Deconstructing How Beauty Is Defined • I Stopped Judging my Afrocentric Body by a Eurocentric Standard
Greetings Hope Infusion Subscribers,
With the splendor of Spring in full bloom, I’ve decided to share an essay about how American culture defines beauty, and my journey to a wholesale rejection of the ways in which that standard is commonly applied to Black bodies.
Skilled writing teachers help students mine the depths of lived experience and excavate stories they didn’t realize lay buried within. This story was unearthed when my teacher presented two equally compelling writing prompts: (1)Write about something you were told about your appearance that stayed with you your whole life (2) How do you see yourself differently than how the world sees you?
Rather than choose one, I blended both into this piece which weaves personal experiences with historical events.
Happy first week of June!
Deconstructing the Definition of Beauty
I had just taken a seat in a staff meeting when a familiar and irritating question was posed by a co-worker, “What did you do to make your hair that way?”
I inhaled a pause as I pondered how to answer. I was being asked about my hair — Again. I felt pressed to tactfully respond — Again. I was beyond annoyed with the topic — Again.
Hair related questioning had been happening far too often and was noticeably reserved primarily for me, the company’s sole Black employee. In nine years of employment, no employee’s hair change evoked the barrage of reactions, questions, and unsolicited commentary that mine did.
I settled upon a one word response, then slowly exhaled before answering.
Nothing!”, I said, in a calm but firm tone, conveying implicitly, without stating explicitly—that this line of inquiry was over.
Focus on my hair intensified when I stopped chemically straightening it after 5 prior years of having done so. The change surprised co-workers who were caught off guard by my deviation from an unspoken standard about what my Black hair should look like in a white corporate setting.
Varied micro-aggressions ensued, like a co-worker approaching me at a business luncheon to inquire about my “new hair texture” after which I was caught completely off guard, when she proceeded to run her fingers through my hair without asking and with total disregard for my physical boundaries.
On another occasion, I entered a meeting with my hair braided as the CEO announced to all present: “Oh look! Olivia wore her “fun” hair today.” The sarcasm employed was the polite southern kind—dipped in sugar and served up with a smile — but the disapproval was evident, the sour beneath the sweet.
I didn’t bother responding. These type of interactions had become commonplace and by that time I had graduated from caring about the reactions of white people to my Black existence.
I was fresh out of fucks to give and had commenced a wholesale rejection of judging any aspect of my Black body by a Eurocentric beauty standard. It’s a racist and arbitrary measure that's been imposed upon people of African descent since they were stolen from their native land, and forcibly brought here and enslaved.
For 400 years America has conveyed in ways subtle and overt that Black bodies are inherently unattractive. Every feature has been demeaned. Our lips are too full, our noses too wide, our hair too kinky, our skin too dark, our thighs too thick, our asses too big. We’ve been dehumanized and compared to apes and monkeys – a degradation from which not even President Barack Obama was exempt.
And these messages of our unattractiveness have been relentlessly reinforced, in countless ways, by countless means, across every strata of society. Movies, media, magazines, books, fashion, toys — in every way imaginable whiteness has been long elevated as the supreme standard of beauty against which bodies of color are measured.
White body supremacy is so engrained in European & American culture that Western Christianity white washed the Messiah, transforming Jesus, a Palestinian Jew, into a blonde haired, blue eyed Anglo-Saxon.
It took me half a century to reject being judged by these standards, and to deconstruct and dismantle the internalized self-loathing resulting from decades of programming to this effect.
It’s not an issue unique to me. To be Black in America is to wrestle with ubiquitous societal messaging that Black bodies are unattractive at best, and downright ugly at worst.
In one egregious example, an evolutionary psychologist, penned a 2011 Psychology Today article titled “Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?" It emphasized a dataset that supposedly showed black women to be “objectively” less attractive than white, Asian, or Native American women. The piece sparked widespread outrage but was emblematic of a long standing bias that relentlessly demeans the physical characteristics of Black people. 1
As far back as 1786, this type of appearance based bigotry was enshrined into law. Louisiana criminalized the public display of hair for all women of color – slave and free. Their hair, I repeat, HAIR, was considered a societal disruption and threat to the status quo. White women complained that women of color sought to seduce their husbands with their exotic ways and advanced cosmetology skills. 2
Given the centuries of LEGALIZED rape that enslaved Black women endured at the hands of white men, the accusation would be laughable if not so ridiculous and flagrantly untrue. 3
The erroneous concerns were acknowledged and acted upon by Lousiana’s governor, resulting in the Tignon Law, a form of legal othering that forced Black, Creole, and Mixed Race women to cover their hair in public places. It designated all women of color as part of the “slave class” (even if they weren’t) and prevented lighter skinned women from passing as white.
Pause for a moment to imagine every white woman in America being told she can not publicly display her hair the way it naturally grows out of her head, AND that to do so constitutes a criminal act.
It takes imagining this standard in reverse, and imposed on the dominant culture to fully illustrate the ridiculousness of it.
And if you’re tempted to dismiss this as a concern of yesteryear, it is not. Many corporate workplaces still discriminate against Black people wearing their hair in its natural state which is why, since 2019, 13 states have passed the CROWN act, making it illegal to discriminate against natural hairstyles. 4
When I finally disabused myself of distorted and demeaning perspectives about my natural hair and Black body, I rejected it fully!
Freeing myself from America’s pervasive negative stereotypes about people of African descent and embracing an unapologetic love for myself in all my Blackness has been an essential part of my transformation and healing from a lifetime of racial trauma.
The benefits of this deconstruction have accrued to my daughters who may choose to flat iron their hair into a straight style, but who have never considered chemically altering their hair texture in order to curry favor or be deemed “acceptable”.
They’ve learned early in life to embrace what has always been true…they are beautiful as they are WITH their Afrocentric features and WITHOUT doing a damn thing to alter their hair or any other aspect of their appearance. They are beautiful because they are indwelled with a spark of the Divine, an inner loveliness that has nothing to do with their ethnic heritage, the texture of their hair or the color of their skin.
Coco Chanel said that beauty begins the moment you decide to be yourself. It took me five decades to fully embody this realization, but at long last, it’s the state of mind in which I now exist — Bold, Black and Unapologetically Me!
Sources & Footnotes:
(1) Psychology Today Apologizes for 'Black Women Less Attractive' Post
(1)"Why are black women less attractive?" asks Psychology Today
(1) Black Women Are Not (Rated) Less Attractive! Our Independent Analysis of the Add Health Dataset
(2) Sexual Exploitation of the Enslaved
(3) Tignon Laws Forced Black Women To Cover Their Hair
(3) When Black Women Were Required By Law to Cover Their Hair
(4) 13 states have passed laws to ban natural hair discrimination