Let’s reclaim our black beauty

While progressive people and organisations across this country – and the world – have mounted campaigns against racism, racists grow more audacious. The Dove advert that portrays black women turning white is one such example of audacity and arrogance.

It’s not only that the ad was outright racist by sending the message that black is inimical to beauty and that white is equivalent to it that should get us riled up. It is that Dove had the cheek to put it into an ad campaign.

Did not even one or several of members of their marketing team think there was something wrong with this picture?

The politicisation of identity, particularly race, has been a social phenomenon that has characterised humanity in modern time, and has been used to perpetrate injustice against some groups while conferring privileges on others.

It has also been used to designate standards of beauty and acceptability. Darker skinned groups have been for centuries relegated to aesthetic inferiority while paler skinned people have been dubbed the epitome of attractiveness.

And if we – black people – were to be honest with ourselves, we would acknowledge that what Dove did was to make explicit what has been and continues to be the acceptable standard of beauty. Our own notions of what beauty is, betray that we’ve bought into what Dove was selling in this ad. Among ourselves, we measure beauty based on where someone sits on the melanin scale. So-called yellow bones get preference over darker beauty.

Skin care manufacturers, not limited to Dove, have taken advantage of this pathology by launching skin-lightening ranges.

Many of these use euphemisms such as lightening blemishes or achieving a more even-toned skin to allude to the strongly held belief that paler is better.

The commercialisation of identity by companies such as Unilever, the manufacturers of Dove, would not flourish or find voice if there was no market. We need to liberate our own minds.

Much work has been done to promulgate the message of our common humanity. We have slogans like black is beautiful. Young black women have begun to embrace their natural beauty and heritage and this is seen in the resurgence of the Afro and the donning of the doek.

The struggle continues.