CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Black women's beauty and fashion are complex, meaningful acts, deliberate strategies for engaging with the world that make bold statements about identity, political resistance and empowerment, Black women said in a recent study.
Researcher Brittney Miles , a sociology professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, interviewed 39 Black women about their fashion and beauty practices, beliefs and experiences. The women were a diverse group, representing various Black cultures and nine ethnicities, as well as differing gender expressions and sexual orientations. Despite these differences and their wide range of ages — from 19 to 56 — when asked to define the concept "Black beauty," all of them "talked about what it meant to show up in a world that wants to render you invisible," Miles said.
The participants also shared the belief that Black political history and resistance to injustice were intricately intertwined with their fashion and beauty, "reframing these mundane practices as critical conversations," Miles wrote.
"Black beauty has always been politically contentious," said Miles, who conducted the research during her doctoral studies at the University of Cincinnati. "Historically, beauty standards have been used to reinforce social hierarchies and maintain power structures, marginalizing people who don't fit the societal standards."
However, Black women have a rich legacy of strategically using their bodies, beauty practices and adornment to advocate for social change — a practice called "embodied resistance," she said.
Acts of embodied resistance were documented as far back as the late 1700s when free Black women in the U.S. rebelled against tignon laws — public policies that sought to undermine these women's social status, shame and control them by requiring that they cover their hair with headcloths like those of enslaved women. As acts of resistance, free Black women created ornate, beautiful headwraps that they intricately adorned with jewels and feathers instead, making clever fashion statements that revealed their wealth, social status and creativity, according to the study and the New York Historical website.
Published in the journal Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty, the study's findings were based on interviews with 39 Black women and a research method called photo elicitation, in which the individuals provided photos of themselves and discussed their significance. Miles provided 11 prompts that she categorized and asked each woman to submit up to three photos of herself for each one — such as "a photo of you in girlhood" and "a photo of you at your most beautiful" — but the primary focus was "a photo that captures your Black identity."
Many of the women submitted photos of themselves at protests or wearing shirts with political messages, Miles said. In one of these photos, a woman is standing on a city street with police officers and their vehicles in the background. The woman has one fist raised in a "Black power" gesture and is wearing a t-shirt with the message: "Hope I don't get killed for being Black today."
In another photo, the slogan on the woman's shirt references the Black national anthem — "My ancestors didn't lift every voice for me to be silent" — a declaration that links her activism with cultural traditions of resistance.
In these two photos, the women wear Kente garments — brightly colored African fabrics — that symbolize Black panethnicity and strategic and political solidarity with others across various Black cultural subgroups, according to the study.
"There's this genealogy of thought that audacious aesthetics such as wearing beads, feathers and big hair are strategies for taking up space in the world as part of our cultural politic," Miles said. "And that (was another facet of) Black panethnicity, shaping how these women understood what Black beauty is."
Miles said she was prompted to explore Black women's views on beauty after interviewing a group of high school girls about their experiences with body policing — rules on personal attire and grooming that often marginalize Black students. As the interview began, the girls passed around a tube of lip gloss for each girl to apply "and I reflected in my notes on how that lip gloss was a kind of armor where it literally made the truth come out easier for them as they indicted these systems and people who were supposed to care for them. As they called out these horrible interactions in their schools, they used lip gloss as a strength to be able to facilitate that process of telling their stories," Miles said.
Likewise, women in the current study described their experiences with body and beauty policing by parents, relatives and romantic partners, "who told them stories or created clear, very stark boundaries about what it means to exist in the world and to be beautiful and attractive," Miles said.
These women also recalled similar incidents with employers or college officials, who told them that their bright clothing, big jewelry or natural hair were "too loud" or unprofessional.
"One girl say she'd make her afro as big as possible every time she was going into a room with new people because she wanted them to reckon with her presence," Miles said. "She was younger than most people in her field, and she wanted to make it unapologetic that she was there and her voice mattered. Other participants talked about how they wore wigs and clothes that felt uncomfortable because they felt like that was what was expected of them, and they shrunk themselves to survive."
Women in the study recalled iconic photos from significant cultural inflection points such as the Civil Rights Movement "and described the beauty in Black people existing in spite of anti-Blackness and misogynoir," a term that refers to the distinct combination of hatred, racism and misogyny directed toward Black women.
Black feminist scholars such as Angela Davis, along with Mikki Kendall, the author of the book "Hood Feminism," were highly influential on participants' self-concepts and their thinking about Blackness and beauty, Miles found.
"Participants talked a lot about Black women writers and feminist scholars who — in the face of a world that's told them many times that to be beautiful is to be thin, white, blonde and blue eyed — helped them reimagine and rearticulate what beauty was. And that totally reframed these women's relationship to beauty and served as the basis for how they went on to define Black beauty," Miles said.
The study is part of a larger book project in which Miles is exploring "girlhood beauty experiences, adult beauty practices and politics, and how adult women's reflections on girlhood change how they move through the present and maybe even the future," she said.
"This is something that all of us are negotiating relative to these ideas that are imposed upon us and that very few of us can find comfort in," Miles said. "We all are trying to squeeze (past) our discomfort to see ourselves as beautiful. And sometimes the world can make that very hard."
The research was funded by the Kunz Center for Social Research and a Charles Phelps Taft Graduate Enrichment Grant at the University of Cincinnati.
