on black beauty

Yesterday, a black man tweeted that Ari Lennox and Teyana Taylor had “dangerously high sex appeal while simultaneously looking like rottweilers.” Today, Ari responded by observing that black women endure a particular kind of anti-blackness from black men. The backlash was swift and predictable. People said that she was being too sensitive. People said that she was trying to control free speech. “Why is this your speech?” she asked.

This time last year, I was watching Survivng R. Kelly and the backlash was swift and predictable. People said that black women were trying to ruin a successful black man (as if black women are somehow immume from the ruin of black men). They said that the black girls were fast. They blamed black parents. They recycled and deployed every trope used to justify the dehumanization of black people over the past 50 years. I realized, then, that part of why black people had such a hard time letting R. Kelly go was because of a false consciousness — perceiving black freedom to mean replicating whiteness in its ability to a wield power and domination freely, including in the degradation of black women. For many, this was the currency lost in bringing the darkness of an entertainer to light.

In 1920, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote an essay on “The Damnation of Women” that explored the singularity of black womanhood. White women were expected to be beautiful, treated with affection, and child-bearing. When they weren’t, their ugly or hurt or barrenness was “forgotten with studied silence.” To prevent revolt and compensate for their relegation to domestic life work and economic dependence, they were lavished with demonstrations of chivalry. This was the kind of treatment that assumed, even if illegible, beauty afforded. Then, came the fate of black women. Sweetly feminine, unswervingly loyal, and desperately earnest, but denied the same public deference and courtesy:

They were not beings, they were relations, and these relations were enfilmed [sic] with mystery and secrecy. We did not know the truth or believe it when we heard it. Motherhood! What was it? We did not know or greatly care. My mother and I were good chums. I liked her. After she was dead, I loved her with a fierce sense of personal loss.

After she was dead, she was beautiful.