| �The
girls from Rutgers�they got (sic) tattoos and�them some
(sic) nappy headed hos, and the girls from Tennessee, they
all look cute,� Don Imus, much to his pain more than anyone
else�s, said in a now infamous rant that got him suspended
from radio and expelled from MSNBC. By now, the Imus �controversy�
has been dissected, debated, and deconstructed to the point
of nausea. However, there still remains a peculiar absence
of any acknowledgement that Imus spoke for millions when
he reinforced, albeit crudely and hatefully, the white beauty
standards that still largely dominate American culture,
and produce a myriad of less obvious, but equally cruel
and hateful consequences. Almost all critics and commentators,
even Al Sharpton, focused primarily on the word �ho� and
its degrading, dehumanizing implications when condemning
the radio shock jock.
The persistence and permeation of white beauty standards
runs so long and wide that even those most incensed by Imus
could not comprehend what he was talking about. The �ho�
label, despite being the most loaded and offensive term
of the sentence, is a distraction. What he really means
when he identifies tattoos and, most importantly, �nappy�
hair is rough, ragged; ugly. Many of the female players
on Tennessee�s team were also black, yet according to Imus�
racially colored lens, which is shared by many who express
it in milder language; they were �cute� because they had
straight hair, and lighter, inkless skin. In a word, they
were much �whiter.� The fact that this part of the scandal
was not discussed on mainstream television demonstrates
that the dominant culture largely agrees with the distinction
that Imus made between the opposing college basketball teams,
so much so that it never occurs to anyone to even question
it. Notable exceptions like social critic Michael Eric Dyson,
analyzed the white beauty standard aspect with clarity and
brilliance, but the crux of his analysis and those that
were similar were relegated to small internet publications,
moderately popular radio broadcasts, or Dyson�s collection
of interviews, Know What I Mean? Reflections on Hip Hop.
The clearest signal of white beauty standards was the word
�nappy,� which for decades has meant �black� and �unattractive.�
Cultural resistance to nappy hair has a long and harmful
history. From painful procedures in beauty shops to the
$45.6 million (excluding Wal-Mart) yearly sales of home
relaxers, the painful pressure of conformity to white cultural
norms is visible in the black community. Many black women
wage their own personal protest by going natural, and pegging
their sisters who straighten as �sell outs.� Ingrid Banks,
professor of black studies at University of California Santa
Barbara, summarized the hair dilemma succinctly, �For black
women, you�re damned if you do, damned if you don�t.�
Lose-lose situations where the costs always equal damnation
are common for women who have progressed to a point where
their talents, intelligence, and character rightfully earn
them slots of leadership in politics, business, academia,
etc., but must walk a tightrope where gender roles are confused
and misogyny operates as an undertow, rather than a tsunami.
Women pursue professional excellence, but must also appease
the sensibilities of men who are falling behind in education
and achievement. They still must carry themselves with sex
appeal, but want to be recognized as more than mere sex
objects. Many of these externally enforced, internally fought
conflicts are in their elderly years, but they take on new
drama and stakes for contemporary women who, for the first
time, are surpassing men in many professional and educational
fields. The dualistic urges to succeed and conform, which
often are complementary in the boardroom and nightclub,
manifest in expensive medical bills for irreversible procedures.
Black women are paying for nosejobs to make their noses
thinner, and Asian women are having their eyes widened.
This may seem extreme, but it is increasingly common. It
is also a sad indication of how limited progress can be,
if not in monetary terms, then at least psychological terms.
One of the most repulsive and repeatedly discussed consequences
of unrelenting social pressure on women is the skeletal
shape that many actresses, pop stars, and twenty-somethings
starve themselves to have. Formerly sexy women like Teri
Hatcher, Nicole Kidman, and Angelina Jolie have transformed
themselves from pinups to cautionary posters against eating
disorders.
