Black Beauty Standards
european beauty standards
The "black is beautiful" movement has done much to remind us that black beauty standardsshould be respected and loved as much as any other skin color. And here is a profound truth (and by profound truth I mean a truth that applies to all cultures, to all people throughout the ages, in other words, it doesn't change according to one social whim or another) - we're all beautiful, sacred beings, regardless of our body size or shape or outward color. I can agree with these standards of beauty!
Black beauty standards in rural Africa
I grew up as a white rural girl in apartheid South Africa - a country where the majority of the population is black. When I returned home from live-in school for the getaways and was welcomed by Violet, who enclosed me in her huge dark arms and murmured with satisfaction, "Utyebile kakulu Goku!" In English, she told me that I was now very fat. I was devastated - after all, I had gained weight, but I wanted so badly to be thin. It would be years before I realized that Violet was complimenting me - her black beauty standards were very different from mine.
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| beauty standards in african countries |
In Violet's rural Xhosa culture of the 1970s, when she made that comment, it was part of the beauty standards that 'fat is beautiful" In her culture, being fat was considered desirable and beautiful. It meant: you were healthy, and you didn't have AIDS. It meant you were fertile, sexy, and feminine enough to attract a good husband - one wealthy enough to provide well. It implied you were adequately affluent to eat well.
The media and black beauty standards
What I remember most about Violet (and the other black women I came in contact with on a daily basis) was that they never questioned that black was beautiful - they weren't immersed in the mainstream Western media that categorizes skin colors and body sizes as supposedly more valuable and worthy the whiter and thinner you're.
How can a certain skin color or body size or shape determine a person's worth? Why would our great Creator create one race or culture as more sacred than another? These are all just nonsensical beauty standards invented by misguided people.
Purple was my black beauty standard
I can still clearly see Violet's ebony skin - it had a glow to it that was almost iridescent. And when she smiled(which was often), she had a row of amazingly white teeth, all without the latest teeth whiteners. They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder - I loved Violet's blackness. White wouldn't have suited her. I loved the way she walked, tall and proud. She could balance a bucket of water on her head and walk as gracefully as a dancer.
And she made me laugh - like the time she ran into me sunbathing and made fun of the fact that I liked black so much that I was trying to get the sun to help me. And when I started getting a perm and she asked me why I wanted curly hair like hers.
Here's what I find so sensible about rural black African women. First, they don't have a scale they bounce up and down on that determines their mood for the day. They don't flock to stores that are bursting at the seams to buy the latest one-size-fits-all fashions. They don't have mirrors lying to them that they're fat and ugly. They don't spend hours with magazines and television constantly bombarding them with the message that only a certain shape thin is beautiful. Their beauty standards are much more realistic.
Beauty standards can determine our stress levels
Instead, they live in harmony with the rhythm of the seasons and their bodies. Violet didn't have the constant emotional stress of living in a large body that was constantly insulted, stigmatized, hated, or rejected, either by herself or others. This meant that her parasympathetic nervous system wasn't constantly releasing stress chemicals (such as norepinephrine, epinephrine, and cortisol) into her bloodstream which would increase her health risk.
Interestingly, the 1983 official medical report of the Royal College of Physicians noted that while rural black South African women had a high prevalence of obesity, it was without the apparently inevitable poor morbidity and mortality. Makes you think about the importance of living in tune with natural rhythms rather than striving to be thin - doesn't it?
Because they're immersed in their "big is beautiful" beauty standards, they feel good about their bodies. In this way, they constantly flood their biological system with life-sustaining emotional molecules (like endorphins) that boost their immune system and health.
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