Beauty Beheld

So let me start this essay with the false premise that the world needs yet another artist expressing his thoughts on beauty…it does not. There, I have gotten that out of the way. In a time where people of my skin color are under attack from systems,  (government and pop culture itself) investigating what society views as beautiful and desired is noteworthy. therefore I must protest. Resistance must take whatever form you practice and me being a writer, here I go. Just as an experiment, I did a google search of the word beauty, and this is what I got: 

As I expected, a White/European normative standard of beauty. That being straight hair, thin noses that come to a point, and white/light skin. This google search tells you that beauty is female and defintiely NOT black. Now on down the page there were a FEW people of color, however they still tended to be accessorized by whiteness. Meaning they have straight hair, usually light skin for a person of color etc. If they are dark skinned the black person Google found was exoticized for the white gaze:

Moving forward I decided to search male beauty and these images popped up at the top of the image search

So basically the same, white, thin, European standards of beauty for men also. I then went one more step and googled another intersection of mine, “gay male beauty.”

As you can see I got pretty much the same results, but more muscular and more body shots than simply faces when I googled male beauty. So what does all this tell me? Well of course it could mean many things, but according to Google image search beauty is white, male beauty is white and gay male beauty is white and muscular. There is an Asian male pictured here, but he has white features, (straight/non kinky hair, thin pointy nose, light skin etc)  so the anti blackness remains intact. It visually reads, “you aint white Asian guy, but you don’t have black features so you’re white adjacent and in the beauty club.” So where does this leave the rest of us? The diagnosis of the problem is perfectly expressed by Beyoncé in her latest Vogue interview, “Until there is a mosaic of perspectives coming from different ethnicities behind the lens, we will continue to have a narrow approach and view of what the world actually looks like.” The fact that Beyonce was the catalyst for the marquee publication to hire its first black photographer in its 126 year history (1892) (Meet Tyler Mitchell) embodies how we must address this issue.

Be black, be faggoty, be everything that you uniquely are, as loud as you can, and create the safe spaces that are being denied us IN FRONT of the oppressor.

Vogue sought out Beyonce for profit, being the worldwide superstar that she is, and she took that opportunity to leverage that privilege into access for a black photographer who would most likely never have gotten that chance to shoot for Vogue otherwise. His talent was never the question, but getting a seat at the table has everything to do with access and the white gatekeepers intend on keeping us minorities seeing their vision. That being whiteness. Beyonce disrupted that narrative by hiring blackness to be the hands that direct the lens this time. Kudos Beyonce, and may we all follow suit.