The bag of bones aesthetic precedes Hollywood, and has moved
from the runway to the silver screen. Despite the fame and
fortune of supermodels Tyra Banks, Naomi Campell, and Iman,
fashion has long been dominated by white choreographers
and catwalkers. At New York City Fashion week in 2010, only
16 percent of runway models were non-white. Hollywood, which
has a history of white beauty dominance, is now taking full
instruction from the ultimate bastion of white aesthetic
norms, which has a record of diversity that compares only
to the academy and the US Senate. The skinniness sensation
sweeping schools and studios, therefore, is the culmination
of white beauty standard hegemony. Taken to its logical
extreme, white cultural expectations and social pressures
of conformity are best represented by women whose flat hair
rests on top a shapeless, curveless, flat frame. The woman
most glamorized and idealized by fashion and Hollywood is
an odd mutation�a once vibrant, vital, and vivacious beauty
whose sexual powers have been steadily and slowly diluted
until she becomes a lifeless-looking creature. Biologists
have studied the basis of men�s attraction to hourglass
figures and have closely connected it with the reproductive
potential of women with said shapes. Females who cultivate
figures that resemble the index finger of a giant look woefully
unprepared to reproduce, yet manage to symbolize the determinative
power of social values by repudiating biology. Despite the
fact that many men prefer healthy bodies over emaciated
ones, women, and more frequently teenage girls, use pop
culture as a dietary and stylistic guide.
The most highly visible resistance to the established social
order of white and bulimic beauty standards, which also
has a wider influence than any well-intentioned, but irrelevant
women�s studies lectures, comes from the strongest expression
of black culture in the pop world that is at once celebrated
and demonized: hip hop. If the idealized and glamorized
extreme of white beauty standards is a sexless and shapeless
stick figure, then the queen of the hip hop community is
a sexual powerhouse. She is curvaceous and voluptuous�tough
and titillating. Thicker thighs, wider hips, and larger
breasts are the marks of attractiveness, but none equal
the bouncing, bountiful booties, which have been the subject
of silly songs (�Baby Got Back�) and the dehumanizing prop
for vulgar videos (�Tip Drill�). Hip hop elevates and amplifies,
with arguable effectiveness and ambiguous consequences,
the young, black, urban voice to a place of a prominence
in a culture that seeks to silence that voice at every political,
social, and educational turn. It also projects black beauty
standards onto a national screen where they can be juxtaposed
against the corrosive concepts of beauty on the white side.
Comparing two attractive, talented, and intelligent women
from their respective quarters makes the juxtaposition difficult
to ignore. Gwyneth Paltrow is beautiful, but Beyonce is
a sexual stimulus bill�injecting new life into the male
libido and imagination.
Ideally, there would be sufficient room to desire and respect
Paltrow and Beyonce in both the male mind and pop culture.
The friendly coexistence of Paltrow, and those who resemble
her, and Beyonce, along with similar stars, demonstrates
that the sexual and cultural world is indeed big enough
for both of them. However, it becomes difficult to delight
in the harmony once one realizes that women, most especially
the young, without millions of dollars and millions of fans
increasingly feel as if they must choose one model to follow,
and the choice is often dictated by anything but their own
autonomy and identity. On psychological battlefields in
high schools and nightclubs there exists a war between the
physical expressions of femininity found in hip hop and
fashion magazines. The former is saner, sexier, and healthier,
but the ladder seems to be winning. Even so, young women
and the  adults
who care about them should take comfort in hip hop�s capacity
to grant acceptance and affirmation to women who, perhaps
because of genetics of their own politics of style, look
in the mirror and see full thighs, wide hips, and an apple
bottom. Self-confidence, self-respect, and self-love are
critical for all people, but they are of immeasurable importance
to young women who are in the process of discovering their
own sexuality�many of whom are black and before hip hop
had no pop cultural projection of their beauty. In this
respect, even the most degrading and demeaning depictions
of women in hip hop unknowingly serve a feminist and egalitarian
end. They confront narrow and hurtful white beauty standards
and allow women who will not or cannot conform to those
standards to see themselves in the lusted after and fought
for vixens of rap videos. Enabling women to value themselves
as they are has always been one of the noblest goals of
feminism, and hip hop, despite all of its obvious and serious
sins, fills that function for many women, especially those
of color.
