Just Us

by Claudia Rankine

  Another day I run into a white woman who tells me she feels bleaching her hair blond is a form of dissent. What are you pro-testing? I ask. My own normality, she says. She has tattoos that are not acceptable in professional spaces, and her black eyebrows and her blond ombré hairstyle make her seem edgy. Like punk rockers? I ask. Like Blondie? There is a kind of suburban-highlights blondness that she wants no part of in her thirties. I get that. I like her clarity, even as I think dissent is being misused.

  The question of boredom for brunettes is frequently offered as a reason to bleach one’s hair. To liven yourself up is to go blond. Blond hair as a corrective is now considered ordinary. So many have it, and others, men maybe, aren’t bored by it. This raises the question, Are white supremacist ideals ordinary aspirations? I try to consider the statement that blond hair is more attractive and, therefore, to bleach your hair is just good common sense.

  Social Darwinists, using false equivalents, steered the world with their adulation of Aryan types. Aryan ideals and their signifiers, such as blondness, were considered superior and were essential to the Nuremberg Race Laws.12 But are they essential to white, or black, women? Or to the Asian woman passing by me, with hair as blond as the hair of the white woman crossing the street ahead, both of whom have dark roots the shade of earth?

  A friend insists that attaching blondness to whiteness and white supremacy is ridiculous. It just looks better on most women, she claims. I am not white, so I try to inhabit her form of certainty. My friend’s unwillingness to interrogate why “better” and “blond” are married interests me. The flip side would be Black Is Beautiful. In Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah, the protagonist describes how her white employer insists on describing all black women as beautiful. The employer uses “beautiful” to mean black. Perhaps “blond hair is better” and “black is beautiful” are both forms of insistence, with the latter refusing to take hold in the public imagination because of racism, while the former appears to be good sense because of white supremacy. I don’t know. I’m simply exploring and not insisting. My friend makes a gesture with her hand indicating we are moving on.

  It might be true that many white women ombré their way toward blondness because the world treats them better and pays them more and marries them to richer spouses when they frame their faces with all that yellow.13 They don’t even bother coloring their roots or the back of their heads unless they are movie stars or news commentators or politicians or celebrity tennis players and their jobs are to be the objects of the desires of white men, and men of color, and white women, and women of color, and nonbinary people. This is reductive and not.

  The “not” refers to the fact that women might be dogged by the sneaking suspicion that they are failing at life without blondness. As a blond I became myself, so many say. Funny. If you say I want to be myself and the culture says the self that matters is blond, then oh, well—too bad—so be it. Shit. After a while, everyone is in agreement about who looks human, youthful, beautiful, human, and—did I say human?

  An article in the New York Times titled “Why So Many Asian-American Women Are Bleaching Their Hair Blond,” by Andrea Cheng, begins with her earliest memory of feeling marginalized by her Asian identity within the white American suburban community where she grew up: “The first time I was aware of my Asianness was when I asked my mother why I wasn’t blond. I was 5, and one of only a handful of Asian-Americans living in a predominantly white suburb in Michigan.” The desire to belong, to share in the uniformity of blondness, has propelled some Asians in the United States to spend twelve hours and more than four hundred dollars to become blond. Monthly touch-ups to maintain, Cheng adds, “can run upward of $200 a visit.” She writes that Asian women speak about having more confidence by breaking with an older generation and about the merits of experimentation. In the article, the shaping of a new Asian American identity is discussed by the professor erin Khuê Ninh. Whatever Ninh may or may not have said about race, the article does not bring up whiteness, though it is implied. The article concludes with a once-blond woman, speculating on Asians’ motivation for dyeing their hair, saying that perhaps it was a way to say, “See me.” It’s difficult not to hear that as a plea.14

  In a country that has traded so overtly in white superiority and white purity, perhaps white women are trapped inside the machinery that insists on the authenticity of whiteness. Do they feel trapped? Is the popularity of the ombré hairstyle, blond at the edges, blond only halfway, a way of partially freeing oneself while still engaging one’s entitlement with the vocabulary of whiteness, which doubles as a vocabulary of youthfulness for older women covering their gray?

