Just Us

by Claudia Rankine

  Brennan Walker

  Tamir Rice

  Trayvon Martin

  Kalief Browder

  complicit freedoms

  What gave the dinner’s formality away was the recognition that when someone spoke on the other end of the long table, everyone listened for the single conversation involving the invited guest. This meant the complete guest list heard when the woman asked me what to tell her black female students who bleach their hair blond.

  It was unusual at these academic events to find myself at a table populated by people of color, but here I was at a formal dinner attempting to pass itself off as an intimate supper, surrounded by other black women and a few black men. Sometimes these meals are an opportunity for faculty to visit and catch up about the kids or the terror in their department or the bits and pieces that give nothing away but a random day’s activity. But sometimes these meals are a disguised Q&A slotted into the dinner hour.

  The professor didn’t offer up the name of her course, but I imagined a roomful of black blonds in a class titled the History of Black Power Movements, or Angela Davis to Audre Lorde to Kimberlé Crenshaw: Politics of Resistance, or Becky with the Good Hair: Call-Out Culture in the Twenty-First Century. The one who asked the question was sharply attentive and carried worry on her face as if her students’ grooming choices were a reflection of her very being, which is, not coincidentally, tied to her teaching.

  The professor’s almond-colored eyes were waiting for an answer, and the room waited with her. I could have said we expect too much from one another, but that’s not an answer. I could have dodged the question by suggesting that bell hooks pretty much covered this in “Straightening Our Hair.” I tried to remember what hooks said, and the phrase “come correct” came to mind, though I don’t think it’s from that essay.1

  Instead of answering, I found myself identifying with the scolded and falling into a defensive posture. I asked, in a tone that sounded more like a statement than a question, whether the abandonment of their natural hair color is of equal importance to the safeguarding of their sense of agency and freedom. Whatever the fuck as long as they are coming to class might be heard beneath “Well, can’t they own everything in their ‘blonded life,’” to quote Frank Ocean. I asked the professor by telling her, and she nodded the way one does when someone brings up First Amendment rights after some white supremacist terrorist wants to demonstrate on the main street of one’s town. Some things should matter more, no matter the law, no matter our individual freedoms, no matter—that’s what she didn’t say aloud, but that is what the nod managed to signify. Her silence made me want to try again, and in any case we were in that room together until someone politely turned our attention toward dessert.

  Perhaps somewhere beneath and despite it all—where the all is every mother-aunt-teacher-Michelle-Obama-moment-of-black-exceptional-straightened-shoulder-length-Madam-C.J. Walker-hair-beauty—was the nagging belief that blonds have more—more of something.2 We had been told this in all our decades, though no one was talking especially to us, meaning, of course, to black women, since “all the women are white … ,” though we, black women, are a part of the “we” in the gender conversations the media has with women in television commercials, films, and print ads bombarding us.3 Blond hair need not mean human, it need not mean feminine, it need not mean Anglo or angel; clearly, it doesn’t mean white purity, given that a change in hair color doesn’t cause anyone black or Asian or white, for that matter, to pass out of his or her body. Aretha Franklin remains, after all, with any hair color, the Mother of Soul.

  All the money, time, and possible damage to one’s natural hair ultimately pales in comparison to what it means to take what is available and own it. Complicit freedoms. Is that a thing? Perhaps the students’ blondness is their boldness in the face of racist propaganda concerning beauty ideals. Then the black blonds are inside one of those equations where, no matter what you do on either side of the equal sign, every sum will come to one—this one, what I want. Fuck you. Fuck me. Next. Do you, boo! Free to be. Free to take. Free to fake. Frivolous. Fuck brave. Fun. Funny. Good as hell.

  Unless, of course, it’s a zero-sum game, and whatever the case, the equation equals zero and we remain here in these United States of America, still in line, still complicit, beneath all our choices, inside all our false sovereignty.

  Then a question that is also an answer came to me: What would Frantz Fanon say? I asked the professor. She laughed, which pleased me because now she looked like she forgot to carry it all for a few seconds. It might be a failing that I want people to lose their humorlessness, but I badly want us all to have a kind of metaperspective humor around all that goes into our scramble to escape what Fred Moten names “the false fight for our humanity” that has lasted four hundred years and is not the same thing as fighting for our civil rights.4

  Mine is always the worry that we are already dying—I mean already dead in the social world that persists alongside the lives we live—as we tirelessly engage tall tales in an endless fight for justice. Or, could it be the students have divested from the performance of exceptional blackness, a performance that will never save us from the actions of ordinary whiteness, and decided on reverse appropriation with all its artificiality and performativity.

  Maybe we are simply in the latest stage of self-judgment, so stuck, judged or judging, which of course is humorless and which also scares me. It scares me more than bottle blonds and what the blondness is meant to signify, if it is meant to signify something beyond knowledge, something about the wilderness of being, and not simply mask self-hatred and low self-esteem. The worry is that this particular hair color promises “the world” to these women, though it cannot give it. Do black blonds believe it allows them to be seen, maybe to be seen for the first time as human, youthful, beautiful, human, and—did I say human?—most tragically in their own eyes?

