Introducing ‘Black Beauty: Perspectives, Viewpoints and Representations’

Black American women are exposed to mainstream beauty standards, which may have implications for body image satisfaction. Given that beauty standards are often based on idealized depictions of White women’s physical features, scholars have called for body image research that extends beyond body type/weight (e.g., skin tone/hair) to better examine the experiences of Black women. In examining body image satisfaction and protective factors (e.g., ethnic identity), empirical research has yet to attend to these experiences at the intersection of race/ethnicity and gender. An online survey was used to examine whether womanist consciousness (WC) was a protective factor for Black American women ( N = 211). Findings indicated that after controlling for ethnic identity, higher womanist consciousness significantly predicted higher body satisfaction with historically racially defined features (e.g., skin tone/hair) and lower self-ideal discrepancy. Darker skin tone was linked to higher body importance and higher ethnic identity level. Last, increased frequency of wearing hair weaves was associated with lower body satisfaction while more frequently wearing Afrocentric hair styles/textures was associated with higher body satisfaction.

Dreams for Sale: Ideal Beauty in the Eyes of the Advertiser

Black beauty culture developed in the context of widespread disparagement of black men and women in images produced by whites, and black women’s exclusion from mainstream cultural institutions, such as beauty contests, which defined beauty standards on a national scale. Though mainstream media rarely represented black women as beautiful, black women’s beauty was valued within black communities. Moreover many black women used cosmetics, hair products and styling, and clothing to meet their communities’ standards for feminine appearance. At the beginning of the 20th century, the black press, which included newspapers, general magazines, and women’s magazines, showcased the beauty of black women. As early as the 1890s, black communities organized beauty contests that celebrated black women’s beauty and served as fora for debating definitions of black beauty. Still, generally, but not always, the black press and black women’s beauty pageants favored women with lighter skin tones, and many cosmetics firms that marketed to black women sold skin lighteners. The favoring of light skin was nonetheless debated and contested within black communities, especially during periods of heightened black political activism. In the 1910s and 1920s and later in the 1960s and 1970s, social movements fostered critiques of black aesthetics and beauty practices deemed Eurocentric. One focus of criticism was the widespread black practice of hair straightening—a critique that has produced an enduring association between hairstyles perceived as natural and racial pride. In the last decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, African migration and the transnational dissemination of information via the internet contributed to a creative proliferation of African American hairstyles. While such styles display hair textures associated with African American hair, and are celebrated as natural hairstyles, they generally require the use of hair products and may incorporate synthetic hair extensions. Beauty culture provided an important vehicle for African American entrepreneurship at a time when racial discrimination barred black women from other opportunities and most national cosmetics companies ignored black women. Black women’s beauty-culture business activities included beauticians who provided hair care in home settings and the extremely successful nationwide and international brand of hair- and skin-care products developed in the first two decades of the 20th century by Madam C. J. Walker. Hair-care shops provided important places for sharing information and community organizing. By the end of the 20th century, a few black-owned hair-care and cosmetics companies achieved broad markets and substantial profitability, but most declined or disappeared as they faced increased competition from or were purchased by larger white-owned corporations.

Dark skin shade and natural afro-hair are central in the politics of visibility, inclusion and exclusion within black anti-racist aesthetics. This article focuses on black beauty as performative through looking at how the discourse of dark skin equals black beauty is destabilized in the talk of ‘mixed race’ black women. A dark skin shade and natural afro hair become ambiguous signifiers as the women's talk leads to a mobility of black beauty. Their talk is thus an interception in which there can never be a definitive reading of black beauty while also pointing to the binaries of the black anti-racist aesthetics on which they draw. Thus, while women are rooted in racialized and racializing notions of beauty they expand the boundaries of the beautiful black woman's body. Black beauty as an undecidable resists binaries without ever constituting a third term and arises through the disidentification and shame of cultural melancholia.

This article provides a feminist critical discourse analysis (CDA) of ‘Women in Islam’ editorials in the Nation of Islam’s (NOI) journal, Muhammad Speaks, from 1961 to 1975, to explore the ways in which women in the NOI constructed Black beauty. I argue that the NOI provided Black women with a new definition of Black beauty that challenged the dominant controlling images of Black womanhood that marked them as ugly, unfeminine and hypersexual. Through the organization’s emphasis on disciplining women’s bodies through modesty, naturalness and cleanliness, I show how the NOI created a new racial hierarchy and standard of beauty that valorized some Black women, while contributing to the marginalization of other Black women. The article reveals the limitations of solely relying on beauty politics to provide liberation for all Black women.