The appreciation of black bodies, in a culture that often
insults or ignores them, expressed by hip hop may be vulgar,
but it is also unique�unique enough for many black women
to overlook the chauvinistic objectification of women that
too often accompanies that appreciation. This is not to
imply that many black women, from public figures to private
citizens, do not radically protest the consistency of degrading,
demeaning and dehumanizing presentation of women in rap
videos and lyrics. Maya Angelou said �vulgarity is vulgarity�
when Russell Simmons came to hip hop�s defense during the
Imus controversy, and went on to put the disrespect of black
women on BET and MTV in a sociological context: �Black women,
because we are last on the totem pole, everyone has a chance
to take us on.�
Angelou�s indignation is well-founded and with merit. However,
the flaw in her critique is a failure to acknowledge that
hip hop is a diverse form of artistic and musical expression
that is not always best represented on popular radio and
in music videos. Lupe Fiasco, Talib Kwali, Dead Prez, Immortal
Technique, and Public Enemy are just a handful of the rap
artists who place sophisticated social commentary at the
center of their rhymes, and in doing so, refuse to suffocate
women under the cruel cover of �hos� and �bitches.� Hip
hop manages to both celebrate black beauty and objectify
black women because it plays with the ancient Jezebel stereotype,
which posits that black women are savagely salacious. English
colonists were the first to depict black women�in their
case Africans who participated in tribal dances and wore
native, revealing clothing�as psychotically sexual. English
rockers, The Rolling Stones, served their racially foolish
ancestors well when they sang on �Some Girls,� �Black women
just want to get fucked all night.� To be fair to Mr. Jagger
and Mr. Richards, the 1978 bluesy rock tune presents every
racial and ethnic group in crudely stereotypical fashion,
which is the joke of the song: �English girls they�re so
prissy, Chinese girls are so gentle,� etc.
When it comes to artistic expressions of the black-women-as-Jezebel
stereotype there is perhaps none more revealing, complicated,
or complex than that found in Joseph Conrad�s seminal novel,
Heart of Darkness. The novel�s protagonist, Charles Marlow,
travels to Africa on an assignment from a Belgian trading
company and is stunned when her first lays eyes on the gloriously
beautiful African woman:
From
right to left along the lighted shore moved a wild and
gorgeous apparition of a woman. She walked with measured
steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading
the earthy proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of
barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair
was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings
to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson
spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass
beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men,
that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step.
She must have had the value of several elephant tusks
upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent;
there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate
progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon
the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the
colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed
to look at her, pensive, as though it has been looking
at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.
Marlow
turns the woman into a symbol of the undeveloped jungle�something
that is exciting and inviting for wild exploration, yet
is untamed and desperately needs the supervisory control
of educated and elite white men. The woman never speaks
in Heart of Darkness. She is silenced and the only portrayal
readers are given is that which comes from Marlow. It is
crucial to the colonist operation to silence the land, along
with its defenders, so that it may be exploited, just as
it is crucial to the chauvinist agenda to silence the woman
so she may too be exploited. Autonomous and independent
female voices are difficult to find in hip hop, and the
same can be said for all of the media and pop culture. Therefore,
nearly the only portrayal of black women in pop culture
comes from modern Marlows in hip hop, who paint the female
as simultaneously �savage and superb.� Echoes of Conrad
can be heard in rap songs, and shades of Marlow�s �wild
and gorgeous apparition of a woman� can be seen on beachfronts,
dance floors, and boat decks for hours at a time on MTV,
BET, and YouTube. The uplifting presentation, found in both
Conrad and hip hop, of black women as �magnificent� is undermined
by the hurtful relegation of that magnificence to what Michael
Eric Dyson calls the �crotch politics� or male rappers.
It is an old story�unlettered, untamed, and undeveloped
the black woman is only good for one thing and the story
has been viciously told for centuries. Although it may appear
that the story has not changed from 1902, the year that
Heart of Darkness was published, to the present, there is
one meaningful and critical social and cultural difference.
The hair.
English colonists saw African afros and Conrad describes
the glorious and wild woman�s hair as �done in the shape
of a helmet.� European helmets circa in the early twentieth
century stood much higher than modern helmets, which makes
the description even more applicable to the straight versus
natural dilemma facing modern black women. Conrad�s African
woman, as described by Marlow, could not be more natural.
