POLITICS OF BEAUTY

actress, Stacey Dash

African American actresses have risen to heights limited by the vision of a business dependant upon insights of a dominant culture clinging to the tentacles of white supremacy, and a doctrine of entitlement that slowly barters with the notion that women have value and worth beyond the fancy of endless access to the sexual being within every woman. Black Americans did not name the period of the so-called black exploitation movies of the 1970’s. Whites made a last ditched effort to quell the surge of black pride that was foremost upon the consciousness of a people evolving out of the restrictive culture of Jim Crow. Business-wise the image of Black women was slow leaving the controlling personalities of business people who control Hollywood as the genius of the fashion industry was getting hip to the allure of dark skinned women. The features of African women were long the envy, and source of bloody retribution of white women upon African slave women, and men in the hidden chapters of relationship between the two races.

Whole industries were created to attain the “exotic African look”, but the business of beauty, and the business of sales within the movie and fashion industries was searching for ways to hold onto the aesthetic mystery of Black American women without the presence and contributions of Black women, and then along came Science. Science came into the game of race relations with technology that could create African looks on white women, and the years passed as the fashion industry found reasons to let go of the 'ideal' of Black womanhood, and seized upon the enhanced features of white women from Europe and America. The direction of these tendencies nestle within the tentacles of success white Americans have had living off of the paradigms of supremacy, and entitlement, but at what cost?

The cost to their souls has been more than brutal. Many healers have passed down a wisdom to younger healers, and developed the spirit and technique to assist in the developmental process of our white relatives initiation into adulthood. In the medicine wheel teaching from the Man Who Looks Like His Uncle, Angaangaq, the white man, and the elements he is composed of speaks of their spiritual responsibility to bring people together. They have done that but at what cost to the souls of all mankind affected by the approach and life way of the European? That is too large of a question to answer in so narrow a space, but as we plunge deeper into the "war with no end" perhaps Americans will gain a little of the old wisdom and listen to the Peace Keeper from the Iroquois nation, and become adults in the Human Family.

Gregory E. Woods

"Dawn Wolf"

Keeper of Stories