  I mentioned Fanon, whose psychoanalytic writings address internalized antiblack racism, to suggest I understood the professor’s worry was that these women were blindly filling up with self-hatred for their own black skin and natural hair.5 I wanted to show her the image by the visual artist Carrie Mae Weems where Weems looks into the proverbial mirror-mirror-on-the-wall, though she’s using a handheld one. The professor could hang the image in her seminar room. The piece is called I Looked and Looked and Failed to See What So Terrified You. I didn’t ask the professor if she knew the piece, though its title might have answered her question. Or, Weems’s question might lead to a discussion in the classroom about the bleaching or not bleaching of one’s hair. Ultimately, it all depends on what happened or is happening behind the watchful eyes of the professor and her students as they assimilated and metabolized the repetitions in our culture.

  The professor’s worry, I’m guessing here, was that the culture damaged her students, despite our—black women in our middle ages—best practices, and efforts with our own natural hair. By extension, we older black women are shattered, since the younger ones are our daughters, not literally, and for all our Black Is Beautiful rhetoric, deep within our false sense of sovereignty might remain a vision of black feminism limited by white surveillance of black femininity.

  The professor nodded again when I said I believed it’s important the students do what they want until they understand for themselves what they don’t want. I am a mother, but I am also a daughter with memory. Someone on the other side of the table said she wore heels even though they hurt her feet. OK. Some of us didn’t, said another woman, and I can’t but think there is a backstory there I will never know. Heels versus nose jobs? Different things? Do heels belong to femininity’s aspirational life or white acculturation? Are nose jobs a form of assimilation? Skin bleaching is clear in terms of its destination toward whitening one’s skin, but is blondness?

  Is blondness the heel, the nose job, the skin bleaching, or none of these? This culture made us, and as wrong or as right as we can be, we know someone is always looking. Amen to that, I
didn’t say, as four men arrived with trays of cake, vanilla ice cream already melting into the dark chocolate. Though life is not always so sweet.

  I was still thinking about the professor and her question as I waited for a friend in a gallery. To pass the time, I counted the number of women around me who are bleached blonds: Natural Blond; White Blond; Platinum; Silver Blond; Butter Blond; Creamy Blond; Rooty Blond; Gold Babylights; Milky Blond; Sandy Blond; Icy Ombré; Honey Blond.

  When my friend arrived, I told him I’d counted a dozen women who’d colored their hair blond. He remembered his hairdresser once mentioned that many of his female clients went blond for their weddings. After the wedding photos locked them into forever blonded beauty, in white, colored blond, to have and behold from that day forward, they returned to their natural color.

  Blond hair has been associated with everything from prostitution to the “paragon of female beauty,” but from early on it was always rare, so the word blond meant both the natural color and the act of dyeing one’s hair.6 According to the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, beblonden was the Old English word for “dyed.”7 Before hair coloring as we know it arrived, horse urine, lemon juice, and the sun were accepted paths toward blond ambition.

  Whether blondness equates to whiteness seemed the obvious question for the professor. But is it to white people? Does dyeing hair blond mean one is reaching for something, someone, some other body in a fantasy of white-pleasing pleasantness? There’s a nagging jingle in everyone’s head insisting blonds have more fun. Maybe Clairol meant funds. The color, according to Clairol, adds energy to your hair (not sure what that means) by softening your facial features and making you look more youthful. Its website states, “You’ll have people doing a double-take wondering if it’s really you!” They add an exclamation point after “really you” because we know it’s not really, really you and the moment will always need the added insistence of the exclamation, which in real life expresses itself economically in touch-ups.

  Most definitely, blonds have more blondness, and this must mean something since, as journalist Christina Cauterucci reported, “Just 2 percent of the world’s population and 5 percent of white people in the U.S. have blond hair, but 35 percent of female U.S. senators and 48 percent of female CEOs at S&P 500 companies are blond. Female university presidents are more likely to be blond, too.”8 Cauterucci credits researchers Jennifer Berdahl and Natalya Alonso, who reported at the 2016 Academy of Management’s annual meeting that “blond overrepresentation can be explained by race and age biases in leadership pipelines.” Journalist Emily Peck reports that “Berdahl and Alonso also found that male CEOs are more likely to be married to blondes: 43 percent of the highest-paid male CEOs have a blonde spouse.” Berdahl now walks that statistic back to 40 percent of wives in the photos they could find. Berdahl and Alonso’s research led Berdahl to believe that because blond hair is “only natural to Whites and tends to go brown after childhood, we reason that a preference for blond women leaders is both a racist and sexist phenomenon. White(ish) and child(ish) looking women appear to be preferred as leaders, perhaps because they are less threatening to the status quo of power.”

  Normal people, not in the wealthiest 1 percent, bleach their hair blond as well. Normal people. It’s a conscious or unconscious complicity with the idea that white life is a standard for normal life. Does this make the reach for blondness a reach for normality while still wishing for the extraordinary—extraordinary fun, extraordinary beauty, extraordinary attractiveness? Princess Diana, James Dean, Beyoncé are all symbols of that extraordinary—everything.

