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“Your hair thick, your nose thick, your lips thick, all of you just thick.”
Being too much of one thing and not enough of another had been a recurring theme in my life.
Thick where I should have been thin, more when I should have been less, a high school teacher nicknamed me “Ms. Personality,” and it did not feel like a superlative.
I had tried in different ways over the years to fit. I thought I could discipline my body and later my manners to take up less room.
When you are vulnerable and on the losing end of a power dynamic, all you can hear of that kind of direct, unsolicited feedback is how—despite all of your hard work—you are still doing everything wrong.
That is important to know because there is not just one black woman experience, no matter how thick one black woman may be.
We were respectable.13 We went to church and paid tithes and wore slips and we drank but had the good sense to be ashamed that we did. We whispered when we said bad words and we valued hard work and education as evidence of our true worth. We did not want to be problems.
In a modern society, who is allowed to speak with authority is a political act.
Speech becomes rhetoric, or a persuasive form of speech, only when the one speaking can make a legitimate claim to some form of authority.
As women, black women face challenges of appealing to rationality in public discourse because our culture has decided that women are irrational and emotional. Logic and reason are beyond our biological and cultural programming.
I am living in the most opportune time in black history in the United States and that means, still, that I will die younger, live poorer, risk more exposure to police violence, and be punished by social policy for being a black woman in ways that aren’t true for almost any other group in this nation. That is the best it has ever been to be black in America and it is still that statistically bad at the macro level.
I fix myself, even when it causes great pain to do so, because I know that I cannot fix the way the world sees me.
We are people, with free will, circumscribed to different degrees by histories that shape who we are allowed to become.
The things we touch and smell and see and experience through our senses are how stories become powerful. But I have never wanted to only tell powerfully evocative stories. I have wanted to tell evocative stories that become a problem for power. For that, I draw upon data and research.
My thinking is not fixed in time and hopefully it never will be.
With the privilege to read and to think comes great responsibility.
If I knew to be cautious of men, I did not learn early enough to be cautious of white women.
The white kids were your school friends, never your home friends.
When we were together, politely sociable in classrooms and hallways, I learned what was beautiful. By high school, I knew that I was not it.
That is because beauty isn’t actually what you look like; beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order.
Whiteness exists as a response to blackness. Whiteness is a violent sociocultural regime legitimized by property to always make clear who is black by fastidiously delineating who is officially white. It would stand to reason that beauty’s ultimate function is to exclude blackness.
But, should power need them to be, social, economic, and political forces could make those girls beautiful by reshaping social norms. As long as the beautiful people are white, what is beautiful at any given time can be renegotiated without redistributing capital from white to nonwhite people.
Memes are just born-digital nuggets of cultural norms.
More precisely, Wolf demonstrates that as the sociopolitical context of whiteness—the political, state-sanctioned regime—tussles with historical forces like falling stock markets, mass media, suburbanization, and war, it will reshape an acceptable beauty standard for women that adjusts for body types, but never for body color. That was not Wolf’s argument, but the absence of such a critique rather proves the point: beauty is for white women.
Some of her most strident critique is saved for the compromises inherent in hip-hop culture. Here is a cultural product where blackness can be a critical feedback loop to the white mass
media images of black women as caricatures. What Collins finds instead is a space where black masculine ideas about black women create ever more hierarchies of desirability based on body type, for example. Those hierarchies rarely go so far as to challenge the supremacy of white female beauty.
That Nyong’o was atop a list of the world’s most beautiful people does not invalidate the reality for many dark-skinned black women any more than Mark Zuckerburg making a billion dollars as a college drop-out invalidates the value of college for millions. Indeed, any system of oppression must allow exceptions to validate itself as meritorious. How else will those who are oppressed by the system internalize their own oppression?
Beauty is not good capital. It compounds the oppression of gender. It constrains those who identify as women against their will. It costs money and demands money. It colonizes. It hurts. It is painful. It can never be fully satisfied. It is not useful for human flourishing. Beauty is, like all capital, merely valuable.
