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Beginning with the necessary question “Why me?,” I look at a system which bars BIPOC bodies and theory. In her open letter to the US Black Studies academic community, Sylvia Wynter (1994 ) spoke about the problem of “no human involved” (“NHI”) in the policing and incarceration of Black bodies as being pertinent for how Black studies was positioned institutionally. This same white supremacist governance and surveillance “NHI” exists in universities on both sides of the Atlantic. There is something very wrong with the system of which I am a part that persistently and consistently bars BIPOC bodies and theory and only avails our presence and thought a marginal position on the proviso that the status quo of whiteliness ( Yancy 2008 ) is not disturbed. Nothing really changes in terms of anti-BIPOC racism. Rather, it remains strangely the white supremacist (settler) colonial same within Canadian race-evasive multiculturalism and UK ‘post-race’ racism.

Beauty is not race neutral. It is a racialized category/ perception which emerged through centuries of European colonization, Indigenous genocide, African/Black enslavement and indenture resulting in an aesthetic hierarchy with Blackness at the bottom. The coloniality of aesthetics means that still today hair perceived as Black in texture and styling and darker skin on African descent bodies are the repositories of anti-Blackness. However, Black women, children and men continue to fight back by (re)creating Black antiracist aesthetics focused on valorizing Black skin and hair.

This chapter looks at Black women’s online resistance to racial cosplay/blackfishing by two Instagram beauty influencers, Emma Hallberg and Aga Brzostowska. As they performatively produce Black beauty – light skin, hairstyles, small waistline, “thick” legs, big bottom, bigger lips – whiteness remains master signifier as racial home and site of privilege. Racial cosplay/blackfishing is “race transing.” That is, the translation of Black looks and transformation of the white body by a Black mask for racial deception as these beauty influencers attempt to extend their reach to Black consumers while not interrupting white supremacist privilege, or the aesthetic, political, social, skin, and affective value of whiteness remaining integral to white bodies. “Transing’-while-white” has been resisted by Black women on twitter and YouTube asserting racial authenticity, critiquing racial capitalism’s white co-optation of Black economic, cultural, and social capital, and questioning the white supremacist psyche attached to racial cosplay/blackfishing.

This special issue emerged out of the continuing concern with how best to deal with institutional racism in higher education institutions (HEIs) that we have long shared as colleagues in the Center...

In this conversation, the authors converse on skin colour politics and the white beauty standard. Reflecting on the resurgence of white supremacist ideas in the US American public sphere and its underlying imaginary that denies Black beauty, dignity and grace, Shirley A. Tate asserts that beauty is not just a matter for the individual, but socially constructed. As such, it has always been a political issue for Black thinkers, engaged in thinking through what Black anti-racist aesthetics could and should be about. In spite of decades of collective struggles against hegemonic beauty norms, the authors conclude that colonial conceptions of skin colour and beauty continue to haunt us, even if these may now include ‘mixed looks’ rather than just whiteness.

‘Unconscious bias happens by our brains making incredibly quick judgements and assessments without us realising. Biases are influenced by background, cultural environment and experiences and we may not be aware of these views and opinions, or of their full impact and implications. This article opposes this point of view by arguing that bias is not unconscious but is (un)conscious and linked to Charles Mills’ ‘Racial Contract’ and its ‘epistemologies of ignorance’. These epistemologies emerge from what the Equality Challenge Unit (ECU) calls ‘our background, cultural environment and personal experience’. Asserting that racism stems from ‘unconscious bias’ diminishes white supremacy and maintains white innocence as a ‘will to forget’ institutional racism. In equality and diversity training ‘unconscious bias’ has become a performative act to move beyond racism through training to participate in a constructed ‘post-racial’ reality. The article argues that through decolonizing ‘unconscious bias’, ‘w...

This chapter uses ‘brownness’ as ideal to take up a discussion of somaesthetics and sarkaesthetics through looking at the shame caused by negative aesthetic value within Black Nationalist politics attached to being Black-white ‘mixed race’ and its ‘dissing’. That is, Black women’s bodies are a medium for creating aesthetic value through the subject’s adoption of a third-person perspective, enabling the emergence of dis/alienation from existing Black Atlantic discourses on the Black woman’s beauty shame.

This introduction constructs a Black decolonial feminist approach to Black beauty shame. Black feminisms-US, UK, Caribbean, Indo-Caribbean, African and Latin American—illustrate that intersectional racism/racialization matter for theorizing which centres Black women. A Black decolonial feminist approach to beauty and ugliness draws on Wynter, Espinosa Minoso, Glissant, Cesaire and Oyĕwumi in thinking from/through Black women’s experiences, their affective lives, and their becomings.

White beauty iconicity is necropolitical because Black and Black-white ‘mixed race’ women live within shaming events produced by their aesthetic hierarchy positioning as ugly. Whiteness continues as the beauty ideal in the Global North/South-west and is a necessary defining context for aesthetic life. The promise of white ideal beauty continues to resonate negatively in Black and Black-white ‘mixed race’ women’s lives as it makes their beauties un-narratable by erasing their possibility for representation.

Affect is racialized with respect to Black beauty shame because beauty/ugliness is a socially constructed, culturally specific binary and within the ‘structure of feeling’ in the Global North/South West anti-Black African descent racism structures our experiences within racialized assemblages. Shame is attached to judgements of Black beauty/ugliness. It is an affect which is at once silenced, even whilst it aims to silence and produce silencing on the connections between beauty, ugliness and racialization.

Looking for shame when it is not uttered motivated an analysis that incorporated conversation analysis with discourse analysis to produce an ‘ethnomethodologically inclined discourse analysis’ (eda). Interviews with UK Black and Black-white ‘mixed race’ women were transcribed using a conversation analytic transcription to capture the intensification of shame within talk surrounded by speech disturbances such as in-breaths, out-breaths, pauses and loudness, to show Black beauty shame’s silence/silencing and speakers’ agency in talk-in-interaction.

Black beauty shame matters in global racial capitalism. Global racial capitalism depends on Black ugliness as a source of surplus value through its over-exploited hyper-visibility which maintains white and Black lighter-skinned beauty norms. There are colonial and Black Nationalist aesthetic formations which necessitate that we develop ways of becoming and relating outside dominance if we wish to avoid shame. Rastafarian ‘livity’ is important if Black beauty shame is to be erased through dis/aliention from dominance.

Constructed through enslavement and colonialism, Black beauty shame drags the coloniality of power, being, knowledge and affect into the twenty-first century. Its silencing and silences work through intensification, which floods one with a suffusive sensation that isolates through precise individuation and a relationality which one cannot control. Black beauty shame is about social, political, economic and psychic domination through subjectification’s biopolitical racializing assemblages, whereas subjectivation as unashamed produced through dis/alienation points to alter/native Black beauty.