that was the subject heading when my friend Toya sent me a link to this Swedish white guy’s blog which I highly recommend:
http://www.blackisbeautiful.se/
The full title of the blog is :
Beautiful Black Woman – Thoughts of a White B’woy
At first it was funny, humorous. Sort of intriguing, but clearly just the thoughts of some poor cracker boy bit with the bug. But then I started to read. He was talking about “uplifting” black women over and over, an acknowledgement that black women were somehow low to the ground. And after awhile I did feel a little elevated, just by looking at all the pictures of women with similar traits and seeing the word “beauty” next to them. And it wasn’t that inflated “black is beautiful” label that we have to slap on everything so we’ll believe it no matter who else does, this was a foreign white guy who seems to have done this of his own volition. Like anyone else writing a blog, he wants to share with the world something he’s passionate about, something of himself. I thought, “this is so deep,” and it immediately emphasizes all the severe deficiency of this kind of thing all over the world, throughout time.
To me, this could be attributed to many things. In the U.S. there were strong attempts to strictly reinforce this idea that black women were not beautiful. Go do some research, I’m not going to do it all for you; if you wanna go know something, go know it. White women were this whole other level of beauty that black women could never attain. Secondly, black women have a history of being exploited that’s too long to be reasonable. I think we’ve all read that Africans also had slaves before the slave trade, but not everyone knows that in West Africa, where the Africans were taken to America, West African men enslaved West African women. It wasn’t about race or class, it was about gender. Needless to say, the unresolved issues are great. Even now, African American beauty is thought of more as an issue; a debate, rather than a fact.
But this white guy’s blog, I think his name is Andreas, this white guy said, “95% of the black women I see are beautiful. How many guys can say that about white women?”
Damn! That was pretty awesome. And I think he’s right, lol. I hesitate a little because it sounds mean. It could just be because there are more white women [in America] than there are black women, but there’s definitely more of a…”range” of beauty let’s say? White women on TV complain that they pick “unrealistic” looking women to portray the average, and it’s the truth. But I know women of color who look like Gabrielle Union, and Sanaa Lathan, and Zoe Saldana, and Queen Latifa, and Kelly Rowland. And Jill Scot and Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill, and that chick from 106 and Park. Even Halle Berry and Alicia Keys. They may not have the same talents but they look like them. When I see a black woman on TV I’m like, “oh snap, a black woman on tv!” not “oh they picked the most unrealistic black woman ever to portray an average black woman.” Fact is, all the black women I’m thinking of in my head right now, are attractive and/or beautiful. I don’t know if it’s really true, it’s not like my perception is any worse than it was before, but I just feel like the last of the scales are coming off my eyes. Sometimes people think if they say a lie long enough and loud enough it can really prevail over a truth. For a long time I felt subpar and listened to other black women as they talked about feeling subpar, and thought this was a mountain we all needed to climb together. But turns out this mountain is made of doodoo and plastic that a buncha people convinced me was a mountain but is not. Let’s face it, there is ALOT of beauty comin’ out of that African region…and it’s really a little bit unfair to the rest of the planet.
And I sort of can’t believe I’m a part of it.
Tags: beauty, black women, Pop Culture, society, white people
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