  If dyeing your hair means you become someone else and this person makes you more yourself, is this a sign that whiteness is who you really are? Is whiteness vis-à-vis blondness a thing to own, a possession, property, something that you can be without if you wish to live? Is becoming blond a way to access or own whiteness as property? Is blondness an investment that increases one’s value by making one simultaneously mainstream and unique in a single process?

  The worry is that this particular hair color promises “the world” to these women. Can it be given?

  If white supremacy and antiblack racism remain fundamental structural modes of violence by which countries continue to govern, blondness might be one of our most passive and fluid modes of complicity. It points to white power and its values as desirable, whether the thought enters one’s head or not. As women say again and again how bleaching their hair lightens up their faces and makes them more embraceable by men and women alike; or talk about their edginess with their new blond cuts; or as nonwhites feel agency in owning a signifier of power they can’t otherwise own; or as the gray is held back and valued youthfulness is sought after; or as we reflect back to the world what it values, it becomes more and more difficult to pretend that our freedoms are not bound up with our complicity with the values of white supremacists.

  I see a young black woman, college age, on the street near my apartment. Since it was women like her who started this line of inquiry, I find myself staring. I tell her she looks incredible because she does. She flashes an unedited smile. I ask, I’m just curious, as a black woman why have you bleached your hair? What’s difficult to reconcile is the notion that a hair color can be a lifestyle choice, a bit of fun, but can also be in line with a long-standing commitment to white supremacy. Why not, she answers, and it’s not a question. I repeat the phrase back to her—Why not?—this time with its question mark, which makes it not a repetition exactly. The young woman has walked on, and I’m left behind pondering—perhaps this is how we free ourselves in order to free ourselves from confronting the history in all time. Why not.

  Taxi.

  NOTES

  1. Text I tried to remember what hooks said, and the phrase “come correct” came to mind, though I don’t think it’s from that essay.

  Fact Check Yes—the phrase does not appear in “Straightening Our Hair.”

  Notes and Sources hooks does use the phrase in her book Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem: “Self-responsibility means we are willing to ‘come correct’ and be accountable for our actions, for what we say and what we do.”

  2. Text mother-aunt-teacher-Michelle-Obama-moment-of-black-exceptional-straightened-shoulder-length-Madam-C. J. Walker-hair-beauty

  Notes and Sources Carina Spaulding, “From Brandy to Beyoncé: Celebrity and the Black Haircare Industry Since 1992,” in African American Culture and Society after Rodney King: Provocations and Protests, Progression and “Post-Racialism”: “The growth of websites dedicated to natural hair has led to what is becoming known as the ‘natural hair movement,’ thus rhetorically reflecting the size of its increasing popularity.”

  3. Text We had been told this in all our decades, though no one was talking especially to us, meaning, of course, to black women, since “all the women are white …”

  Fact Check Yes, phrase from title belo
w.

  Notes and Sources All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, edited by Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith.

  4. Text … I badly want us all to have a kind of metaperspective humor around all that goes into our scramble to escape what Fred Moten names “the false fight for our humanity” that has lasted four hundred years and is not the same thing as fighting for our civil rights.

  Notes and Sources An original source on Jamestown—“He brought not any thing but 20 and odd Negroes”—and a Washington Post feature. For a critique of 1619 to 1864 as the temporal landscape of North American slavery and alternative conceptualizations, see Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route, by Saidiya Hartman, and In the Wake, by Christina Sharpe: “The wake as the conceptual frame of and for living blackness in the diaspora in the still unfolding aftermaths of Atlantic chattel slavery.”

  5. Text I mentioned Fanon, whose psychoanalytic writings address internalized antiblack racism, to suggest I understood the professor’s worry was that these women were blindly filling up with self-hatred for their own black skin and natural hair.

