Beauty

Pretty for a Black Girl

Thirty-nine-year-old Heather Carper grew up in Kansas and learned at least one lesson very early: "Black girls were never the cute ones. You could be 'cute for a black girl,' but you were never the pretty one."

To be an American woman of any race is to be judged against constantly changing and arbitrary measures of attractiveness. One decade, being waif thin is in; the next, it's all about boobs and booties. Wake up one morning, and suddenly your lady parts "need" to be shaved smooth and your gapless thighs are all wrong. The multibillion-dollar beauty and fashion industries are dedicated to ensuring that women keep chasing an impossible ideal, like Botoxed hamsters running on the wheel of beauty standards.

But while expectations for how Western women should look have evolved over centuries, one thing has remained constant, and that is black women's place at the bottom of the hierarchy. In 1784, Thomas Jefferson praised the skin color, "flowing hair," and "elegant symmetry of form" possessed by white people, writing that black men prefer the comeliness of white women "as uniformly as is the preference of the [orangutan] for the black women over those of his own species." Stereotypes of black women were designed in part to provide the antithesis to the inherent loveliness of white women, leaving other women of color to jockey for position between the poles of beauty. Old beliefs die hard. Hundreds of years later, in 2011, the London School of Economics evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa published a series of graphs and numbers at Psychology Today, "proving" that black women are "far less attractive than white, Asian, and Native American women." Because ... science.

Moments in Aright

Anala Beavers, age four, knew the alphabet by the time she was four months old, could count in Spanish by one and a half, and never leaves home without her US map. (She knows all the state capitals!) Anala was invited to join Mensa in 2013.

Neither a Beast nor Fetish Be

The inferiority of black beauty continues to be reinforced partly through popular culture. In allegedly liberal Hollywood, black women are nearly invisible as romantic partners. American fashion catwalks remain so white that former model and activist Bethann Hardison, who formed the Diversity Coalition to challenge whitewashed runways, was moved to pen an open letter to the industry:

Eyes are on an industry that season after season watches fashion design houses consistently use one or no models of color. No matter the intention, the result is racism. Not accepting another based on the color of their skin is clearly beyond 'aesthetic' when it is consistent with the designer's brand. Whether it's the decision of the designer, stylist or casting director, that decision to use basically all white models reveals a trait that is unbecoming to modern society.

Black beauty is even marginalized within subcultures that pride themselves on subverting mainstream values, according to twenty-seven-year-old Black Witch,* who is active in pagan, punk, and Lolita fashion communities. Lolita fashion originated in Japan and is inspired by frilly, Victorian-era dress-lots of petticoats and delicate fabrics. Black Witch says that many of her fellow community members see Lolita femininity as at odds with black womanhood.

"They call us ugly. They say we look uncivilized in the clothes," she says. "I once heard a person say, 'I'm not racist, but that looks like an ape in a dress.'"

Increasingly, black women are even absent in our own culture's illustrations of beauty.

"I don't really watch music videos anymore, but I have noticed that white girls are the 'it thing' now," says Liz Hurston, thirty-four. "When hip-hop first came out, you had your video girls that looked like Keisha from down the block, and then they just started getting lighter and lighter. Eventually black women were completely phased out and it was Latinas and biracial women. Now it's white women. On one hand, thank God we're no longer being objectified, but on the other hand, it's kind of sad, because now our beauty doesn't count at all."

Seeming to confirm Liz's observation, in 2006 Kanye West told Essence magazine, a publication for black women, that "If it wasn't for race mixing, there'd be no video girls.... Me and most of my friends like mutts [biracial women] a lot." In a society that judges women's value and femininity based on attractiveness, perceived ugliness can be devastating. The denigration of black female beauty not only batters African American women's self-esteem, it also drives a wedge between black women with lighter skin, straighter hair, and narrower features and those without those privileges.

Thirty-five-year-old Erin Millender says that the time she felt least attractive was as a teenager. "I went to a very white high school with a very J. Crew aesthetic," she says. "I was brown. I am built stocky. I've always had a butt ... and not a tiny, little gymnast booty either. I was aware of the fact that I did not conform to the beauty standard."

Erin is biracial. Her mother is Korean American and her father is black. Many would see her light-brown skin and shiny curls and note her advantage over black women with darker skin, broader features, and kinkier hair. But Erin says that in school she was teased for "anything that was identifiably black. White kids don't know the difference between various grades of nap. They see frizzy hair and brown skin? That's just nappy hair to them—the same as any other kind of black hair. Brown skin and a big booty gets 'ghetto booty.'"

But at the predominantly black schools she attended before high school, Erin says some black girls targeted her, jealously pulling the long hair that brought her closer to the ideal of mainstream beauty. "Then, after school, in ballet, white girls made fun of my butt."

And the attention of men like West, who fetishize biracial women, is no honor. "[It is] creepy and insulting." Erin says that far too often that appreciation comes with backhanded compliments "implying that I don't really look black and would be less attractive if I did," plus "shade" from other black women, "who assume I think I'm better than somebody."

Black looks are not just erased; features commonly associated with people of the African diaspora are openly denigrated in American culture. (Though it is important to note that blackness is diverse. Black women can be freckled, ginger, and nappy; ebony skinned and fine haired; and every variation in between.)

Get the Kinks Out

Hair is a lightning rod for enforcement of white standards of beauty. And reactions to black women's natural hair help illustrate the broader disdain for black...