Black skin, kinky hair: why the need to alter them?

Here is a thought-provoking idea from Juliette SMERALDA, a Martinican sociologist, concerning our relationship with kinky hair and black skin and the consequences on our self-perception as Black women, which might lead us to relax our hair and, for some, to want to appear "whiter" than they are... What do you think?

"3.2 Hair, epidermal, and morphological transformations: "strategies" questioned

The sociologist traces a history of the African comb, African hairstyles, and methods of modifying hair and skin structure and color. Hair, epidermal, and even morphological transformations originated in the United States: "the fact that hair relaxers and depigmenting agents for Black people appeared in the United States is no coincidence: there is a link between the situation in this country, which has never managed to tolerate its Black minority, and the appearance of these procedures which, like the widely initiated biological dilution, quite quickly overcome the most resistant Negroid features..." (p. 65). These transformations correspond to "the strategy of denaturing (relaxing and bleaching)" (p. 86), in Pain, since they are "mimetic practices inspired by the white Caucasian model" (p. 152):

• kinky/curly hair: "It would spontaneously give the impression of being disheveled, untamed, and "dirty." It therefore seems to create disorder when worn in its natural state, and by women. It is then the object of mockery and exclusion which wearers are not always able to cope with, especially when it comes to integrating into a peer group and feeling that they exist among them. Getting rid of hair-as-stigma would therefore have become a leitmotif to which few women offer real resistance." (p. 62) - "a negative (over)representation of kinky hair" (p. 69) - "the painful and irreversible history" (p. 103) of kinky hair - "relaxing one's hair is proof of one's ability to become a socially "adapted" subject in an environment now deeply shaped by the Western model" (p. 151) - "through the practice of relaxing, it is a matter of removing hair from the tyranny of a gaze that is socially penalizing. Kinky being synonymous with disgrace, imperfection, rurality, lack of refinement, etc., this hair must disappear behind a straightening." (p. 153)
• black skin: "a rigorous instrumentalization of skin color" (p. 85) - "to fit the prevailing ideal, no sacrifice is too great, no pain unbearable" (p. 90) – skin "subjected to characteristic forms of aggression" (p. 131) – "people who get rid of this asset attack the stratum corneum (of the epidermis), which protects them from UV radiation and thus expose themselves to pathologies that can lead to death." (p. 131)
• the body: Rhinoplasty to "tame the flat nose and its round tip, in order to give the unfortunate wearer a "real" nose, worthy of the name: a pointed nose" (p. 170) – "thinning" (p. 170) of the lips."

For more information, see "Potomitan" and "NoireôNaturel", News section.