  Fact Check Yes–quotes from Fanon on beauty, whiteness, and internalized racism below.

  Notes and Sources “I am white; in other words, I embody beauty and virtue, which have never been black. I am the color of day.” Black Skin White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox “All this whiteness that burns me. I sit down at the fire and became aware of my uniform. I had not seen it. It is indeed ugly. I stop there, for who can tell me what beauty is?” Black Skin White Masks, trans. Charles Markmann

  “I am a white man. For unconsciously I distrust what is black in me, that is, the whole of my being. I am a Negro-but of course I do not know it, simply because I am one.” Black Skin White Masks, trans. Charles Markmann

  6. Text … to the “paragon of female beauty”…

  Notes and Sources On the association between blond hair and beauty see Penny Howell Jolly’s chapter “The Ideal Woman” and to a lesser extent “Hair Power” in the book Hair: Untangling a Social History. See the first chapter for an account of the blond ideal through European and American history, beginning in the medieval period: “Two ideals concerning women’s hair have had remarkable longevity in western society: it should be long and its color should be blonde…. Italian Renaissance writers also established the blonde as the perfect female, her fairness expressive of innocence and purity. Of course this was a difficult ideal for predominantly dark-haired Italian women to attain. Even today in our country, with its wide-reaching ethnic mix, no more than 17 percent of women are natural blondes. Following the lead from classical and medieval sources favoring blondeness, the fourteenth-century poet Petrarch expressed the preference for fair hair that prevails through much of modern western tradition. Praising his beloved Laura, he writes of ‘Those tresses of gold, which ought to make the sun go filled with envy.’”

  7. Text … beblonden was the Old English word for “dyed.”

  Fact Check Maybe. Multiple sources say that the etymology of “blond” is uncertain, but a number mention beblonden as a possible origin word.

  Notes and Sources There are two major sources for Old English lexicography—Bosworth-Toller and the more recently published Dictionary of Old English from the University of Toronto.

  According to an email exchange with one scholar, “The word ‘beblonden’ … does not seem to occur in our Old English Corpus (which contains more than three million extant Old English words). Based on these observations, it seems that ‘beblonden,’ even though it is included in the Bosworth-Toller Dictionary, is one of the ghost words with no solid evidence to prove its existence.”

  8. Text … journalist Christina Cauterucci reported, “Just 2 percent of the world’s population and 5 percent of white people in the U.S. have blond hair, but 35 percent of female U.S. senators and 48 percent of female CEOs at S&P 500 companies are blond. Female university presidents are more likely to be blond, too.”

  Fact Check Maybe—quote is accurate, but see below.

  Notes and Sources Berdahl: “The percent of women senators and CEOs with blonde hair may have changed since we reported those statistics in 2016.”

  9. Text Despite the fact that she’s a natural brunette, not long after the public consumed her first films, she would come to personify the beauty and the misogynist stereotype of the empty-headed blond.

  Notes and Sources Both of her biographies say she dyed her hair in February 1946. Her first film appearance that I’ve found was in 1947.

  Lois Banner, Marilyn: “[Emmeline] Snively and the photographers also wanted Norma Jeane to dye her hair blonde, because they thought it would suit her pale skin better than her natural brown. But she wanted to remain natural, and she worried about the expense of having her hair straightened and dyed. In February 1946, a shampoo company considering her for an ad demanded that she dye her hair blonde and straighten it. When the photographer shooting the ad offered to pay for the process, Norma Jeane acquiesced.”

  10. Text … after World War II, in West Germany, sexy “Bild Lilli” dolls based on a popular cartoon character were sold in barbershops and bars.

