Being beautiful won’t keep us safe

I love beautiful things. This love drives my creativity, my environment, and a lot of my self care. I also love when I feel beautiful. But, it has taken me a really long time to truly believe that my beauty exists outside of my value as a human. And I think that I only truly started believing that recently when I accepted the moments in which I was ugly. In which my environment and my feelings were ugly, and the world felt grotesque, and I could not find beauty in any of it.

And no, it wasn’t so ugly it was beautiful. It wasn’t beautiful in its tragic sadness. It wasn’t eerily beautiful. It was just ugly, and I felt ugly – and that is not a moral failing on my part. Because in those moment, I wanted to be safe. I wanted to be at peace. I wanted comfort. And my being or feeling ugly did not make me less deserving of any of those things.

I think that our social movements have an unhealthy obsession with beauty. This obsession is ever present, always bubbling below the surface of our language and behaviors. I see it in the mainstream body positivity movement that is more concerned with telling fat people and thin people, and people of all sizes that they are beautiful than advocating for the elimination of fatphobia in medicine. I see it in the ways that viral mugshot photos lead to modelling contracts but not abolition. I see it in the way mutual aid funds with thin light skinned people reach their goals faster than their dark skinned, fat counterparts. I see it in the way that the beauty (or “lack thereof”) of Black women remains at the forefront of discussions when they are unjustly killed by police.

This is a haphazard reflection about beauty and humanity and social movements. But it was triggered by a moment in April when the world let out a collective sigh following the news the George Floyd’s murdered - Derek Chauvin - had been found guilty. Hours later, the news flashed across my Instagram stories that Ma'Khia Bryant had been killed by the police as they were responding to her call for assistance.

It made me sick to see Black people (specifically Black men) trying to justify the murder of a Black girl explain the ways her Black girlhood did not fit within their parameters of beauty or innocence. Somehow, her victimhood was up for debate because of her size and the presence of a knife in the fight that the police already knew was occurring. She was now a threat, a reasonable person to fear for fully armed police officers. She was not to be protected; she should have known better than to exist in a Black girl’s body. And I could speak endlessly about the ways that this girl was beautiful and precious and the way that Black girls are taught that they are inherently less beautiful than their white counterparts. And the ways that part of adolescence and adulthood literally has to be dedicated to unlearning these harmful ideas. And how most never complete this process of unlearning. But I actually don’t think it matters. Because, what if she wasn’t beautiful? So fucking what???Why would that make her less deserving of survival? Why shouldn’t she be safe because any one person has decided that her face or physique isn’t to their tastes?

White supremacy is so intricate and adaptive in its cruelty that it will constantly shift and change the definitions of whiteness to maintain a monopoly on beauty. As soon as we declare that we love ourselves in a way that it has told us not to – it will find ways to amalgamate those traits and behaviors into whiteness. Black women (particularly Black trans women) have been at the forefront of most mainstream beauty trends (ie. lash extensions, weaves, lace front wigs, makeup contouring etc.) and white and non-Black people are constantly striving to give themselves non-white features (ie. tanning, body modifications for fuller figures, lip fillers etc.) and yet Black women do not determine the beauty standard and consistently exist below it.

And so, I am left thinking of a phrase that I have heard my whole life, though its exact year of origin is unknown.* “Black is Beautiful.” And Black is indeed beautiful. But no matter how beautiful Blackness, and Black culture, and (certain) Black people are seen by mainstream white society – Black people still aren’t safe. It’s difficult to chart the exact growth and healing of a collective consciousness, and so I have more questions than answers. But I wonder if hearing and believing that Black is Beautiful was a necessary step in believing that our lives matter, that we are indeed deserving of living in a society that does not try to kill us. And if that’s true, then I can’t help feel sadness. Did we truly not believe that our humanity was worth anything until we were convinced of our own beauty? Did we really prioritize beauty over safety? Hoping that we would seduce and tantalize white supremacy into giving us what we have always deserved. Or have we always known that we were beautiful? Is the idea that Black people are capable of being beautiful less threatening than the idea that all Black people deserve liberation – regardless of what anyone thinks they look like? And, I cannot help but wonder if “Black Lives Matter” or “Protect Black Women” have already become meaningless platitudes that we say to remind ourselves of what has always been true, or what was always supposed to be true – and what white supremacy will never truly believe.

I’m not saying that the self esteem and the beauty of Black people is unimportant. But I know that there will always be people left behind when we make beauty a precondition for safety. White supremacy is designed to be exclusive. It thrives through the nexus of oppression. And so, it will warp the ever-shifting standards of beauty to divide us. How can we liberate ourselves when light skinned people are considered most beautiful, are given the most opportunity, but have the least amount of lived experience with anti Black racism and colourism? The types of bodies, hairstyles, fashion, voices, demeanor, mannerisms etc. that it is acceptable for Black people have changed in a way that often feels like progress.  But I cannot see progress in a system that makes certain types of Black existence unacceptable. I cannot accept a system that gives us crumbs of “beauty” and asks us not to think about liberation.

I’m asking for us to evaluate all of the calls for humanity that have been created within the confines of an inhumane paradigm. We did all that we could with what we had at our disposal, but it’s clear that these same ideas now hold us back. Beauty has always been subjective, and likely always will be. But our humanity shouldn’t ever be.

*The exact official origin of Black is Beautiful is debated. Long thought to be coined first by John Rock in 1858, evidence and transcripts of his speech from the date indicated show no use of the term. And while the ideology of Black is Beautiful can be found in the Negritude movement of the 1930s, Bill Allen claims that he coined the phrase in the 1950s. Regardless, the most widespread use of Black is Beautiful was its adoption by African Americans in the 1960s as a distinct aspect of the wider civil rights movement. The movement gained traction after 1962 when Kwame Braithwaite and the African Jazz-Art Society & Studios put on a show entitled Naturally 62’ that depicted Black women who all exited outside of the western beauty standard. Black is Beautiful is meant to encourage pan-Africanism and a global acknowledgement of the beauty of Black features and dark skin in particular.