She is at one with nature�its symbol, representation, and
product. Her hair is an important signifier of her relationship
with and connection to the �fecund and mysterious life�
of the jungle. The sexuality tangled in her hair, therefore,
becomes a vital part to the mystery and sensuality of the
woman�s appeal. Unfortunately, it is also central to ethnocentric
savage quality that Marlow describes her as possessing,
or as he more likely meant it, being possessed by. The possessed
and possessive sexual dichotomy is represented perfectly
by the wild afro. Its undirected fury possesses the woman
because it signifies an utter lack of control, yet the hair,
obviously, belongs to the woman that it punctuates. She
chooses to wear it that way, and can thereby be said to
possess it. Wildness becomes dictated, and the chaos is
controlled. What appears to be a lack of authority over
her hair is actually a voluntary submission, which ends
up giving her greater power because it enables her to rebel
rather than conform and markedly break with social convention.
African women at the turn of the nineteenth century were
not aware of the sociological statement of style, and, due
to their isolation and absence of televisual media, had
no conception of the symbolic weight sitting on top of their
heads. Modern black women are aware of the sociological
statement and do comprehend the symbolism, which is exactly
why it is nearly impossible to find a nappy, natural fro
in hip hop videos.
While the sexualized subjects of hip hop may have dark skin
and fuller frames that divide them from white beauty standards,
they also almost always have straight hair. Video vixens
adopt that one crucial white norm and reveal that even in
hip hop aesthetic pressures of conformity have their reach.
Male rappers borrow their fashion sense�sagging pants, shoes
without laces, etc.�directly from prison, where regulation
is the ultimate trendsetter, and defy social expectation
and convention in the most visible way possible�by adopting
and making outlaw chic.
Women,
on the other hand, are only allowed to break with convention
when it surrenders to a lustful male agenda. The elevation
of black beauty standards to a place of sexual prominence
is not carried out to celebrate black women, but to arouse
the men who prefer those standards over those enforced by
the dominant culture. Throughout commercial hip hop, as
is the case with most pop culture, there is the expectation
and requirement that women behave sexually. However, feminine
sexuality, while put on up front display, must be subservient
to the male libido and easily controlled by masculine forces.
The near universality of straight hair on video models is
emblematic of male control over female bodies and the abusive
relationship that exists between commerce and sexuality.
Video models who submit to social pressure, from male rappers
and their record company executives, to straighten their
hair surrender something important, but unlike the woman
who encourages her hair to expand, the surrender is involuntary.
It is externally enforced by greedy and chauvinistic parties
who seek to commodify the female body. Essential to the
process of commodification is the silencing of women within
the community. They must become mere props and visual aids
of male expression. Just as the �jungle woman� is prohibited
from speaking in Heart of Darkness, the straight-haired
Jezebel wears tape over her mouth in rap. It is illustrative
and illuminating that many of the females in hip hop who
have artistic autonomy and authority�Jill Scott, Lauryn
Hill, Angie Stone, and sometimes Beyonce�wear their hair
in a naturally big and bold style.
Certainly,
not all black women�in recording studios, boardrooms, or
nightclubs�who straighten are cooperating with social and
cultural pressures to abide by white beauty standards. Many
of them may simply like the look better, and contrary to
what more militant advocates of natural hair claim, this
preference does not make them �sell outs.� However, when
fashion, hip hop, and Hollywood seem to require black women
to wear straight hair like they would a standard issued
uniform, and it becomes increasingly difficult to find aesthetic
independence, one cannot help but become suspicious.
The
suspicion should be aimed at American mainline culture and
its general treatment of black sexuality. There is much
to be said for a cultural representation of black women
that is either invisible or ignoble that hip hop, even with
all of its misogyny and mistreatment of women, emerges as
an unlikely and weird bastion of black beauty.
A great deal can of this cruel and contemptible status quo
can be traced to common cultural and sociopolitical force
in American life: fear. Fear of black people has driven
residential preferences of average Americans, entire campaigns
in American politics, and nearly everything in between.
Since black people are the objects of such terror, it should
be little surprise that the narrative regarding black sexuality
is rooted in racial stereotype and driven by ugly paranoia.