  When I enter “blonds” in a search engine, the algorithm presents rows of white women, and at the bottom of the screen there’s Marilyn Monroe in all her Hollywood blondness. Despite the fact that she’s a natural brunette, not long after the public consumed her first films, she would come to personify the beauty and the misogynist stereotype of the empty-headed blond.9

  On the street, ahead of me, a woman holds the hand of a child. Neither the mother nor the child is blond, but the doll the child holds in her hand has long blond hair. In the history of the blond Barbie doll, historians have discovered that after World War II in West Germany, sexy “Bild Lilli” dolls based on a popular cartoon character were sold in barbershops and bars.10 They are said to have inspired the original Barbie. Mattel bought the rights to the reproduction of Lilli but not the origin narrative from the post-Nazi Germans.

  As I look around, I wonder if, for bleached blonds who are white, the added blondness is whitening their whiteness, erasing their ethnicity? In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, white Anglo-Saxons in the United States persecuted Italians and the Irish, ostensibly for their religion, before they could claim whiteness. Their passports associated them with blackness, and for some, perhaps, their dark hair confirmed their nonwhite status. I suppose if all I had to do was bleach my hair blond to stop white supremacists from wanting to burn crosses in my yard, I might consider blondness myself. Certainly, the forty-fifth president and his family understand the importance of the blond signifier in their campaign to Make America Great Again.

  I’m reading an article at the doctor’s office called “Political Peroxide Blonde Privilege,” by the author Amy Larocca. It features rows of photographs of white women in the public eye, in politics and media, all with startlingly similar blond hair. It could be called “Peroxide Nation.”

  Hillary Clinton, who, like many on Capitol Hill, was once a brunette, also went blond when she entered public life.11 A Frontline program suggests she dyed her hair under pressure. Though she kept the color, she gave up the polish we associate with it and allowed her natural gray hair to grow out and be seen in public after losing the 2016 election.

  Did comedian and TV personality Ellen DeGeneres have to be blond if her queerness was to be acceptable to mainstream homophobic America? Coming out was considered a risk, but the concession was the white signifier of blondness. Her wife had to be blond, too. Middle America had to understand that the only difference between their understanding of humanity and this woman dancing her way into their living rooms was her sexuality, which was signaled only by her boyish outfits, not her white and blond body. The title of her comedy special Relatable appears to signal the importance of one’s likability.

  The question for anyone interested in motivations for going blond becomes an inquiry into aspirational living or into the passivity of complicit freedoms. Either blondness grants access to something we feel we don’t have, or it feels like a random choice, and the fact that it lines up with what is valued by white supremacy is an unfortunate by-product but not a deal breaker. Another way to think about blondness is that either we are sending ourselves somewhere unattainable, or we can’t avoid arriving there in the first place.

  I ask a white cashier behind the counter, and she says men treat her better now that she’s gone blond. After a pause, in which she might be thinking I will judge her for caring about the male gaze or in which she is just trying to remember her encounters, she says, women also are friendlier.

  Is civility what’s being chased, the civility that is owed to white purity?

  A woman in a New York restaurant says she was blond as a child and pulls up a video of herself on her cell phone. She feels called out in our present call-out culture and needs to prove authenticity, though my question exists without judgment. At least I think it does. I don’t care what she does to her hair. I’m interested only because I want her to enlighten me regarding blondness and the context it evokes. Does it create a sense of belonging, for example? Belonging to what? is the obvious next question. Her blond hair, the woman says wistfully, disappeared with the arrival of puberty. In the video, her siblings are brunettes. Perhaps her youthful blondness meant she was treated as special in her family. But why bleach it now? “Why?” she repeats as if I am incapable of comprehending. “That’s an odd question,” she adds, without answering me.

  I’m waiting to be seated in another r
estaurant populated by many blonds with only the slightest hint of brunette at the roots, women a friend calls expensive because everything from their fingernails to their musculature to their skin’s elasticity has been addressed. I approach a woman awaiting her companion. Why blond hair? I ask her. She’s friendly and not afraid of strangers or her truth. Blond hair makes me look brighter and lighter, she says. I like to wear white, she adds. I am surprised by her use of the word “white” as existing alongside blondness. She is the first to bring the word forward without a prompt. Is she saying white only because it rhymes with bright, or does she mean white as a racial distinction that extends from her clothes and hair color toward her skin? The waitress approaches with the woman’s companion and effectively ends our conversation.

  Not long after, I ask another white woman why she bleaches her hair. She explains more explicitly how it returns her to an idea of youthfulness. Was she also blond as a child? Not really. Hers is a nostalgia for a blond childhood that never existed but was presented again and again in the media as a thing cherished. Given that not many people change their eye color from otherwise to blue, I try to think of a single other signifier of whiteness that free-floats like blond hair. Nothing comes to mind, though some people believe indications of a good education or property ownership are readable white signifiers, so perhaps it’s that simple: blondness is readable, it points directly to whiteness.