Notes on:
Forum: “From Hottentot Venus to the White House: Black Women on Beauty and Bodies,” Open Center, New York City
Musical: “Memphis,” Broadway, New York City
10/24/09

                      “In order to change things, we need a script,” said Veronica Webb, now a television host and, in 1990 the first black woman to get a cosmetics endorsement contract with a major American company, Revlon.

Webb was talking about ways to make personal beauty — and the beauty industry — a place of adventure and accomplishment for black women. She was speaking at a forum called “From Hottentot Venus to the White House: Black Women on Beauty and Bodies.” Most of the attendees were black women. The natural hair-to-perm ratio was at least 3 to 1; the audience culturally savvy, professional, highly educated, and political. The forum didn’t quite provide a script, but it did serve as a check-in, a moment where people could have a sophisticated dialogue, check in with old friends, and meet new people of like minds.

Tricia Rose, the chair of Africana Studies at Brown University and author of books including the seminal hip hop academic text “Black Noise” and her new book “The Hip Hop Wars,” broke down the politics of beauty and culture. She started out by telling the story of the “Venus Hottentot,” or Saartjie Bartman, a woman of the Khoisan tribe/ethnic group who was kidnapped from South Africa and taken to Europe to be part of a freak show. Her high and wide buttocks were thought to indicate sexual depravity. Since the era of Bartman, some strains of European and American culture have painted black womens’ beauty as emblematic of not just difference but moral decay. Professor Rose used this cultural grounding, among other things, to talk about why activists in the 1960s used beauty and culture as well as politics as a space of revolution. “It wasn’t just laws and instututions” that had to change, but the idea “that we had to be as close to white as possible. Out of that comes the movement to say that `Black Is Beautiful’. As this was happening, women were sporting wicked ‘fros that defied gravity. But a lot of Sisters, particularly those who were in their twenties in the sixties, say that brothers were still really interested in the women with the perms and the white women with the straight hair. Women,” Rose said, “are in a bind.”

In fact, many of the audience members commented on the documentary “Good Hair” by Chris Rock. Many people hadn’t seen the movie, and those who had were often critical. WBAI radio host Esther Armah said she found some parts of the movie funny, yet, “my concern with `Good Hair’ is that it it lacks historical context about why black women choose to relax their hair.
It made it looked like we are literally inventive of our own pathology… that we are crazy [just] because we are crazy”– without taking into consideration the preference that white society or black men may express for straight, long hair. “I felt black women felt humiliated,” Armah said.

People then got into a rousing debate as to whether and how much to critique Chris Rock for the movie. Professor Rose, who had not seen the movie, said that supporting any black artist or public figure had to be framed in a context of “tranformational love”–which includes critique–and not just “affirmational love.” “You must have a loyalty not just to a phenotype but to a community that produces justice.” In other words, don’t get caught up with supporting black people just because they’re black, but do feel like you have the right to critique black works of art and actions in order to push people to the next level. “We do not want to hate chris rock, but we want to hold him responsible” for historical context.

One of the most interesting conversations within the forum was about storytelling and whether we over-personalize narratives about black life. Moderator Michaela Angela Davis of BET said that “if you don’t address our story [in a movie or other cultural expression], people are mad.” They see so few expressions of black life that they judge every one stringently. “We need to tell more stories,” she said.

One of the many lyrical side-conversations in the forum was when Davis talked about the turn in music culture towards misogyny, and how that shifted the idea of blackness as a cultural safe space. “We were safe inside our music,” she said. “We’d been winning since field songs. When we started to get molested inside of our own music, it was particularly painful.”

Davis then turned to the lessons Veronica Webb could offer from her supermodeling years. Webb told a tale of beauty as innovation and self-reliance. She grew up in a home where her mother made a lot of her clothes. “We would go to Jo-Ann Fabrics and spend cold evenings doing fittings and knitting. Coming from the east side of Detroit, which was Motown, and then stepping into New York in its Run-D-MC time, its Russell Simmons time, was Motown all over again,” she says. Webb came to New York and found work not just as a model, but as a muse for legendary designers including Karl Lagerfeld and Azzedine Alaia. (Alaia is a Tunisian-born designer whose clothes have been worn by First Lady Michelle Obama, as well as the French First Lady.)

“Fashion…creates an interesting conversation. The job of the model is to bring that alive,” she said. But the beginning of her path was bumpy for practical reasons: racial prejudice on the business side of fashion, and a lack of resources in the hair and makeup department end of the industry for women of color.

“When it got to be difficult and humiliating was on the business end of it,” she says. “After weeks and weeks of working with designers and photographers… the designer or photographer says I want to to put them in the ads and the business person says we don’t want them in the ads. One of my first experiences was being cancelled off of a job for a magazine cover because the person couldn’t do my hair and there was no one who could do my hair. I couldn’t get `the look’ and I took it very personally. Very often you would go to work and there would be no foundation for you. you’d be put in the corner because your look couldn’t come together.”

The upside? Black models stuck together and “we figured out how to do it ourselves.” Black makeup and hair artists including Sam Fine and Oscar James also broke into the mainstream of the industry at the time black models were achieving big gains, like Webb’s contract with Revlon to promote a black women’s makeup line called “Colorstyle.” She smiled. “Can you believe that name?”

“i was just that light-skinned wedge into the white world,” said Webb. “And I knew I would begin to change things. Within five years, Tyra had a cosmetics contract. Now, Queen Latifah has a cosmetics contract.”

