A few years back, my daughter and I went to the hospital to visit a friend who had just delivered her first child, a baby boy. While a small crowd gathered in her room to extend well wishes, I overheard several of the young women giggling after mentioning a phrase in Urdu that I didn’t understand. Later when we got back to the car, I asked my daughter if she had noticed it, too. With a heavy sigh she affirmed and translated it: “and mashaAllah, he is so light!” I was aghast. This young woman – and many of the other young women from our masjid community who were also present who I knew to be from pious and practicing Muslim families – were aspiring to a notion of beauty that was steeped in racism. Needless to say, racism and narrow definitions of beauty dominated the conversation all the way home.
As parents, we must understand the underpinnings of racial stereotypes about beauty in order to put an end to them in both our homes and our society. And, as significantly, to positively affect the development of healthy self-esteem in our children.
Beauty has not always been defined by the eyes of the beholder. An association between beauty and whiteness has deep roots, particularly in the U.S. When whiteness is celebrated in the popular culture – it does not have some objective, biological, evolutionary underpinning – it literally means placing value in being a white person, with the flip side being devaluing everyone who is not. Racism is an oppressive construct, an invention of man to impose and maintain control, both literally and figuratively. And these messages and manners are pervasive and passed on to our children in a wide variety of ways.
Definitions of Beauty Are Steeped in Racism
Early racial theorists like Christoph Meiners and Johann Blumenback defined the category of white or Caucasian as being “the most beautiful of the races.” For them, it was about ensuring that white supremacy reigned paramount in every realm of society. And that comprehensive strategy has been hard to shake, particularly in the mainstream notion of beauty that is displayed by the media, directly and also insidiously.
Sometimes notions of beauty also have a lot to do with class privilege. Think about how much it costs to get cosmetic surgery, orthodontics, to have your hair styled, your nails done, your teeth whitened, or to get a facial. In these efforts to achieve “beauty,” one is also aspiring to its cultural definition.
Pockets of Pushback
There has been periodic pushback against these narrow definitions of beauty – the model of which is pale skin, thin lips and waist, and blue eyes – at various points in U.S. history. There is a huge body of work that is relevant, but here are a few examples to illustrate the point.
The first African American woman to reach millionaire status was Madame C.J. Walker, who in the early 1900s developed the “Walker system of hair care” that catered directly to Black women. From humble beginnings, she discovered a formula to address a scalp condition that caused the loss of her own hair and then developed a product line that was sold by “beauty culturalists” across the country. At the height of her business, Walker employed more than 3,000 employees, largely Black women who sold the products door-to-door. This personal touch grew a loyal following and Walker’s entrepreneurial success catapulted her to international fame. Her success also inspired the growth of many other Black-owned businesses that catered to the Black community.
The Black Power movement of the 1960s and 70s proclaimed “Black is Beautiful” to counter cultural norms that suggested the contrary. There were many icons of that era that popularized this message in the arts – music, literature, drama, fine arts – and on the sociopolitical stage with the civil rights movement. Natural hairstyles and large afros were a sign of those times.
The awakening of nationalistic pride spread internationally as well. In South Africa, the Black Consciousness Movement gained traction under the leadership of Steve Biko. Columbian artist Frida Kahlo pushed stereotypes for Hispanics in her persona and paintings, choices that were often described as a radical rejection of white, colonial beauty standards.
More recently, the body positivity movement and the fat-acceptance movements have also consistently bushed back on the notion that beautiful also meant thin and able-bodied.
A Racial Reckoning
More recently, the Black Lives Matter movement has focused increased attention on the implications and extent of systemic racism in our society, and that has also included standards of beauty. It is more common now to see television and print media ads that are more inclusive of people of color. Companies selling household products ranging from pancake syrup to rice to butter, have revisited slogans and branding that had their foundations in slave and settler colonialism.
It is also significant that a few of the global beauty giants – L’Oréal, Unilever, and Johnson & Johnson – are changing their marketing strategies to remove racially insensitive branding and also products that promote skin lightening. These moves have been largely welcomed in the U.S., but make no mistake – cosmetics are a $500 billion industry and these moves are all about the profit bottom line.
When these strategic changes have been applied globally, however, there has been push back from many Asian countries – from Japan to India and many nations in between. Asian consumers have their own beauty ideals and don’t seem yet ready to make collective changes. In India, skin-whitening properties are included in also 80 percent of basic moisturizers sold. Similarly in Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, skin-whitening moisturizers make up over 50 percent of the market.
According to Gabriella Beckwith, a senior research analyst at Euromonitor, “there has been a call for companies to put greater emphasis on people over profit.” With brand empathy playing a huge role in purchasing decisions, brand loyalty is changing and that means there is potential for progress, even if it is slow.
Sanitizing Your Home (and Heart!) of Beauty Biases
When we talk about the politics of beauty, we must also bring home the notion that what we consume and what we aspire to, matters on a deeply personal level. And for parents, that reach trickles down to the self-esteem of our children. It is vitally important that we see the unique beauty of and within them.
Each and every human is a creation of Al-Khaliq, The Creator of Everything. Our skin color, our birth order, the body that we possess from the tips of our toes to our golden or jet black manes, and the family that we inherit, were chosen for us. Our children must see, hear, and feel us to celebrate their uniqueness and their beauty. We must remind them of it so much that, when they look in the mirror themselves, they can see and appreciate that beauty, too.
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