Candyce Phoenix

HANNAH MESSKOUB

eauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but who is the beholder? Despite the ever-changing cultural, ethnic, and racial landscape of the United States, the beholder is, and historically always has been, the white male. The white male, at the apex of the social stratosphere, has defined beauty for women of all races, resulting in a gender dynamic in which women try to perfect themselves in the eyes of men. This has meant that women of color have attempted to downplay the physical attributes normally associated with their respective races, while white women seek to enhance themselves in order to resemble the fethishized woman of color.

Because of the conflicting and seemingly authoritative ideals white men espouse for how women should look, women are increasingly obsessed with enhancing their own beauty. As a result, women of all colors are told to change themselves to something they are not. This paradox is precisely how beauty is used to keep an entire gender and entire races subjugated.

Throughout the past century, cinema and advertisers have presented black women in a sexualized context. The traditional and stereotypical portrayal of the “mammy,” the older black female, has been represented in art and commercials. One of the earliest and most notable popular representations of black women was Nancy Green, the original model for Aunt Jemima pancake mix. Green was stereotypically big-breasted and had a large bottom, with considerable girth in her midsection as well. While Aunt Jemima was not seen as a desirable woman, she was the first black model and paved the way for other black images to be included on various products, most importantly liquor bottles. The women on these bottles retained the large chest and bottom but had small waists, presenting the first widespread sexualized images of black women in the United States.

This view of black women as sex objects was nothing new, but in fact dated back to 18th century plantations where white slaveholders raped black women. The trend continued long after the abolition of slavery. One woman, Endesha Ida Mae Holland, recalled that on her 11th birthday, in Mississippi in 1955, she was called to the house of her mother's employer. She wrote: “I can still feel the arms of Mrs. Lawrence, lifting me off my feet and into the arms of her husband. In the South, I was often told, no white man wanted to die without having sex with a black woman. It was just seen as a part of life.” White men admired the physical attributes of black women, at times viewing them as little more than animals, while simultaneously finding them more desirable than they found white women. In most cases, this is a result of a fetishization of physical attributes that white women generally do not possess.

History might then suggest that black women should be more comfortable with their physical attributes than white women. Black supermodel Tyra Banks has said that “black women don't have the same body image problems as white women. They are proud of their bodies. Black men love big butts.” But while Banks is certainly correct in saying that body image problems are not the same across racial lines, more and more black women are going under the knife. In fact, the number of black people undergoing plastic surgery tripled between 1997 and 2002, and increased by another 30 percent between 2002 and 2003. 1 The most common procedure: rhinoplasty, or a nose job. Black people have long been characterized as having flat, wide noses that are typically deemed unattractive. As one black surgeon, most of whose patients are black, revealed in a May 2002 article in Cosmetic Surgery Times, the most common complaints among black women who seek rhinoplasty are that “'My bridge is too fat,' 'My nostrils are too wide,' or 'My tip is round and bulbous.'”

Why are black women looking to plastic surgery to “whiten” certain physical features? It is without a doubt a result of the images with which they are bombarded daily and the messages sent to them by white America. In some cases, plastic surgeons themselves recommend rhinoplasty to black patients. In The Guardian, Tania Branigan writes of a white plastic surgeon who tells his patients that he thinks that “European noses are much nicer.” The perception of beauty is consistently defined in a white context. The definition of beauty in America is often tall, blonde, and skinny. This definition allows for the continued subjugation of the black population. As Cornel West, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, notes, “White supremacist ideology is based first and foremost on the degradation of black bodies in order to control them.” Convincing black women that they are undesirable causes them to internalize negative images of themselves and serves to keep them subordinate to whites.

When Vanessa Williams became the first black woman to win the Miss America Pageant in 1984, many black women rejoiced, for her victory hinted that “black womanhood could indeed represent the national identity of America.” 2 But Williams was lighter-skinned than most blacks, with few “black” features. While the black race as a whole represents a wide spectrum of beauty and body types, white America rarely bestows the label of beautiful upon any woman darker than a paper bag.

In order to profit from racially-based gender subjugation, various companies began to produce skin-bleaching creams, using advertisements that presented black women naturally, captioned with “See how sad,” and then with their skin bleached, captioned “See how happy.” Several famous black women have taken to skin bleaching, including Josephine Baker and Lil' Kim. In one interview, Lil' Kim commented on the racial psyche of her late boyfriend, fellow rapper Biggie Smalls. When asked in an interview if she felt that Biggie preferred light-skinned women to dark-skinned women, she replied: “Yeah, I could tell by the women he wanted. When he was younger he didn't really get a lot of light-skinned women, so it's something I think he wanted to try out.” In reaction to this and her own dating difficulties in youth, Lil' Kim has undergone so much skin bleaching that she is virtually unrecognizable as her former self. Nevertheless, Kim is held up as an icon of black beauty. Josephine Baker, Dorothy Dandridge, Halle Berry, Vivica Fox, and Tyra Banks have all been lauded as epitomes of black beauty. Yet all of them are noticeably thin and relatively light-skinned, with few of the physical attributes usually associated with black women.

Skin bleaching is not merely an issue of beauty, but one of race. The phenomenon has crossed borders into other countries ravaged by racism. Skin bleaching in South Africa has become so popular — and so dangerous — that the products have been banned from the country. These unsafe creams have been known to cause cancer, blotching on the skin, and other severe problems, yet African women continue to reach for them. Steeped in the history of apartheid in that country, Khany Dhlomo-Mkhize, editor of True Love magazine, observes that skin bleaching “is part of making yourself less black, ripping away at your roots ... [P]eople of mixed race, the colored community, were lighter-skinned and treated somewhat better.” Skin bleaching is becoming a popular trend in other areas too, including the Caribbean, demonstrating that it is not simply an issue of beauty, but an effort to advance socio-economically. One Jamaican girl who uses skin-bleaching creams notes that “white people get the better things in life, yes. You have a lot of advantages when you are white.”