Structural injustice and the Requirements of Beauty

Previous research, while limited in scope, has been instrumental in highlighting the unique experiences and relationships Black women have with their hair. This research often highlights the influence of Euro American beauty standards and negative experiences associated with concepts of ‘bad hair’ and ‘good hair.’ However, very few studies have attempted to investigate non-Euro American perspectives on Black women and their hair. To address this gap, I interviewed five Ugandan Black and mixed-race Black women using qualitative narrative analysis methods. While each participant shared distinct narratives in their interviews, their accounts are also found to be interconnected. Particularly, narratives collectively revealed a shared theme of internalised oppressive beliefs, including preferences for straight and long hair indicative of Euro American beauty standards. Additionally, participants consistently noted the lack of adequate media representation for hair types common among Ugandan women. Overall, this study contributes to the expanding body of literature on Black women and their hair by focusing on Ugandan women and capturing lived experiences that are more representative of Black women globally. Notably, this study sheds light on the influence of Uganda’s colonial history on prevailing beauty standards among women in the country.

Reviewed by: Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South by Blain Roberts Karen W. Tice (bio) Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South. By Blain Roberts. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Pp. x, 363. $39.95 cloth) Visitors traveling to Bell County, Kentucky, are greeted with an official road sign marking it as the home of the winner of the 2011 Miss Petite Princess Pageant as does neighboring Knox County, which honors its local 2010 Tiny Miss Kentucky winner. Beauty pageants are also especially popular on both black and white Kentucky college campuses and have been used to market not only their universities but also their localities’ contributions to coal, chicken, tobacco, and cotton. The southern states, in general, sponsor more local beauty competitions, on and off campus, that contribute to national beauty pageants such as the Miss America Pageant. Indeed, the westernized beauty contest prototype of individuated competition has been surprisingly durable and elastic, molded to fit an array of historical, [End Page 775] regional/national, economic, and cultural contexts, especially in the U.S. South. Throughout their long history, beauty pageants have been altered continuously in response to shifting idealizations of gendered, racialized, and class-based beauty, virtue, and respectability. They have been used to promote tourism, industry, civic and cultural pride; to resist stereotypes of racial and cultural backwardness; and to sell crops and commodities. Constructing values and norms for women’s bodies and behaviors through beauty pageantry has been a popular strategy to evaluate and showcase gendered, ethnic, racial, and class distinction; cultural citizenship; nationalism; and racial and regional identities. The popularity of southern beauty queens as regional icons of progress and economic modernization has resulted in many writers who label the region as the U.S. “pageant belt.” Blain Roberts’s book helps us understand the historical roots of the notion of the “pageant belt” South and how beauty practices have served as barometers of race, gender, segregation and integration, consumerism, rural/urban migration, and economic modernization throughout the U.S. South. Roberts defines beauty as an “expansive category that encompasses ideals, practices, rituals, labor, and even spaces,” and her work seeks “to show that the pursuit of beauty encompassed a range of activities, large and small, intimate and public,” including cosmetics, beauty and body contests, and hairdressing (p. 9). She argues that southern beauty politics are deeply racialized since “pursuing beauty became the way for white and black women to signify their commitment to their race, to literally embody it” (p. 11). She states that the South was regionally distinctive and thus probes how “southern beauty practices resulted from a fraught relationship between a conservative, largely rural region and the rest of the nation.” Although many scholars have written about race, beauty pageants, black colleges and respectability, hairdressing, and cosmetics, Roberts furthers this conversation in her innovative account of the roles of home demonstration agents and agricultural trade boards in furthering “indigenous rural practices into forums for the evaluation [End Page 776] of women’s bodies,” when “a market economy transformed the South into a region of profit-oriented commercial farming” (p. 106). She shows how the growing acceptance of the public evaluation of women’s bodies—and the importance of cultivating habits based on not only economy and thrift but also fashion, respectability, and the emergent aesthetics of urban cosmopolitanism in dress and deportment—augmented southern beauty rituals. She highlights the role of baby shows, health pageants, 4-H clubs, dress revues, sewing classes, “crop beauty competitions,” and agricultural fairs as the latter shifted its emphasis from “growing better tomatoes to growing better bodies” in the transformation of not only beauty practices but the economic and cultural modernization of the South (p. 119). Roberts additionally analyzes how the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and civil rights culture were expressed in southern women’s beauty practices, including the differing political investments and complexities that middle-class and rural black women faced in their beauty practices and the use of cosmetics to champion black capabilities, assert middle-class black aesthetics, build racial solidarities, and battle white racism. Despite her claim...

Neste artigo visa-se tratar sobre as interações entre novas mercadorias de consumo e a beleza negra, mais especificamente o cabelo crespo. Desta maneira, procura-se observar e analisar a possível construção da identidade estética das mulheres negras. Através de uma etnografia digital em canais do Youtube que tratam sobre cabelos crespos, busca-se compreender a relação entre o consumo de produtos para o cabelo crespo e a construção de uma beleza negra pelas mulheres negras. O intuito de fazer uma etnografia digital, que se relaciona também a militância fora das redes sociais, é de compreender os usos dos produtos, além das relações entre as mulheres negras, as mídias, e as novas mercadorias estéticas, a fim de perceber possíveis espaços de visibilidade para a beleza negra através do consumo. Assim, através das youtubers afirma-se uma luta para visibilidade e inclusão da mulher negra através da beleza como pauta política e atual que vai além do consumo e além da esfera digital.

