Black Power In Black Beauty: A Recasting of Black Femininity in the Visual Works of Kwame Brathwaite
I originally composed this as a paper for submission in a course entitled Gender: Historical Perspectives, which I loved very much! It's been heavily edited and republished here, for your enjoyment :)
The performance of Blackness en vivo is a tricky subject; the psychology impacted upon marginalized people by the forms which subject them amount to colonization of the mind in the work of Frantz Fanon, famed political philosopher and post-colonial scholar. Whether the subject of workplace regulation or staid concerns over order and unruliness, the aesthetics that attend this performance are also socially governed. The imposed assimilation of Black people into white cultural norms engenders feelings of inferiority and aspiration; the gendered nature of these aesthetics and performance duly impact Black women, and the acceptance of their femininity.
In response to white hegemony surrounding expressions of Black womanhood, visual artist and designer Kwame Brathwaite generated the gestalt of “Black is Beautiful” to celebrate a newly-defined beauty for African American women rooted in pride in their “natural” Blackness. This new set of touchstones developed the range of what we now recognize as Afrocentric: Afro hair styles, dark skin, and full lips; and African patterns, styles of dress, and music. This construct of the “natural”, and the political motivations of Black nationhood which undergirded Kwame’s work, made room for a new paradigm of Black femininity, Black commodities, and Black gaze.
A Reaction Against Racism:
By the mid-20th century, notions of white cultural supremacy and white propriety had deeply penetrated Black communities, advertising, and culture. The linchpin of the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, commonly cited as the hallmark Supreme Court Case which initialized desegregation, was a psychological case study: researchers Kenneth and Mamie Clark offered elementary school students Black dolls and white dolls, and asked them to associate positive and negative attributes with each doll. Both white and Black students attributed white dolls with intelligence and kindness over Black dolls; the argument of the case was that the deleterious side effects of segregation harmed Black students’ self-image.
African Americans endure a sort of double consciousness in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois; forced to view themselves through the lens of whiteness, “measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (DuBois 1897). The resolution of this is a destructive sort of half-assimilation, and the adoption of a racism towards the Black self; this internalized racism manifested itself in the aforementioned colonized psyche, and expressed itself in Black life particularly through Black public appearance.
This policing of appearance which followed emancipation particularly fell upon women; Black men were also subject to workplace codes of conduct and faced a racialized limit on access to patriarchy and masculinity, but Black women remained those most subjected to bodily governance and the construct of “beauty”.
The commerce that surrounds all of this must be indicted as well: an entire industry of hair care and skin creams built itself upon the imposition of white femininity and propriety onto Black women in the form of acquiescing purchases: hair relaxers and straighteners, hot combs and flat irons, skin lightening creams and bleaches. Moreover: these assimilatory technologies levied a toll on Black women’s health, from heat-damaged hair to chemically-burned skin.
The material undergirding of all of this is the broad economic and political disenfranchisement of Black communities and individuals, following their commodification; this generated the psychology of Brown v. Board, supported the atomization of Black sexuality into consumable performance, and propped up white megalomania. Slavery made Black femininity into a circus act; Saartjie Baartman, rent from South Africa by British slavers, was paraded around Europe on exhibition and made to display her nude body for the enjoyment of the white gaze. Slavery and racialization built narratives around Black women and shunted them into a femininity overtly coded as white; Black women became hypersexualized jezebels under threat of acquiescing into respectability, and their African features and heritage subsumed into popular culture and media as denigrated caricatures.
An aspiration to whiteness followed this debasement of Black femininity as vulgar; a rich and ridicule-intentioned history of visual representations of Black women with non-lightened skin and un-straightened hair populates this popular media. Advertisements for whitening products promise male attraction, respect, and beauty, while the ‘mammy’ and ‘jezebel’ archetypes cast Africa as backwards and African Black women as promiscuous, uncultured, and unkempt. Untreated Black womanhood became a point of embarrassment in media narratives; cultural disenfranchisement followed the political economy of racism.