The same motives exist in the United States. One means by which whites were able to control blacks on the plantation was to divide and conquer. This was accomplished by designating some slaves as house slaves and others as field workers. Notably, house slaves were often lighter-skinned, usually the products of the rape of black women, and were treated better than the darker-skinned field workers. This concern with whiteness even began to cross over into the population of black males. House slaves were required to keep up decent appearances for visitors, and so took better care of their hair than field workers. Eventually, “good hair” and light skin became the marks of the black upper class. Long after the end of legalized bondage, dancers at Harlem's infamous Cotton Club were chosen based on the lightness of their skin and the quality of their hair.

Hair trends continue long after slavery. Many black women began to use relaxers in their hair to make it straighter. For some it was an effort to make it more manageable, as many African methods for tending to black hair had been lost during enslavement in America. For many others, it was an effort to “pass” for white, or, if they were not light enough to pass, to approximate whiteness to the best of their ability. This was no different for black men, among whom a styling of hair known as “conking” became popular. Conking entailed burning one's scalp and hair to remove the kinks and make the hair as straight as possible. Despite the excruciating pain it could cause, it was widely done. In the 1980s, another form of hair styling among men, the jheri curl, became popular. This process even further approximated white hair, making black hair even straighter and much less stiff. Since the 1980s, black hair care has become a multi-million dollar industry, now run by white-owned companies that capitalize on the insecurities of black people in order to turn a profit.

The issue of defining beauty according to characteristics of the white race came to a head in the 1960s and 1970s, when the civil rights movement and black pride spread. This era saw a return to the natural, as many men and women ceased processing their hair in order to grow full Afros as a sign of pride in their blackness. Thus, as much as beauty has been and continues to be used as a tool of oppression, it has also been used as a tool of resistance, creating a stigma in the black community against physically-altering procedures. As one black female plastic surgeon notes in a July 2005 Newsweek article, many black women have usually shied away from plastic surgery because “they also want to avoid any criticism that might come from the community, which has for years supported larger frames, wider noses and not-so-perfect features. Changing those things is sometimes seen as an insult to our ancestors and to the culture.” Unfortunately, this statement itself is evidence of internalized racism. The assumption by a black woman that black features are somehow “not-so-perfect” shows that this pride in black culture is fading the further we move away from the civil rights movement, and this could perhaps be what is leading to increased plastic surgery procedures among blacks.

Perhaps most surprising, however, is the effect racialized images of beauty have had on white women. One of the most popular rap songs of the 1990s, Sir Mix-A-Lot's “Baby Got Back,” praised the black female physique in comparison to that of white women. The tune, an ode to the large posteriors stereotypical of black women, was groundbreaking because it introduced the sexual objectification of black women into popular culture at the expense of white women. Throughout the song, Mix-A-Lot adds comments such as “I'm tired of magazines saying flat butts are the thing”; “When it comes to females, Cosmo ain't got nothin' to do with my selection”; and “To the beanpole dames in magazines: you ain't it Miss Thing!” He opens with “I like big butts,” and closes his second verse proclaiming, “Even white boys got to shout, Baby got back.'”

Mix-A-Lot's opinion of white women is not isolated, as evidenced by his inclusion of white males in his song. In fact, precisely because this view is not isolated, white women have been undergoing various processes in order to make themselves more attractive to males, specifically white males. While many white women may be sexually curious with regard to black men, in general, the majority of their efforts are focused on white men, as white men are by and large the men with whom they are socially expected to marry and have children. This has led to an increase in butt implants among white women, a trend so popular that clothing manufacturers have begun making padded underwear, padded jeans, and padded pants in order to help women make their butts appear fuller. Breast augmentations, one of the most popular plastic surgeries, are also most prevalent among white women. Whereas black women are more likely to opt for breast reductions, white women overwhelmingly prefer the augmentations. Other personal enhancements highly prevalent among white woman are tanning, an effort to achieve an attractive, browner skin color, and lip collagen implants, an attempt to attain the full lips most often associated with black people.

It is an interesting phenomenon: white women enhancing themselves to approximate the look of women of color and women of color going under the knife to buy white features, and, hopefully, a first-class ticket to a better life. Many white men find women of color sexually attractive yet unfit to marry, while white women are fit to marry but are not fetishized. The more women are obsessed with beauty, the less they focus on the power structure that is causing that obsession.

But one question remains: does changing oneself result in a loss of racial identity? If black women straighten their hair, are they somehow less black? If white women get lip collagen injections, are they somehow less white? For people of color, there is definitely a threshold that cannot be passed in order to remain on “your side.” Michael Jackson is a prime example of this; his extensive facial surgery and skin-bleaching have led to his being disowned by, and disassociated from, the black community. For people of color, conscious racial identity is much more important than it is for white people, as people of color are constantly told by societal structures that they are inferior. Straying too far from one's racial roots is often seen as a betrayal, particularly given the deep history of “passing” in the U.S. However, for white people, this complex history of passing as a person of color does not exist. In fact, it is seen as absurd that any white person would want to be a person of color, as they are subconsciously told that white is right. The very racist institutions that have produced a need for beauty changes among people of color can also help to produce resistance in communities of color. Only time will tell if this trend will continue or if cultures of color will redefine themselves and welcome those who go under the knife.

1. Peters, Celia C. “Black Skin Under the Knife.” AOL BlackVoices. 10 Dec. 2004. 1 Jan. 2006.
2. Watson, Elwood, and Darcy Martin, eds. There She Is, Miss America: The Politics of Sex, Beauty, and Race in American's Most Famous Pagaent. New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2004.