Black Women’s Obsession with Artist Statement:

The giclee images stem from an idea I’ve been mulling around in my head for decades. I think it started in the late 1980s when I was asked by a Black woman, upon noticing that I wore my hair natural, “Are you still wearing an Afro? Didn’t that go out with the 70s?”

I explained to her that my natural hair wasn’t a fad statement but a full embracing of my natural self. At that point, I realized the concept of Black beauty that had seen a short shift to an African aesthetic was more a fad for so many Black women, a style to be switched up when Black is Beautiful ran its course. We shifted back to an aesthetic rooted in Eurocentricity. Skin bleaching, hair straightening, and eye and body-altering all have provided tangible examples of the erasure of Blackness from our concept of beauty. Not surprisingly, 400+ years of cultural indoctrination have taken its toll on images of beauty in the Black community. The proximity to whiteness has become the gold standard in determining beauty, so Black women have been chasing that standard in a myriad of ways for generations. Enslavement and colonization produced a culture of self-hate that often manifests in ways sometimes not even perceptible by the Black community. I am exploring in At What Point Do We Disappear: Black Women’s Obsession with White Femininity how deeply ingrained this self-hate is, not only here in America but also in Africa, where women sport long, straight-haired wigs and bleach their skin in attempts to “lighten up” their complexion so that they can be more appealing to African men. This fascination with whiteness extends beyond simply skin color and hair texture. It manifests in obsessions with light-colored eyes, thin bodies, altered noses, and lips. All women, whatever their racial group, are constantly faced with standards of beauty that are unreachable thanks to media images replete with idealized models. But in the case of white women who aspire to attain this idealized beauty, they need not change the inessential group’s essential physical qualities to realize this beauty standard. Black women must reject their entire physical being if they are to attain this standard. Even the so-called natural movement cannot leave white femininity as we witness countless examples of how to have curls, not kinks, using various hair products. The message is clear: curls=desirable, beautiful; kinks=undesirable, ugly. I liken the inculcation of white femininity in the Black female psyche to the diminution of our souls. We erase aspects of ourselves in creating a beautiful aesthetic with many roots in white womanhood. At what point do we disappear