A response to this came in the Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s; faced with white apathy towards Black plight at best and abuse/reification of this plight at worst, organizers and orators turned to nation-building and a devolution of community power to Black people. A concurrent visual movement and language anticipated and fed into these new politics, crafted in the mold of Kwame Brathwaite’s projects and the movement behind the phrase, “Black is Beautiful”; the object was to proffer alternative media inspiring pride in untreated Blackness to directly oppose the dominant media narratives.
Black is Beautiful:
The ideological foundation for Black is Beautiful grew from négritude (an epistemology and critique of colonialism from members of the African Diaspora in French-occupied colonies), which itself pulled from the Black nationalism of Marcus Garvey and an older W.E.B. DuBois; the political economy of race engendered a turn towards Black politics for Black people and an embrace of Pan-Africanism. “Black is Beautiful” blossomed from this focus on the Black gaze, anticipating the Black Arts Movement led by writer and revolutionary Amiri Baraka and creating a new, Black aesthetic methodology.
Kwame Brathwaite (b. 1938), a Garveyist and Black Nationalist, fomented the Black is Beautiful movement through his series of fashion shows (dubbed “Naturally”) and his published photography. “Black is Beautiful” as a phrase centers pride in Blackness as prescribed by Garvey and mid-century activist Carlos Cook (whom Brathwaite’s work and vision directly followed), with an intimate gendered motivation: Brathwaite wished to celebrate Black women outside of the white gaze, especially absent the self-hatred sometimes attendant to a Black gaze preoccupied with its white counterpart.
Brathwaite and his art/model collectives, the Grandassa Models and the African Jazz Art Society and Studios, developed and popularized “Black is Beautiful” to emphasize an embrace of Afrocentric (vis a vis Eurocentric) standards of beauty.
Brathwaite’s visual productions prompt an analysis of his photography. As seen in online archives from Aperture and the Phillip Martin Gallery, Brathwaite focused his work on an accentuation of dark brown skin tones, broad flat noses, and an array of untreated but carefully manicured Afro hairstyles: “natural” thus becomes smooth, noticeably Black skin, broad noses, and departures from cosmetic chemical and heat treatment. The poses that the Grandassa Models assume in Kwame’s photography present this self-assured pride as well; models assume regal or warm facial expressions, and the camera seems to defer to their authority.
The colors and patterns of his models’ clothing, and of the backdrops of his photos, speak to this sense of nature and dignity; Brathwaite showcases traditional West African patterns, silhouettes, and design work; and relies on rich tones of greens, oranges, blues, and reds in his clothing and settings. These choices evoke a visual sense of an imagined Africa, and become political in their deployment of homages to the continent in the midst of Black nationalist sentiments fighting colonialism and double consciousness by embracing this constructed homeland for Black people.
Influenced by the antecedents of Black Power, Brathwaite’s Black is Beautiful enjoyed its uptake among contemporary artists. Elizabeth Catlett (a sculptor and graphic artist associated with the Black Panthers) places Black Panther imagery alongside this motto in “Negro es bello II”, produced in 1969, while The Black Arts Movement which followed Brathwaite completed this shift toward regarding a new Black gaze.
Critiques of Black is Beautiful:
Black is Beautiful was not a gestalt without criticism, some from Black luminaries and intellectuals. James Baldwin, in televised conversation with Nikki Giovanni, offered this (within the context of a dialogue about Black ego, individuality, and fascism):
Black is beautiful, Black is beautiful! but since it’s beautiful you haven’t got to say so…because it’s a very dangerous slogan; I’m very glad that it came along, because it had to come along, but I don’t love all Black people really…
Baldwin’s argument purported that while Black is Beautiful was necessary, it generated a homogenizing and political lie: all Black people love all other Black people. His view of the self-love pushed by Black is Beautiful was that it expanded beyond utility and towards a bizarro fascism; however, it is unclear that the collectivizing self-love Brathwaite wished to inspire necessarily implied a love of every single Black individual. Rather, Black is Beautiful implicates Black people in a love of their Blackness; the object is not a love of the sum of a whole, but a love of the gestalt.
