Thoughts on the Phrase 'Black is Beautiful'

Photo: Rachel Marquez
Model: Janica @ Best Models
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Whiteness, of course, isn't a colour, it's a normative cultural value; an ideal we are all obliged to accept and aspire to whatever our race or ethnicity. The paler the face the better the person; not only more attractive, but more noble, more spiritual. Darkness of skin betrays darkness of soul; something base and bestial.

Such thinking, of course, which has a long and ugly history, deserves to be challenged; I absolutely support those who subscribe to a political aesthetic that promotes black pride and defiantly declares in the face of white racism that black is beautiful.

However, things become problematic when those who subscribe to such and refuse to cosmetically alter their appearance start to assert their own moral superiority, sneering at those who don't sport afros and accusing them of racial treachery.

To turn a slogan conceived as a form of self-affirmation into a weapon with which to censure others is not only a form of militant asceticism and bullying, but often also betrays sexist hypocrisy on behalf of black males who, on the one hand, voice disapproval of the millions of women who do use skin lightening products and straighten their hair, whilst, on the other hand, dating light-skinned models or marrying white women.

Sometimes, when a woman of colour bleaches her skin, she's not denying her blackness due to self-hatred and internalised racism - she's not betraying her roots - rather, she's simply making a considered choice about how she wants to look and acting with a degree of realism in the world as it is rather than as it could be, should be, and hopefully one day will be.

In a miscegenated future I would like to think no one will feel pressured to wear whiteface and pass as something or someone they're not; but neither will it be any more reprehensible or controversial for a black woman to lighten up cosmetically or surgically modify her body than it is presently for a white woman to work on her tan and have lip injections.

In a world after Michael I hope that all skin tones and facial features are seen as beautiful - be they natural or artificial (human or inhuman) - and a free spectrum of colours replaces the rigid black and white binary designed (like all such binaries) to keep us in a fixed identity.

Homophobia: Mixing Desire With Disgust

In their classic study, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Stallybrass and White argue that the bourgeois subject defines himself through an act of exclusion. In other words, his identity is not merely founded upon self-affirmation: I am X, but also negation of otherness: I am not Y. 

For example, I am male / I am not female; I am straight / I am not gay. In this manner he constructs an entire system of binary oppositions that are as tedious as they are restrictive. While one term is highly valued as the good and noble, the other is seen as a form of worthless evil; that which is base, dirty, repulsive, and corrupting.

But here's the thing: the latter, whilst excluded, is nonetheless internalized under the sign of negation and so disgust always retains the imprint of desire - just as, conversely, desire forever keeps an element of disgust. So it is, that whenever one reads the obscene rantings of the homophobe one is struck not only by the level of hate, but also the obsessive and perverse fascination for those practices and those people which are so despised. 

To be clear: I'm not simply saying there's always a secret longing on behalf of the homophobe for an experience of gay sex - although doubtless this is often the case - but that there is, to quote Jonathan Dollimore, "an additional structural interdependence of desire and disgust". 

And so: "even when homophobia is not obviously a projection of repressed desire, being more a hostile response to the intolerably different, even then, the homosexual, through condensed association, may be one on whom is projected the repressed disgust inherent in desire."

  

Notes

Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, (Oxford University Press, 1991). Lines quoted are on p. 247.

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, (Cornell University Press, 1986).