In 2019, California created the CROWN Act. It forbids the discrimination of both natural hair and associated hairstyles. A handful of other states followed with equivalent legislation. For a long time, black hair, which comes out of the head in tight curls, has been seen as unprofessional at best and ugly at worst. Beautiful hair is straight or wavy! If black women want beautiful hair, they either need to "tame" their natural hair with dangerous procedures involving heat or chemicals, or hide it with weaves or under a wig. We know what beautiful hair looks like, and natural black hair isn't it - or so we're taught.

The sentiments surrounding black hair are a microcosm for beauty standards in general. There is no natural reason at all that straight, blonde hair should be more attractive than curly black hair. And the comparison aside, there should certainly be no natural reason why black hair should be ugly! Africans found it plenty attractive for thousands of years. What's the problem now?

Anti black hair sentiments are rooted in white supremacist thinking. I don't mean the literal, current movement of overtly white supremacist dolts. Those are just the mushrooms visibly sticking out from the buried mycelium of white supremacy that's still finely branching through society. We think by condemning the mushrooms we're getting rid of the fungus but the mycelium is harder to attack. It's buried in subconscious sentiments and in our efforts to distance ourselves from the mushrooms, we've buried it further under retroactive explanations for our biases. We're not racist, so our "preferences" surely can't be racist... The gut feeling is "I don't like that" but our brain has to come up with a better reason than racism: "It looks dirty." ... in a way slicked back hair, greasy spikes or hairspray stiffened hair helmet doesn't? "It looks unkempt, 'untamed', unprofessional." As if braids didn't demand a lot of effort. This extends beyond hair, to black features and black skin too! "Oh, I just happen to not be into black skin as a purely aesthetic color preference." As if we're picking our partners' skin colors to match our curtains and couch cushions! And as if "black" wasn't comprised of an incredible variety of shades.

The real reason for this "I don't like that" gut feeling is we're learning what's valuable and beautiful from how the rest of the world treats it. Watch the scene in Casino Royale when Eva Green's character Vesper Lynn enters the poker room in the dress she picked out to wow everyone. Everyone's head turns towards her. I don't care how beautiful someone is, that's not something that happens in an environment were everyone has hot, young companions in sexy cocktail dresses with them. She doesn't stand out that much. But we, as the audience, know from how Bond reacts to her and how all these men in the room react to her, that she is that strikingly beautiful. We're taught that through context. Now let that happen in nearly every movie we watch, with the beautiful characters all sharing the same features... we get it eventually. We pick up on what we're supposed to find beautiful.

In the same way, we're trained from birth to associate black features with ugliness. Since the 60s, representation through black characters has been steadily improving, but there were times when black characters were practically all ugly! Not because broad noses are naturally uglier than narrow noses for some reason but because ugly characters are lower, it's easier to make fun of them, not to show them respect, etc. and that's the space black people had in society so it's the space they were assigned in fiction. You can't just make someone who you consider subhuman the romantic lead in your mainstream adventure movie! You can make them ugly comic relief on the level of a mule though. Check out these censored scenes from Fantasia depicting the character Sunflower, a little, black centaurette with exaggerated black features and some extra signifiers for ugly thrown on top, like her missing teeth and pudgy body compared to the slender, literally white centaurette she serves. It's just racism. An extreme example, granted, censored since the late 60s, but nevertheless emblematic of a trend that survived far longer. It shapes our perception of what's valuable and what isn't, i.e. what's beautiful and what isn't, and it perpetuates itself because someone who's been trained by racist cartoons to perceive black features as ugly isn't going to cast a black woman as the beauty in a film. Hell, even the black woman in question will have a hard time seeing herself as a beauty!

This is hidden from those who aren't suffering from it. Those with enough distance have the luxury of just taking for granted that, "well, black is just uglier!?" without examining why. The mycelium is hidden from them because they're not the ones being strangled by it. It took the civil rights movement to come up with a "black aesthetic." They were bombarded with that same messaging and even as children watching racist as fuck cartoons they got hammered into them that black features are ugly. It was practically impossible to even conceive of these features as anything but ugly before an aesthetic was invented that assigned value to big lips, broad noses and kinky hair! Here's a poignant speech from BlacKkKlansman that broaches the subject. "Black is beautiful" was a powerful slogan. Beauty is tied into self-esteem, which is important if you want to stand up for the rights you are due. You have to know your worth! That was half a century ago.

We've come pretty far in terms of equality in (at least the theoretical) law... but societal attitudes are still lagging behind in a lot of ways, one of which being our perception of beauty. Mostly because people who aren't on the butt-end of this don't tend to think about their preferences as political. "Oh hey, I just happen to 'prefer' thin white women (and really, when I say 'prefer' I mean anything else is ugly).. Nothing wrong with having a 'preference', is there?" But also because advertisement keeps reinforcing this. If you're constantly told you need relaxer to have beautiful, professional hair, you'll get the message what bad hair is.

This is a microcosm for beauty standards in general. It's fairly transparent anti black hair sentiments are rooted in white supremacy.

The waters are muddier, I feel, with people's biases against heavy people but in some ways they're similar. People have the "I don't like that" gut feeling. They have this aversion because they learned to perceive fat as ugly because every fat character they ever saw was either evil, greedy, clumsy, stupid, funny or lazy - but never attractive or beautiful. Yet their brain won't admit it's fatphobia informing their feelings, so they come up with alternative explanations: "It's about health, you know?" Yeah, I'm sure you wouldn't date a thin model with asthma either... It's about beauty and value. And we can continue the same with trans people, or disabled people (for a long time even people with such mild "disabilities" as needing glasses!!), old people... even people with little issues like noses that are too crooked or breasts that are too small or too big. They don't all carry the same far-reaching political baggage but they're all assigned (a lack of) beauty and value according to our beauty standards.

When a movie star shows up with a thin model at his arm, no one bats an eye. Were he to show up with a very heavy woman, people would be asking what he possibly sees in her. Maybe she's an uninhibited, sexual adventurer whose lot in life sharpened her wit and he enjoys how big and soft her body feels..? Entirely possible, but don't see it often because it goes against our societal perception of beauty and value.

I think it's time we say nuts to that. As long as we keep our so-called "preferences" unexamined and untested; as long as we're pretending they're either random or insist there is some very shaky biological reason for them, we are letting hateful mycelia spread through us. We're going to be fertile ground for mushrooms that are coming up in our midst and when we see them, we're going to act horrified that such hate still exists in the 21st century... but the actual body of the fungus, not just the fruits that grow out of the ground as mushrooms, the actual body, the mycelium, is finely branching through us all. Fuck that. Enough.

We owe it to our fellow humans to examine and honestly test our so-called "preferences." They deserve to be valued as fellow humans! We also owe this introspection to ourselves, so we don't let beauty standards we had little say in limit who we get to love and enjoy. If, as we examine and test, we find out actual preferences we have, alright, why not, tastes differ. But let them be our preferences, not society's. And let them be preferences not judgments of value! Whenever you catch yourself thinking of someone they're worth less, sexually, challenge yourself to love them, find what you could enjoy about them until they're as valuable to you as anyone else. After that, have your preferences - but don't fall for the snap value judgments because they tend to be ugly.