The Tribune

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett

We often talk about beauty as if it were an unnatural thing that has a particular commercial value. We tend to measure women against this unnatural, commercially-valued beauty. If they do not measure up, as no woman can naturally, according to the media, then she is an unbeautiful and socially unacceptable, especially among the youth who wear this badge as if it were their life.

They are destroyed by the unbeauty of blackness and inequality, especially as these are played out in our society and over social media.

These days, the idea of a particular type of beauty seems to be even more pervasive than years ago. We talk, though, about the advancement of blackness and the ‘take over’ of women, but these seem still to face monumental obstacles before reaching any obvious difference or improvement. Even once that place of obvious advancement is reached, or that sweet spot, it will not remain there without constant work. Many of the hard-won achievements of women have been through tireless effort and struggle, through determination, have been lost to lack of follow up. Wins do not always remain in place.

In fact, we seem to be on a slippery slope of backsliding where many Bahamian girls and young women see themselves through distorted lenses. Firstly, they see themselves as unequal to males and in an inferior position where they are paid for as if they were material. According to many, this is their right. They have earned the right to ‘charge’ for what they have. Others see the world as defined by the male gaze. All of life these days is controlled by that gaze, even when it is imposed on women by other women, it is a male constructed gaze.

In a recent Facebook tussle, a young girl was told she was too black, ugly and scrubby and should start to bleach. She was also instructed by the belligerent Facebookers to put on some weave. She was insulted because of her picky hair and her dark skin. Beauty has obviously missed her, this according to numerous posts about a photo of a dark-skinned girl with short naturalish hair. Everything about the young girl was ridiculed by the young men and women who saw the photo and commented on it. The fact that weave and bleaching are so common was not only alarming but made obvious by the posts. They have become normalised ways of being in a ‘black’ country.

A black woman is not beautiful in her own skin, she must change herself to fit into a model of beauty that, simply put, does not work naturally with her body nor genetic make up. It said that black is ugly and that white is beautiful. The laws and legacy of colonisation have gone nowhere.

It is distressing to think in a black country more than 40 years after the presumed end of colonialism with independence, we would find ourselves right back in the place where young black girls, especially young working class or economically limited black girls find themselves in a place where they are seen as ugly and where they see themselves as ugly.

We have obviously become recolonised, and it is worse this time because there is no obvious enemy to fight against. There is no bad person or master, no enslaver, no soldier standing over us looking down a bespectacled nose at the savages. The self-hatred is pervasive and does not need a living, breathing enemy to succeed. Blackness has become ugly and unfashionable, more so here than elsewhere.

The shackles of mental slavery have not been removed; they have in fact been tightened because they are no longer visible. It is worse now than before because it is more pervasive. As black women like Jada Pinkett Smith and Oprah Winfrey tackle the struggles of inequality in the US, few people really break it down here. Those who do break it down tend not to be working in the lower socio-economic group that is faced with huge inequalities to begin with and one way they validate themselves is through the beauty industry. This is an industry that indoctrinates black people to see that black is ugly. Without this, their products would not sell.

We are missing a serious lesson in all of this. Black youth do not like what they see in the mirror and so they work hard to replace what they see – that inferiority, that learned ugly self – with a self that is acceptable, celebrated and desired by someone out there, beyond them. It is a manufactured self that has the weave, the nails, the capped teeth, the stylised body through surgery, only they can’t afford it. We are missing the boat when it comes to teaching self-acceptance and self-celebration (the right kind of celebration).

We have lost the value of blackness and naturalness. Ironically, at the same time, more women of a particular group are obviously embracing their blackness. I am sure they face some resistance in their communities, ‘Why not process your hair?’, ‘Why not weave it, bleach your skin, colour your eyes, sculpt your body?’ But they strive, not without some doubts somewhere along the way, I am sure, but with self-confidence that is simply not taught to young black girls who can hardly afford to eat some days, and when they can they are being taught to change the way they look because it ain’t acceptable. The Pussycat Dolls’ song “Don’t You Wish” comes to mind here.

I often discuss inequality, and especially women’s inequality here, but it is more insidious than we even wish to think. Inequality has become normal and it presents a particular kind of self-hatred that is well cloaked in self-celebration or commodification. Once a man finds a young, working class, black girl pretty, she is OK. If he does not, she must bleach herself to death, for example, in order to be found attractive.

According to society, it is only his acceptance of her that validates her. Young girls hunger after that kind of attention. Male attention defines them as women. The difficulty is that without this kind of attention, many young girls feel that they are failures. Peer pressure, popular culture and the social ethos then push them into these transactional relationships because they need to be validated and they need to survive. The social milieu defines them as less likely to succeed because they are so unequal, because the gap between them and the perceived image of beauty and success is so wide. All her features mark her as unbeautiful. This pressure in redoubled by social media where people are faceless and can inflict serious pain without bearing any of the responsibility.

The Bahamas has quickly become a place where black people are inferior to those who once colonised it. We look for validation to the outside. The outside is quick to define us and it uses its standards of beauty to undermine any self-assurance in our population. In many cases internationally this causes black women in the spotlight to gradually change their appearance. They become closer to a white, but not quite, icon of what is beautiful. The hair must be beaten into submission first. As that occurs the skin is bleached so that it no longer resembles anything natural without makeup. The features and the skin tone no longer match up. In Hollywood and on the runway, many of those women have the wherewithal to be able to affect this transformation less harmfully. Our young girls are destroyed in the process of striving to rid themselves of themselves, and all because social pressure is so absolutely against natural blackness. The kids must be learning it from somewhere, and no, we cannot stop them from being exposed to the outside world that we so often choose to blame, but we can add our own measure of building confidence; this measure is usually missing. There are few parents who will reaffirm black girls’ natural beauty. Many more are the mothers who live out the image of this commodified, consumption driven image of acceptable beauty.

By widening the rift between the elite and the poor, we are not only creating serious socio-economic problems, we are destroying socio-cultural ethos of blackness as acceptable without intervention.

Yes, young black men are demonised by the same society we examining here, especially when they are poor, but young girls are doubly destroyed as their only avenue to success, so they are told, is their looks, and if their looks are so despised, we are dismissing them as nothing.