Political leaders, law enforcement officials, and media
heavyweights have all built a history of depicting the black
male as a ravenous sexual predator who must be stopped,
with violence if necessary, from brutalizing innocent and
unsuspecting white women. Many black males, some of whom
were children, were murdered at the hands of angry mobs
or unprosecuted criminals for committing the offense of
flirting, smiling, or in some cases just looking at a white
woman. The still shocking murder of 14-year-old Emmet Till
is the most infamous case of killing done in the name of
protecting white women from black monsters. Till had the
temerity to allegedly whistle at a white woman. In 1915,
the film Birth of a Nation lionized the Ku Klax Klan as
American heroes for preventing psychotic black males on
a rampage from raping white women. President Wilson hosted
a screening of the film in the White House. Not too long
after that marijuana was criminalized for a variety of absurd
reasons, one of which was stated by Harry Anslinger, the
acting drug czar, as �it causes white women to seek sexual
relations with Negroes.� These are three particularly illustrative
examples in a long and well-known history of the demonization
campaign of black sexuality. The black male is routinely
portrayed as a loathsome lothario or mindless predator that
preys on the epitome of innocence�the white woman.
If the white woman represents uncorrupted beauty and moral
purity, the black woman is certainly emblematic of something
else. She must match the black man in her commitment to
subscribing to senseless sexual impulses. However, she cannot
be seen as predatory, because that would give her too much
power. The Jezebel stereotype functions perfectly in this
respect, which is why it is so persistent. It turns the
black woman into a cartoon. She is highly sexual, and just
as thoughtless as the black male, but she is also powerless,
easily manipulated and appropriated as personal property.
She can be molded and modeled into a mannequin for male
pleasure. The straight hair that results from social pressure
most clearly captures this molding and modeling process.
It shows, literally, how the dominant culture can force
its own values and standards on marginalized human beings.
The black women who are allowed to escape marginalization
typically showcase the values and standards of white culture
without trying. Halle Berry, Thandie Newton, and Rihanna
all have on thing in common. They look white. They have
light skin, white features and, of course, straight hair.
The beauty and sensuality of the black woman�light skinned,
dark skinned, straight haired, froed�should be obvious to
everyone in a digitalized, televisual age, much more to
those who have had the privilege of befriending or dating
them. The black woman, despite her beauty, brains, and bravery,
has been forcibly exiled to the lowest sociological position
in America. But, rather than resign to helpless victimhood,
she often carries herself with earned elegance that results
from maintaining strength in moments of struggle. She mothers
in the neighborhood where altruistic love is devalued and
undermined by selfish fathers and self-absorbed political
institutions. She prays in the pews of churches where a
fraternal order of pastors are willing to take their money,
but not ordain them. She studies in schools where she is
not expected to succeed and labors in jobs where she is
not wanted. She does it all with politics of style and substance�cultivating
pride and beauty, while actively resisting harassment, disrespect,
and subjugation.
Black women execute this everyday heroism with a variety
of hair styles. But, the one that wears the wild fro gives
a powerful visual aid to demonstrate her rejection of what
is asked, expected, and often demanded of them by a culture
that forces them to subsist on low wage jobs in the inner
cities, makes them work twice as hard as everyone else in
the middle class, and routinely demeans and degrades them
with the schizophrenic message that they can never be as
beautiful as white woman, but should try to be by conforming
to white norms, and in the process recognize that their
sexuality is the only thing about them that counts. It is
little wonder why �nappy headed� women cannot be tolerated
in Hollywood, fashion, or hip hop. They are walking contradictions
to the dogmatic decrees of the powerful. The protest of
black women without straight hair may be only symbolic.
But if symbolic protests are celebrated, it won�t be long
until substantive protests are coordinated. If black women
see natural hair elevated to its rightful place of sexiness
and style, alongside straight hair, more of them may demand
that the single mothers wrestling with poverty, professionals
facing condescension and low expectations, and students
with every obstacle in front of them find room on the same
elevator, which rises through and over glass ceilings and
class barriers.
For the social and political structure that thrives on racial
division and economic inequality, the overdue elevation
of the black female is a problem that cannot be solved with
a $10 hair relaxer.
BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator
David Masciotra is the author of Working
On a Dream: The Progressive Political Vision of Bruce Springsteen
. His Website is www.davidmasciotra.com.
His blog is Subtle Subversion.
Click here
to contact Mr. Masciotra. |
Jul 1, 2010 - Issue 382
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published every Thursday
