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Vancouver Mural Festival: The Black Strathcona Resurgence Project
There are a million different reasons we find certain people beautiful. But there's no denying that a lot of current beauty standards in the North America are based on a particular type of beauty — one that centers a type of white femininity that's only accessible to a select few.
To begin with, a lot of current Western beauty standards celebrate whiteness — not some objective, biological, evolutionary thing, but literally just being a white person. If you go back and look at the work of some early racial theorists — people like Christoph Meiners and Johann Blumenbach — they defined the category of "white," or "Caucasian," as being the most beautiful of the races. Women were invested in whiteness because it was their way of communicating purity. That association between beauty and whiteness has been built into the foundation of western culture.
It wasn’t until the Civil Rights movements in the 60’s and 70’s that we saw the resistance to the western canon of beauty. Birthed out of the broader Black Power movement was the natural hair movement. It was about affirming aspects of blackness that had been considered ugly by white, colonial standards. Organizers of the movement started to embrace the political power behind the idea that all aspects of blackness were beautiful. Women of color, often marginalized from women’s suffrage organizations in the late 1800s and early 1900s, founded their own groups to advocate for the rights of African American women and men. Women played a crucial role in galvanizing the Civil Rights Movement. While resulting legislation such as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act was a win for African Americans of both genders, they were particularly symbolic for women.
They recognized that beauty is a facet of power. Being considered beautiful can help you gain access to certain spaces or increase your power in certain settings. By the same token, a perceived lack of beauty, or a refusal or inability to conform to certain beauty standards, also has tangible consequences.
The goal of this mural was to celebrate women and ethnic beauty and expand our ideas on what it means to be beautiful. The woman in the mural is a representation of all women of color. She is ethnically ambiguous in her representation. She could be of Caribbean, African or East Indian extraction, but what matters is that she is a woman of color. She does not have blue eyes or thin features; she has a large wide nose and large pouty lips and dark eyes. Her hair isn’t straight and shiny but natural curly and untamed. She does not subscribe to the traditional western beauty standards of beauty, yet she is beautiful. This mural is dedicated to all women of color in hopes that they see some of their own beauty in this mural.
For more information visit: BC Hydro Article, Daily Hive