  Notes and Sources See the essay by art historian Carol Ockman, “Barbie Meets Bouguereau: Constructing an Ideal Body for the Late Twentieth Century,” in The Barbie Chronicles: A Living Doll Turns Forty: “On a trip to Germany, Handler supposedly saw a doll called Bild Lilli, sold principally in smoke shops as a kind of three-dimensional pinup. Based on a comic strip character that appeared in the German newspaper Bild Zeitung, Bild Lilli had a ponytail, feet molded into high heels, and clothes for all occasions. The principal narrative of the comic shows Lilli, scantily clad, in situations were she is taking money from a man. Unlike Barbie, Bild Lilli was not made for children but for men, who displayed her on the dashboard of their cars and, more bizarre still, gave her to their girlfriends instead of flowers or chocolates. Handler decided to reinvent this pornographic caricature as the all-American girl.”

  New York Times: “Barbie’s inventor, Ruth Handler, a founder of Mattel, based the doll’s hourglass figure on Bild Lilli, a German doll that in turn was based on a foul-mouthed, promiscuous newspaper cartoon character.”

  11. Text Hillary Clinton, who, like many on Capitol Hill, was once a brunette, also went blond when she entered public life.

  Fact Check No, she was once a brunette but see below—it looks like she had brown hair while first lady of Arkansas.

  Notes and Sources See the Frontline video from her time as first lady of Arkansas, which describes her dyeing her hair under pressure partway through the Arkansas years (see timestamp 4:00).

  12. Text Aryan ideals and their signifiers, such as blondness, were considered superior and were essential to the Nuremberg Race Laws.

  Notes and Sources The Nuremberg Race Laws themselves do not mention phenotype but instead distinguish between those with so-called German or kindred blood and “Jews.” However, it is more than fair to say that this was accompanied by a propaganda campaign and on-the-ground practice that elevated “German” features.

  For the adoption of the ideal of blondness by Nazi race science, see the chapter “As Blond as Hitler” in Pat Shipman’s The Evolution of Racism. Shipman also cites a study that disproved the existence of a blond-haired blue-eyed majority in Germany: “Virchow’s survey showing that most Germans were not blond-haired and blue-eyed had negligible impact on this widespread conviction.”

  Potentially also of interest: the “Lebensborn” program in which men and women with “Aryan” qualities would be conscripted to produce more of those features. Mark Landler, “Results of Secret Nazi Breeding Program: Ordinary Folks,” the New York Times: “To be accepted into the Lebensborn, pregnant women had to have the right racial characteristics—blonde hair and blue eyes—prove that they had no genetic disorders, and be able to prove the identity of the father, who had to meet similar c
riteria. They had to swear fealty to Nazism, and were indoctrinated with Hitler’s ideology while they were in residence.”

  13. Text It might be true that many white women ombré their way toward blondness because the world treats them better and pays them more and marries them to richer spouses when they frame their faces with all that yellow.

  Fact Check Yes. Australian researcher David Johnston doesn’t mention the timeline that blonds marry on. They do report higher earnings and richer spouses, though. See below.

  Notes and Sources From Johnston, “Physical Appearance and Wages: Do Blondes Have More Fun?”: “Regression results indicate that blonde women receive a wage premium equivalent in size to the return for an extra year of schooling. A significant blondeness effect is also evident in the marriage market. Blonde women are no more or less likely to be married; but, their spouses’ wages are around 6% higher than the wages of other spouses.”

  14. Text … Asian American identity is discussed by the professor erin Khuê Ninh. Whatever Ninh may or may not have said about race, the article does not bring up whiteness, though it is implied. The article concludes with a once-blond woman, speculating on Asians’ motivation for dyeing their hair, saying that perhaps it was a way to say, “See me.” It’s difficult not to hear that as a plea.

  Fact Check Maybe. There are two professors mentioned in the article, neither of whom mention whiteness.

  Notes and Sources Although erin Khuê Ninh does not explicitly mention whiteness, her statement in the article could imply it: “We’re the group that’s always told to go back where we came from, and it’s partly because we have a very strong immigrant population, so we all get bundled in regardless of whether we’re fourth generation or first—to everyone, you look like a foreigner.”