Black isn’t beautiful — a thought experiment
While attending an event recognising persons living with disability in his constituency, Kibra Member of Parliament Ken Okoth recently tweeted:
“Celebrating the International Day of Persons Living with Disability. Inability is not Disability.”
An innocent typo, of course. He meant to say “disability is not inability”, a popular refrain meant to emphasize the dignity of those who are disabled.
Yet this example, dismissed by many as an innocent Freudian slip, illustrates an important point about our many attempts to “normalise” what the prevailing culture otherwise finds abnormal.
Chances are you’ve encountered the popular phrase “black is beautiful” in a conversation or you’ve read it in a piece of writing. The context is usually in the attempt to fight against the popular (false) assumption that light skinned people are more beautiful simply because their skin is lighter.
However, many who respond with “black is beautiful” seldom take the time to think through the implications of their well meaning response.
If I am not mistaken, I assume that what they intend to communicate is that beauty is not skin deep and what ultimately distinguishes beautiful from ugly is not the color of one’s skin but something else along the lines of what Dr Martin Luther King, Jr called “the content of their character”.
But how does simply stating “black is beautiful” (often as a caption to a picture of a black woman) communicate this message? It sounds more like a desperate attempt to force a “truth” that the audience simply doesn’t find convincing.
It is almost like walking into a jewelry shop and shouting “iron is precious too!” Yet this is what we are often doing (albeit unconsciously) when we insist “black is beautiful” in an atmosphere that seems to elevate skin lightness a measure of beauty.
To stretch the analogy further, if someone approached the person shouting in the jewelry shop and asked them “why do you say iron is precious?” the person will most likely start listing all the major feats that iron has helped human beings accomplish in history.
However, in doing so, the conversation will no longer be about the chemical composition of iron but about something entirely different. You see, if the preciousness of iron is determined by its ability to serve as a tool, then diamonds should be at the top of the list and gold at the bottom.
Clearly, the parameters for determining the preciousness of metal were never located in the hardness of metal.
In the same way, the cultural standards of beauty are not in the color of one’s skin but in a combination of factors that can never be simply reduced to skin color.
Black isn’t beautiful, and neither is whiteness or lightness.
But the sad reality is that if you grew up associating whiteness with wealth, privilege and beauty; then you will always struggle to disentangle blackness from poverty, and disadvantage and ugliness. White is civilised, black is not.
Instead of maintaining “black is beautiful” or “black is beautiful too”, perhaps we should spend more time investigating how come white is beautiful in the first place, and why that seems to be a given. By pursuing this line of inquiry, we may just realize that what is needed to see black as beautiful is not to give black the things that white has (clearly, that isn’t working), but to take apart our entire value system and anchor it on something less superficial than health, wealth and the pursuit of privilege.
This won’t be easy. It is going to be a messy process. It will mean questioning almost everything we have always believed about how the world works. Many of these cultural biases are so ingrained that we act on them mindlessly. Even more troubling is that often when we attempt to fight against these biases, we still do it along contours defined by a worldview that privileges white over black.
This is what I mean; we have dark skinned models who are skinny and wearing make-up and strutting on stages in exactly the same way that white models used to do in the time when all models were white. The only thing that has changed is that we now have black models on events that previously only had white models. This is not progress but whiteness in disguise.
As long as we fail to see that the system that came up with beauty pageants and skinniness and make-up and stage-strutting is the same system that made white beautiful, we have not accomplished anything, not even if all the models became black.
A culture is deeper than its symbols. A culture is also about values, and it is ultimately about worldviews — the lens through which we view and interpret all of life. This is why I don’t believe the way to change a culture is to chip away at each symbol, one symbol at a time until we finally change the underlying worldview.
The only thing this will achieve is a regressive series of “campaigns” that never seem to address the heart of the matter; one day “black is beautiful”, the next day “plump is beautiful”, the following day “burkas are beautiful” and after that “kinky hair is beautiful”… and so on. While such campaigns give us a sense of motion, they are not marks of any meaningful progress, they will never get us to the change we desire.
The change we desire and instinctively crave for when we shout “black is beautiful” is a more radical (radical as in root) change. It is not a change that is color-blind, but a change that sees color through the right lenses and appreciates the diversity of the world without needing to flatten it in order to please or accommodate everyone.
Do you have some ideas on where we can begin in our quest for this kind of cultural change? Or is it a lost cause? Are we just re-arranging furniture on the Titanic? And is there even a point trying to work towards such a cultural reformation?
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