Perhaps a more salient critique questions the legitimacy of Black is Beautiful on its aesthetic base: hair and appearance are generally malleable and subject to trends, so why is Black is Beautiful illustrative of anything other than a shift in commerce and advertising? Angela Davis decried the commercial appropriation of the Afro, as the beauty and cosmetics industry rapidly adjusted to this new paradigm of Black femininity. The foregrounding of appearance inherent to a moment centered on beauty lent itself to easy commercial use; the very nature of beauty is aspiration, easily commoditized in advertisement. Black is Beautiful became Black is Profitable, and product culture easily took up the imagery of the Afro to sell new stylers and combs. The eventual co-optation of Black is Beautiful may speak to the power and efficacy of the movement; while Black is Beautiful was depoliticized by these commercial interlopers, the adoption of the original ideology still penetrated Black communities and meaningfully established a new gaze outside of a proximity to whiteness.
Nonetheless, the hyper-commercialization of Black is Beautiful brings to bear the centrality of consumption to Brathwaite’s aestheticism. Brathwaite is not to blame for corporate capitalization on his media; perhaps such an outcome was inescapable, as the parlaying of Black is Beautiful into a billion-dollar-industry which proclaims an ability to manufacture natural remains one story amongst many of capital’s ever-expanding reach and ability.
Legacy:
Black is Beautiful became an important touchstone for Black media; the adoption of the Afro, recall of African aesthetics and repackaging of Black femininity as an identity of pride and nationhood proved a long-lasting influence. Afrocentricity has enjoyed numerous reappearances; notably, within rap’s own consciousness movement which arose in the mid-to-late-1990s and moved towards interrogations of Blackness and the embrace of Black Muslim organizations like the 5 Percent Nation and the Nation of Islam.
This turn presented anthems and album cuts (from 2Pac’s ‘Keep Ya Head Up’ to Black Star’s ‘Brown Skin Lady’) which celebrated Black femininity and combatted the resurgence of negative stereotypes and images surrounding Black women post-Reagan (a debasement found in news media characterizations of Black mothers as crack whores and welfare queens, and in rap music itself and its accesorization and objectification of Black women).
In other visual media, tenets of the Black Arts have been adopted as well: for instance, Lorna Simpson’s reaffirming work appropriates imagery from old hair product advertisements in Black magazines into pastiches of Black mysticism and a celebration of Black women’s hair. The commodification of the Afro has also led to a positive, if opportunistic, recasting of cosmetics advertised to Black women; salves, ointments, and lotions marketing themselves as “natural” employ the image of the Afro and the embrace of dark skin in their attempts to market to a new commercial lane opened by Black is Beautiful. The marketability of denigration has been replaced with uplift; yet a market remains.
Black is Beautiful has undeniably shifted the Black cultural zeitgeist; the re-orientation of Black aestheticism and aspiration towards the Black gaze has impacted how Black people view themselves outside of the hegemony of whiteness, and has reimagined visual representations of Black femininity as a source of pride.
References:
1. James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni, “A Conversation”, Soul! (1971).
2. Blackside, “Interview with Kenneth Clark”, Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years (1954-1965), (1985).
3. W.E.B DuBois, “Strivings of the Negro People”, The Atlantic (1897).
4. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, (1952).
5. Tanisha Ford, Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful (2019).
6. Susan Frith, “Searching for Sara Baartman”, Johns Hopkins Magazine (2009).
7. Reiland Rabaka, The Negritude Movement: W. E. B. Du Bois, Leon Damas, Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor, Franz Fanon, and the Evolution of an Insurgent Idea (2015).
8. Lorna Simpson, Ebony Collages 2014-Present (2014-2019).
9. Susannah Walker, “Black Is Profitable: The Commodification of the Afro, 1960—1975”, Enterprise & Society (2000).
Figure References:
Brathwaite’s work available at: https://philipmartingallery.com/artists/26-kwame-brathwaite/works/