Pretty Privilege is Colorism Remixed
Welcome to This Black-Ass Life! This week, we want to talk about pretty privilege and the retiring of the Black aesthetic. Maybe it’s Maybelline! Or thinness, and proximity to whiteness!
I. The Facts
Janet Mock helped thrust the concept of pretty privilege into the zeitgeist with this piece in Allure.
Pretty privilege is the association of beauty with talent, intelligence, social success and health.
What is overlooked in discussions of pretty privilege are the issues Janet Mock raises in her piece. She talks about cisnormative standards of beauty affecting how trans people are perceived. Janet goes on to discuss how colorism bends in her favor as an ethnically ambiguous person and the anti-fatness she benefits from as someone who is thin.
As we have discussed in this newsletter many times, ableism, colorism, cisnormative standards, anti-fatness, hair texturism - these things cannot exist without … you guessed it! White supremacy!
Why does it matter?
We cannot address pretty privilege or why some people feel unpretty (shout out to TLC) without acknowledging the socio-political issues inherent to defining the concept of attractiveness. When someone is called conventionally attractive, are we asking by whose convention?!
Especially in regards to women, the conventions are constantly shifting with bodies being commodities. In the past two centuries alone, the western beauty standard has gone back and forth from ultra skinny (the 1920s, 1960s, 1990s) to curvy, not the fat kind but the flat tummy kind (late 1800s, 1950s, 2010s).
With the K*rd*sh**ns ALLEGEDLY reversing their BBLS (video; video), we are moving away from the decade-long Blackness as aesthetic to another ultra-slim era. Kim’s move in particular coincides with her move to respectability (law degrees, White House invites, etc).
The overall cultural shift from the Black aesthetic cannot be divorced from our current political reality. We live in a world where white supremacy has gone mainstream with hate crimes rising and a strategic backward shift in whatever progress has been achieved.
The de-n*gg*fication of the beauty and cultural ideal we see is then in clear lockstep with a more emboldened conservative white populace. Take them braids out your head, take that fat off your ass, because it’s Aryan-time, baby! Whiteness is back and the girls are reveling, a few examples:
White girls on Tiktok are announcing their retirement from being “Ghetto Hot Cheeto Girls.”
Pop stars seem to be putting down the self tanner.
Awkwafina’s disappearing blaccent.
BBL removals and the introduction of the so-called “Country Club” BBL.
The rise in the celebration and cultural alignment with the Catholic church, the OG imperialist institution. Catholic cosplay is so damn weird.
Colonizer-core, sorry, we mean, Cottagecore.
What can my Black ass do?
Challenge the notion of “pretty” itself and how it’s narrowly defined.
It’s okay to be mad about shit like this. Even though we might see fewer people appropriating Blackness, this shit is still gross and insidious. After years of profiting from and appropriating the body type that many Black people possess, our beauty regime and our culture, the commodification of especially Black women for playplay and money is upsetting.
Read Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body Is Not An Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love.
Support Imani Barbarin on patreon, who writes and creates content around disability, specifically Black disability.
Check out our newsletters on anti-fatness (“Kiss My Fat Black Ass” - Tyra Banks), colorism (The plight of the light) and plastic surgery (Y’all getting BBLS?).
II. Other Things
Black-ass happenings
Be safe out here. Heat and stressed grids are making dangerous power outages more likely.
Look how people showed out for Bey’s Renaissance party.
Speaking of Renaissance, read this on the erasure of Black queer elders and why they must be honored.
This is not a drill! Angelica Ross will be Roxie Hart in Chicago on Broadway.
Shea Couleé will be in Marvel’s Ironheart. A winner in every sense.
Leave unmarried Black women alone. We tired. We have Tracee Ellis Ross being pestered about marriage. Also, whatever the NYTimes vow section was thinking when publishing this “love story” about a man in his 40s who set up a date in which only he ate (KFC?) in the Popeyes parking lot. Again, please leave us. In the words of Kimberly Nicole Foster, most hetero marriages are simply not bringing joy, “y’all don’t make being a wife look fun. You brag about it, but you don’t make it look like it’s a good time.”
Our Black-Ass song(s) of the week (Jumoke):
After her incredibly insensitive and cruel cash grab, someone said Jackie Aina should sit in a corner and listen to afrobeat. I couldn’t agree more. Nigerian-Americans are an annoying and insufferable bunch. From Wendy “four degrees” Osefo to the respectability politics of blockhead Emmanuel Acho to the anti-Black-American racism of Cynthia Erivo, we need to have a family meeting cause we are moving real silly and shifty. It’s all very embarrazzing. Anyways, listen to Tiwa, eat your Jollof and stop being weird.
Things we look forward to / don't look forward to:
I (Jumoke) look forward to the end of summer shenanigans.
I (Mitu) look forward to Honey & Spice by Bolu Babalola, who wrote our FAVORITE read of last year, Love In Color.
lll. Text From A Black-Ass Baby
Meet the youngest and newest member of the hive (thank you Ariel for this gift of a video)!
Stay Black, have a snack and take a nap today. We'll hit your inbox next on August 22.