The White Standard of Beauty

 

Tracing Back to the Ancient Times
The Follow-Up
The Grotesque Suggestion 
Entering to the Human Psyche
Results In Women and Their Cosmetics

The valorization of the white standard of beauty or the color white apexed to anything that is desirable goes as far back as to the ancient times.

In the 3^rd century BC, an Asiatic religion named Manicheism, founded by a Persian named Mani, was based on the struggle of the eternally conflicted principle of the Spiritual World of Light and the Evil World of Darkness. This is also known to be the Philosophical Dualism of Manicheism.

Taking from there, the concept of blackness gained the unfavorable connotations best implicated in phrase like, ‘’black is evil’’, ‘’black as sin’’, ‘’black as a witch’’ so on and so forth.

The ugliness of black was contrasted to the purity of white so much so as to make the color black not only a matter of pigmentation but also to acquire a moral connotation.

With this began the dominance of whites over the blacks. This is best exemplified in the justification of the whites upon the mater of slavery, which they claimed to be justified on the grounds that black race, ‘’by nature are incapable of freedom and marked out for slavery.’’

The white supremacy was further consolidated by the French diplomat and ethnologist, Count Joseph Arthur De Gobineau, also known to be ‘’The Father of Racism’’, who erected his belief into a theory in his, ‘’An Essay on the Inequality of Human Race’’, by saying: -

‘’I have no hesitation in regarding the white race as superior to all other races in beauty. Human groups are inequal in beauty and this inequality is rational, logical, permanent and indestructible.’’

This idea of inherent superiority of whites and other lighter complexions over blacks and darker complexions continue to exist till to date, not only in just western countries but in our own country as well.

Furthermore, black complexion is associated with thick lips, kinky hair and ugliness while white is with straighter hair, blue eyes and appealing looks.

This white notion of beauty is reaffirmed by Knight Dunlap, a professor at the prestigious John Hopkins University, Baltimore, who went on so far as to suggest strategies for ‘’racial betterment’’ for breeding more desirables and lesser undesirables.

Within the context of physical attractiveness, the white standard of beauty also gained political control and with the help of modern way of communication has succeeded in universalizing this concept in the psyche of people.

This is especially true in the case of African Americans who, according to W.E.B Du Bois, developed a double consciousness, in which they began to see themselves through the eyes of others, they began to measure their soul by the tape of a world who looks on them in amused, contempt and pity.

This contempt resulted in the internalization of the blacks about the standard of beauty they don’t fit in and this further resulted in self-loathing, psychological oppression, loss of identity even violence towards other blacks.

Again, the concept of physical beauty as virtue is, according to the Nobel Prize winning African American novelist, Toni Morrison, is the dumbest and most pernicious and destructive idea of the western world.

This standard of beauty, needless to say, damage women more than it does to men. For a woman of deeper complexion, having a lighter skin opens a possibility of braking away from her own skin and pass off as a white.

All these ideas and concepts of the glorification of a lighter complexion and revulsion towards darker tone has its crescendo in the establishment of the high scale cosmetic industry which cater to the frustration of the women of color by promising them the false ideals of lighter complexion, straighter hair and other desirable results.