Black women’s beauty experiences are deeply connected to their social and political locations. This study uses photo-elicitation and semi-structured interviewing with Black women in the United States to explore how they understand and express Black beauty. Participants’ embodied sense-making around beauty is grouped into three themes: ‘embodied resistance’, ‘Black feminisms and intersectionality’ and ‘Black pan-ethnicity’. Together, their insights reveal a new perspective on the meaning of Black beauty that I theorize as ‘ontological beauty’. Ontological beauty conceptualizes beauty as the culmination of a number of factors related to the nature of existence and being human. Further, ontological beauty can be applied to the body, fashion, aesthetics and other elements of embodiment. Ultimately, notions of Black beauty come into clearer legibility as inseparable from Black social and political experiences, locations and positionalities.

Previous work discussing Black beauty has tended to concentrate on Black women's search for white beauty as a consequence of racialization. Without denying either the continuation of such aesthetics or their enduring power, this book uncovers the cracks in this hegemonic Black beauty. Drawing on detailed ethnographic research amongst British women of Caribbean heritage, this volume pursues a broad discussion of beauty within the Black diaspora contexts of the Caribbean, the UK, the United States and Latin America through different historical periods to the present day. With a unique exploration of beauty, race and identity politics, the author reveals how Black women themselves speak about, negotiate, inhabit, work on and perform Black beauty. As such, it will appeal not only to sociologists, but anyone working in the fields of race, ethnicity and post-colonial thought, feminism and the sociology of the body.


 This study aimed to amplify Black women faculty’s recommendations for broadening participation of the next generation of Black girls and women as they matriculate from primary school into advanced graduate degrees (P-20) in computing education (CE). As tenure-track faculty, these transformative women have attained the highest degree (i.e., Ph.D.) in postsecondary CE in the United States (US). To govern the knowledge validation process, I utilized Afrocentric feminist epistemology undergirded by critical race theory and Black feminist thought. Upon conducting thematic analysis, I identified four emergent themes to broaden participation of Black girls and women in computing: 1) improve access, quality, and early exposure to CE, 2) create equitable and equal spaces for Black girls and women, 3) confront unconscious biases of teachers and faculty, and 4) provide mentoring opportunities. As an emerging Black woman scholar, with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and 15 years of industry experience, I had a “unique angle of vision” to interpret and inform this study’s findings. This study builds upon limited knowledge about interventions needed to support Black girls and women in US P-20 computing education.

This study explores the shopping experience of Black millennial women, particularly in purchasing hair products, and their perception of mainstream retailers’ commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Given the historical context of both blatant and subtle racism in retail spaces, these experiences can contribute to feelings of disempowerment. As major corporations have increasingly promoted DEI commitments, a critical gap remains in how marginalized groups, notably Black women, perceive and experience these efforts. By centring the narratives of professional Black millennial women, this study attempts to grasp the internal and external factors behind their shopping intentions and experiences, focusing on their shopping experience for hair products due to their unique and specialized significance in Black women’s lives. Using a phenomenological approach grounded in critical race theory and intersectionality, we discover how retailers’ DEI performances influence Black millennial women’s experiences in mainstream retail spaces.

While the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was felt widely, for Black communities – particularly in the US and Britain – it was felt more severely. This was compounded by another deadly pandemic that was devastating Black communities and evidenced by the re-emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement after the murder of George Floyd. Parallels can be drawn between the deadly COVID-19 virus and the anti-Black systemic racism fuelling the existence of the Black Lives Matter movement – which both disproportionately kill Black people. Therefore, many within these communities are living in a “pandemic within a pandemic”. Still, the focus on Black boys and men continued the parallels between both pandemics, failing to include the plight of Black girls and women who are also enduring the same impact as their Black male counterparts. This paper draws upon previous doctoral research about the educational journeys and experiences of Black British women graduates in light of the educational implications of the “pandemic within a pandemic” for this group. Framed by Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice (BTP) within the context of Black Feminist Epistemology (BFE), it highlights that Black women and girls have to bear an unfair “burden of care” not only for themselves but for others too. Lastly, it will argue that now more than ever, due to the “pandemic within a pandemic”, as a society we all need to be checkin’ for Black girls and women as they have been silently suffering, navigating and overcoming for far too long.

This study examines Black doctoral women’s experiences with gendered racial microaggressions in agricultural science departments at Historically White Institutions. Gendered racial microaggressions are subtle everyday expressions of oppression due to one’s race and gender, and have been used to subordinate Black women in society. Further, they have been linked to increased psychological distress, increased depressive symptoms, and lowered self-esteem. This study uses Critical Race Theory and Critical Race Feminism as theoretical lenses and critical narrative inquiry as methodology. Findings show that Black women experienced assumptions in communication style and beauty, the Angry Black Woman stereotype, and silencing and marginalization to avoid gendered racial microaggressions. Participants’ coping strategies, study implications, and directions for future research are discussed.