i want to have a conversation about black women’s beauty that has nuance and allows black women to be artists in their own aesthetic creation and agents of personal choice
i’m tired conversations that make it seem like every black woman with a 5 inch pair of heels and a weave is some how insecure, self loathing, or sipping that white supremacist kool aid of beauty standards
because the minute we center the conversation around that shallow understanding of what is not “naturally beautiful”
we automatically give the natural beauty community and all its admirers a free pass on their anti-black women’s misogyny
and their willingness to overlook the ways in which white supremacy and internalized complexes fuck with us all mentally side ways and backwards
regardless of whether we have a lace front or a two strand twist out
because lets be epically real about something
the natural beauty community is not free of its self loathing, internalized white supremacy
otherwise why are some of the most circulated tumblr pictures of “natural beauties” are ones where the models fall within a prescriptive aesthetic standard
meaning they are able bodied, light skinned, exotically dark skinned, heterosexual if there is more than one person in the picture, thin or “acceptably thick/fat”
why do their clothes and jewellery always signal to some epically romatic rastafarian or pan-african notion of being “back to real black”?
am i really less down or real or authetically black if i rock a baby phat t-shirt while sporting some freshly bantu’d locs?
i hate to be the bearer of bad news, but attempting to enforce some haphazard standard of homogeneity under the guise of an acceptable aestestic “naturally beautiful” movement is white supremacist bullshit
because its painting us as a monolith in the same ways white supremacy is all too eager to pathologize people of colour, specifically black people, as being a monolith
the only subtle difference is that we are the enforcers of this bullshit monolithic narrative
we are the ones codifying specific and acceptable ways of communicating “consciousness” to each other and limiting what we term “natural beauty” in order to shut people out who don’t “make the cut”
we are the ones denying each other individuality, freedom of expression, and freedom over our own personal growth and how we communicate evolution and personal politic
and at the same time we are the ones operating under the sanctimonious delusion that you can tell how conscious a person is by their personal presentation and not what come out their mouths
so please stop acting as if those who are natural or even appreciate natural beauty have reached intellectual nirvana when it comes to dismantling internalized white supremacy or “insecurity”
we as a people are collectively not done yet until we can advocate for the liberation of ALL black people while respecting the right to individual aesthetic presentation