Webb, who complimented her runway years with writing and acting, says that fashion should be about creating power, not about believing power can come just by buying things. “Style is attracting attention to you in a positive way by putting together the things that you love.” One of the things that attracted her to modeling was a practical look at the power dynamics of street harassment, and the way men would talk to women, particularly ones they felt looked sexual or unguarded. “Models had respect or autonomy. And no one was speaking to them in a way that was denigrating. I loved that you could be beautiful and open and feminine and not pay a high price for it,” she said.

Another perspective on the business of beauty came from Estee Lauder executive Susan Akkad, who told the story of the company’s namesake. Estee Lauder was born Josephine Esther Mentzer, a New Yorker whose parents immigrated from Hungary. She started selling cosmetics door to door. Says Akkad, “At a time when women didn’t have a lot of options… she ropes in her son to help her, she ropes in her husband to help her…. There are a lot of things in this woman’s story that I can relate to.”

Akkad also told the story of Fashion Fair cosmetics, which began as an outgrowth of Ebony magazine. (Ebony, by the way, may well be for sale.) “People likemy mom and my grandmother were big fans of Fashion Fair not just because they could get their shade matched,” says Akkad, but because this was by black people for black people. I didn’t relate to fashion fair. I didn’t want to go to the black counter to get my makeup. So I was 13 and my mother said `We’re going to get some makeup, and we’re going to go to a French company because they think our women are beautiful.’” Akkad then said, “When I worked for Lancome I told them about this and they ignored me. So many decisions are made based on who happened to be in the room at that time. From a beauty perspective you have an opportunity to have more people in the room who are thinking not only of black women but women of all colors.”

Akkad city research that said that black women feel better about themselves without makeup than white women do. “The way that they describe themselves is positive. … there’s a self-generated sense of feeling good” because mainstream images are not making us feel good. The flipside is that “when your own community is tearing you down, then that can be a terrible thing.”

The “Hottentot Venus to the White House” forum was one of two anchors of my New York “Culture Saturday.” In the same way many of us New Yorkers expect Sunday to come with some kind of decadent, home- or restaurant-cooked brunch, we often schedule Saturdays for culture… museums, movies, intellectual chats to fortify us so we can talk about more at the water cooler than what television show we watched last night.

Later that night I saw the musical “Memphis,” a new Broadway musical. It follows the life of Huey, a white DJ who plays “race music”–that is, R&B and early rock ‘n roll–on a mainstream radio station in Memphis. He’s also dating an elegant and ambitious black singer named Felicia. The play follows his efforts to break black music into the mainstream and court Felicia across the color line.

The play took a safe path through the territory of race, rock, and rebellion. Innuendo, an amino acid of any good rock lyric, was practically banned from the theatre. The two leads lacked romantic chemisty, so much so that the idea of discussing interracial marriage seemed superfluous. (Meanwhile, the sting of the word “miscegenation,” which many of us hastily thought had lost relevance, was actually used on a Republican National Committee website by a member of their online community who posted a picture of the President eating fried chicken and a caption underneath that said, “Miscegenation is a crime against American values. Repeal Loving v. Virginia.”) I suddenly imagined a bizarre variant of the birther protests where a participant would wave a sign saying, I’d like my black president 100 percent black, please!

That said, the instrumentation, dancers, and character actors all were engagng. The play had the most success with secondary characters like Dewey’s racist-but-straight-shooting Mama; or the chubby janitor/song-n-dance man who looks out for Dewey; or the girl who picks up a “race record” in the department store and somehow shines as she continues a montage of small moments in the play.

After the show, I saw what appeared to be an interracial couple — black man, white woman — getting ready to leave the theatre. (I say “appeared to” because they could have been friends; or not interracial at all. You know how skin can deceive.) He was making a POINT to her: that is, gesturing as he spoke intently. Of course, I was too far away to tell what they were talking about. It could have been “I can’t believe you booked us into the Olive Garden for dinner” or… who knows. But I imagine that they were talking about the play, and perhaps having a moment of cultural dissonance. Did he hate it and she like it, or the reverse? Were they talking about my pet peeve, the sexlessness of the lead relationship; or about the set dressing?

Anyway, in my imagination, they talk at dinner and on the drive home about the play. Somewhere along the drive, she murmurs, “Memphis. Maybe we should take my Mom and Dad when they come to town for Thanksgiving.”
He nods and says, “Well, yes, maybe we should.”

If there were a perfect musical to which to take parents who were lukewarm about your interracial marriage, Memphis would be that musical. It keeps the past squarely in the past; keeps clear who is the villain and who the hero; and leavens every setback with a good song and dance number. The New York Times said as much in their review of the play. But having gone after a lukewarm-at-best review in the Times showed no impact on ticket sales (the theatre was packed to capacity), it may be best to admit that Memphis is a success on its own cultural grounds — very, very safe cultural grounds.

The mostly-white theatre-goers at Memphis reflected one type of homogeneity; the mostly black creative-professional crowd at the forum was self-selecting as well. But a matter of perspective separated the events. The function of “Memphis” seemed to be to reassure the audience that we had come a long way, and that we could afford the luxury of distance from the struggles of the past. The forum, on the other hand, demonstrated that the past is still a scrim we look through when gazing at contemporary beauty. Sometimes we are too close to the scrim to see it well. After all, we were just trying to look in the mirror and fix our face, but all those politics got in our way.