Content area
Full Text
Abstract This article examines the practices of skin bleaching and hair straightening in order to explore the extent to which Africans (among other postcolonials) have internalized the dominant racist discourses informing popular notions of beauty and sexual desirability. The argument demonstrates that Afrikans who have experienced intergenerational, white supremacist conditioning, have come to reject all things Afrikan as denoted by the proverb which advocates that "anything too black nuh good". Skin bleaching and hair straightening are thus narratives indicative of self-hate. These performances of chemical self-transformation attest to the hegemonic complicity of victims of oppression with their own self-erasure.
Key words * Hair straightening * Skin bleaching * Self-hate * White supremacist conditioning
UNHEALTHY BEHAVIOURS
The twin practices of skin bleaching and hair straightening are present-day indicators of the internalization and reproduction by Afrikan people - on the Continent and in the Diaspora - of racialized notions of embodied aesthetics, which are anchored in sexual and social meanings that are white defined and designed to reproduce white supremacist narratives of power and self-identity politics. According to Cheryl Thompson (2009), "Today, it is estimated that 70% to 80% of black women chemically straighten their hair. In the 1980s, weaves raised the black beauty bar even higher to hair that is not just straight, but also very long." Similarly, skin bleaching is rampant as an embodied performance of internalized racism (Tafari-Ama, 2006).
More and more... Black women are bleaching their skin... in a bizarre attempt to acquire the psychosocial status associated with Brown or 'soially White' skin. This is a prominent example of how racist discourses of inscribed embodiment, which place particular emphasis on women's idealised sexual desirability, reflect the historical fracturing of Black identities (Tafari-Ama, 2006: 283).
We know that hegemony is at play (Gramsci, 1957) when those dominated by discourses of racial and ethnic disfigurement appropriate those myths and perform them as if they were their own. The prevailing political economy of notions of beauty and sexual desirability invalidates Afrikan embodiment and legitimizes a Eurocentric "look" and apparatus of dominance. This has resulted in an inversion of Afrikanness in order to promote a racialized global industry in so-called beauty products targeting women of Afrikan descent. Increasingly, men have also been incorporated into this discourse...