Appiah describes the aesthetic movement in Europe during the latter part of the nineteenth century as one that taught us to see visual art “for art’s sake.” The tendency to imagine that every single thing in existence is quantifiable and can be subject to measurement, the urge to measure things in isolation from their context, is a Western European imperative. It’s the logic of dividing, naming, and categorizing things, the teasing apart of the very fabric of meaning as part of an attempt to ascribe relative value and worth to a seemingly endless proliferation of subcategories. Each living being becomes distinctly separated from its relation to everything else. Reciprocity is destroyed and replaced by competition. Beauty becomes oppressive and competitive, an abstract, isolated quality.
In addition to the idea of removing beauty from context and character being seen as odd, we find examples in which beauty that is too extreme is suspected to have originated somewhere beyond the mortal world. The Mende believed that physical perfection was an ideal achieved only by the gods, while the Yoruba associated external perfection with supernatural sources that were not entirely positive, believing that balance was the ideal.
In the Black is Beautiful movement, the emphasis on achieving and possessing beauty fell, as ever, disproportionately on women. Black is Beautiful did nothing to displace the oppressive notion that black women had a special duty to their race to be beautiful. Moreover, it defined beauty by conforming to a narrow standard. It also stated that you couldn’t be down for the cause if you didn’t dress for the part, a type of thinking that is misleading in its attention to style, potentially at the cost of substance.
On the subject of Black is Beautiful, Toni Morrison asks from whom such validation is being sought, before eventually surmising that it is validation from the white gaze. Morrison doesn’t need to be told she is beautiful, or to be told that black is beautiful. She knows that it is.27
The concept of validation from the white gaze resonates deeply. I am reminded of all the times I was told that I was pretty for a black girl, or that I was lucky I was pretty because I could “get away with being black.” That perceived beauty was the price I had to pay for the burden of blackness. My worth as a human being was not recognized because of my race, but apparently the possession of beauty could compensate for my racial inadequacy.
I’m grateful for the different cultures I’ve lived in and the different positions I have occupied on the spectrum of beauty, in certain times and places beautiful, in others not; and I saw the difference in treatment based on whether or not I was judged as possessing this thing called “beauty.” I understood then that beauty was not the space for my salvation. It is far too fragile, and my worth as a human being cannot be given, or withheld, based on something so arbitrary.
Yet so much of our identity is invested within the beauty regime. It occupies a huge percentage of our thoughts and social interactions. When we are perceived to possess it, it provides us with a fleetingly enjoyable feeling. Thus, we interpret beauty as a benevolent, positive force within our lives. Sometimes in our fight for inclusion and equality we forget that achieving the position we are fighting for might become something of a pyrrhic victory.
In our desire to see our own beauty acknowledged, we forget that the beauty regime is an oppressive construct designed to keep women in a state of heightened insecurity. This doesn’t stop at the “white gaze.” The idea of “the gaze” itself is Eurocentric and its origins are implicitly white and implicitly patriarchal.
Black is Beautiful doesn’t solve the problem of competitive beauty, nor does it operate outside of the paradigm created by Eurocentric values. It “operates on terrain already mapped out by the symbolic codes of the dominant white culture.”28
Of course, today black people have their own oppressive beauty standards—light skin and good hair might be the most pertinent—and there can be huge pressure to conform to these, but generally, beauty was not as standardized and, as a result, these standards remain, to an extent, comparatively forgiving. Certainly, they are often positively encouraging of a lil wiggle and jiggle. Take Osun, the Yoruba goddess of beauty and fertility. Lines from one of her orikis describe her as “A corpulent woman / Who cannot be embraced around the waist.” I can’t think of a beauty ideal further from the purge and punishment food culture that I grew up with in Ireland. As Naomi Wolf explains, “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience . . . Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”29 The difference exists as a powerful challenge to the tired narrative of black and African women, oppressed in relation to liberated white Westerners.
The current celebration of Rihanna’s changing body is a perfect example. Rather than “getting fat”—that personal and moral failure of women in Eurocentric culture—Rihanna has, from a black aesthetic position, got “thick,” and we love her all the more for it. Her significantly increasing curves are seen as only adding to her allure. I can’t imagine there being a sex symbol like her when I was younger. Considering how I used to obsessively regulate my calories in the hope that my “fat” thighs would disappear, I remain somewhat lukewarm about the inclusion of tall, skinny black women in the fashion gang because they are as sticklike as the white models.
I remember being on a family holiday in Trinidad and sneaking out on a couple of clandestine dates with a boy I met at harvest festival. As we walked, he commented on my “thickness.” Upon my horrified “Erm, what do you mean?” (“thick” in Ireland meant stupid) he broke it down; he was talking about my body shape, and it was most definitely a compliment!
Even though this suitor meant to flatter me, so indoctrinated was I by the European metric of female worth (how little we weigh, how little physical space we take up) that I was even more horrified than if he had been questioning my intellectual capabilities. I managed a tight smile and vowed to starve myself.
According to “Fifty States of Women,” a survey conducted by Glamour and L’Oréal Paris in 2017, out of 2,000 participants, 59 percent of black women described themselves as beautiful. In contrast, only 32 percent of Hispanic women and 25 percent of white women described themselves as such. More black women also agreed with the statement “I am happy the way that I am” when they looked in the mirror.
Dr. Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, suggests the reason is, “Growing up, black women are taught you’re strong, you’re beautiful, you’re smart, you’re enough—and that mindset is passed down from generation to generation as a defense mechanism against discrimination . . . The more confident you are, the better equipped you’ll be to deal with racism.”30
I think it goes deeper than this. The Eurocentric emphasis on thinness has its origins in a particularly punitive and patriarchal construction of femininity characteristic of Anglo-American cultures. Perhaps the endurance of a more African-centered tendency to appreciate something or someone by taking into account qualities beyond the isolated imagining of a physical beauty might be interpreted as an antidote to Eurocentric perceptions that have become an increasingly dominant global norm.