Last night, there was an uproar on “Black Twitter” how Sammy Sosa bleached his skin. Yes, really first steroids, now this. Our concepts of beauty, whether it is male or female have been racialized for the longest time; it’s what colonialism does. The outrage over Sosa, and perhaps even singer Beyonce have us asking the age old questions about “Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?” and why does race have to be involved at all. Even recently at the London School of Economics, one “objective” psychologist has postulated that Black women are uglier than all others. And he wasn’t white either; he is Japanese.
When one starts talking about standards of beauty, especially as it pertains of racial hierarchy, that person stops doing science, leaves any sense of objectivity, and enters the realm of empire, subjectivity, and racism. On the beginning pages of Frantz Fanon‘s Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon argues that, “The black man wants to be white. The white man slaves to reach a human level.” While Fanon goes on to say that black men try to prove to the white man their equality in terms of being just as rational, I would add just as beautiful as well. It would seem to me that in terms of racial doctrine, if to be “fully human” is to accept Euro-centric definitions of what it means to be human, then divinization is nothing less than the black person’s effort to fully partake in whiteness.
Being caught in this Manichean vision of what beauty is, is the primary problem for what it means to be beautiful, to be human, to be divine. Perhaps this is why James Cone‘s proposition all those decades ago, that God is Black, is unbearable to most persons, because we can’t imagine God as anything that is not beautiful or affiliate divinity with ugliness. Beauty transcends what we can grasp, it is ever elusive, it is a mystery but at the same time, it is tangible.
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