Symbolic violence only makes sense if we accept its priors: all preferences in imperial, industrialized societies are shaped by the economic system.
That’s why beauty can never be about preference. “I just like what I like” is always a capitalist lie. Beauty would be a useless concept for capital if it were only a preference in the purest sense. Capital demands that beauty be coercive. If beauty matters at all to how people perceive you, how institutions treat you, which rules are applied to you, and what choices you can make, then beauty must also be a structure of patterns, institutions, and exchanges that eats your preferences for lunch.
Structurally, that violence becomes coded in the social norms around respectability that we black people use to do the dominant culture’s work of disciplining other black people’s identities, behaviors, and bodies.
And sometimes, when we are trapped in the race not to be complicit in our own oppression, self-definition masquerades as a notion of loving our black selves in white terms.
Systems of exchange tend to generate the kind of ideas that work well as exchanges. Because it can be an idea and a good and a body, beauty serves many useful functions for our economic system. Even better, beauty can be political. It can exclude and include, one of the basic conditions of any politics. Beauty has it all. It can be political, economic, external, individualized, generalizing, exclusionary, and perhaps best of all a story that can be told.
Black women have to both aspire to the unattainable paradox of white beauty and cultivate its counterparadox because both must exist for black masculinity to retain the privilege of moving between two social spaces of potential mates. If I reinforce the white beauty norm, then I reproduce it in a way that benefits white women.
The high mortality rate of black women in the United States has been documented by the CDC, which says that black women are 243 percent more likely to die from pregnancy- or childbirth-related causes than are white women.
All of my status characteristics screamed “competent,” but nothing could shut down what my blackness screams when I walk into the room.
racism and sexism and class warfare are resilient and necessary for global capitalism.
Controlling images were never just about the object of study—popular culture memes or characters from movies and television shows—but about the process of reproducing structural inequalities in our everyday lives.
When we perform some existential service to men, to capital, to political power, to white women, and even to other “people of color” who are marginally closer to white than they are to black, then we are superwomen.7 We are fulfilling our purpose in the natural order of things. When, instead, black women are strong in service of themselves, that same strength, wisdom, and wit become evidence of our incompetence.
As objectified superhumans, we are valuable. As humans, we are incompetent.
The networks of capital, be they polities or organizations, work most efficiently when your lowest status characteristic is assumed. And once these gears are in motion, you can never be competent enough to save your own life.
To know our whites is to understand the psychology of white people and the elasticity of whiteness. It is to be intimate with some white persons but to critically withhold faith in white people categorically. It is to anticipate white people’s emotions and fears and grievances, because their issues are singularly our problem. To know our whites is to survive without letting bitterness rot your soul.
Whiteness, the idea, the identity tethered to no nation of origin, no place, no gods, exists only if it can expand enough to defend its position over every group that challenges the throne. White is being European until it needs to also be Irish because of the Polish who can eventually be white if it means that Koreans cannot. For that situational dominance to reproduce itself, there must be a steady pole. That pole is blackness.
But I have come to believe that it did not matter that Obama had faith in white people.
They needed only to have faith in him: in his willingness to reflect their ideal selves back at them, to change the world without changing them, to change blackness for them without being black to them.
whiteness has the political power to be elastic. Originating as it does not from nation or kin but from the primordial ooze of capitalism, whiteness can only be defined by state power. It requires a legal system that can formalize irrational biological expressions, making them rational. It needs a justice system that will adjudicate the arbitrary inclusion and exclusion of people across time. And, most of all, whiteness requires a police state that can use violent force to defend its sovereignty. Blackness is necessarily static as a counterweight to whiteness.
Talk should be meaningful or kept to a minimum.
There is a bit of condescension in assuming that I must be something other than black American if I am also intelligent and high-achieving.
When there is only room for a few blacks there is a competition for which black should prevail.
It poses that ending blackness was the goal of anti-racist work when the real goal has always been and should always be ending whiteness.
