Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

The opening section of the essay illustrates the thinking process of writers, especially non-Black women, who engage in misogynoir, Moira Bailey’s term for “the specific misogyny directed toward Black women in American visual and popular culture because of their race and gender” (88). Kendall posits that misogynoir, especially when people use it to control working-class Black women, has its roots in the racial uplift movement, which endorsed Black respectability as a means of proving that Black people deserved equality and humane treatment.

Such a program has no chance of success because it emerges from White supremacist notions that the burden is on Black people to accommodate themselves to White norms of respectability. Maintaining such norms costs money and energy used to suppress any aspect of behavior, dress, or speech that might reflect poorly on one’s community. Meanwhile, the real culprits—racism and inequality—escape notice because we are so focused on blaming the effects of these forces on Black people, and women in particular. Ultimately, the obsession with Black respectability is about wanting to avoid the truth that a colorblind society is not achievable because we can never escape the way that history has shaped our present.

Those people who police how well or how poorly Black people perform Black respectability also frequently turn their critical eyes on other communities of color and in spaces that are supposed to be supportive and feminist ones. Within feminist spaces, this gatekeeping may take the form of tone policing, which involves taking oppressed people to task for registering their oppression in ways that make the gatekeepers uncomfortable. These norms—being polite and calm, even in the face of devastating oppression and unfairness—are in turn rooted in privilege extended almost solely to White people. It’s hard work—emotional labor that consumes energy needed for survival—and maintaining that veneer of calmness often fails to end the oppression in any event.

To get out of the trap of respectability politics, Black feminists and feminists of color need to name the White supremacist roots of respectability politics. Doing so might take the form of, for example, naming one’s own class biases and the need to listen to women and girls who don’t have the same access to opportunity. Respectability politics was a coping mechanism. It is now time to abandon it for a politics that is more attuned to the needs of people inside of Black communities.

Kendall frames this essay with a personal narrative about coming to terms with her skin color, hair texture, and build. Looking back on her life, she now sees that she internalized negative messages about her natural hair texture, a feeling that her tall stature made her less pretty than her fine-boned cousins, and a willingness to accept back-handed compliments from people who prized features that made her more closely approximate White beauty standards. To her own surprise, her hair, medium-brown skin, and build eventually settled into a shape that people found attractive. Privileges—male attention and better job opportunities—came with this perception of her attractiveness, but so did street harassment.

Looking at popular culture, Kendall notes that some of harshest judgment about one’s ability to embody that aesthetic can come from other women, including women of color. She cites the comments about Meghan Markle’s hair texture and criticism of medal-winning Olympian Gabby Douglas’s edges as proof of this phenomenon.

So-called pretty privilege is also a double-edged sword. When a co-worker harassed Kendall at work, for example, her White female supervisor felt it was appropriate to criticize her for her clothing options, and White male harassers assumed harassing her was a compliment because they did not usually see Black women as sex objects.

The culture that casts Black women and women of color in general as attractive the more closely they approximate White beauty is rooted in colorism, which in turn reflects the impact of colonialism, slavery, and pre-colonial colorism. Lighter color was associated with indoor work, while darker color was associated with labor-intensive work outside; color assumed associations with class, in other words, and the availability of better opportunities to people with lighter skin created a self-reinforcing cycle of colorism. Colorism can in fact be found across the world.

Feminist spaces are no exception to the impact of colorism and texturism (favoring less coiled hair over more tightly coiled hair) on opportunity. White women like Rachel Dolezal fetishize and exoticize darker skin and coiled hair texture to boost their own perceived attractiveness, but they show little awareness of the painful history and struggle associated with colorism and texturism. Although some feminists may well be prepared to call dark-skinned women strong or beautiful, they have not gone far enough to understand that many kinds of bodies—ones with dark skin, the bodies of people with disabilities, fat bodies—are beautiful.

While there is the temptation to say that concerns about beauty are shallow ones, Kendall counters that “like everything else, beauty is political” (110). A more intersectional feminist analysis of beauty culture would note, for example, that the male gaze needs to be interrogated, but so does the gaze that prizes the “white, cis, slim, and abled” body (112).

Kendall had an eating disorder in high school, but it went undetected because so many people associated her thinness with health. She still struggles with disordered eating and gets help with it. Part of the landscape of disordered eating for her is that Black women’s and Black girls’ struggles with eating disorders are shunted to the side. Disordered eating may give the Black woman or girl who is struggling the pretense of exercising control over life that takes place in a racist, trauma-inducing world. Young people of color regularly receive messages rooted in “anti-Blackness, the stereotypes, the hypersexualization” (116), and other negative messaging that convinces them from childhood on that they are not of value.

That messaging is compounded for children who identify as transgender, have disabilities, or are nonbinary. Struggles with food and disordered eating may also develop in the context of lack of access to healthy food and a health-food culture that prizes expensive food that may not be all that tasty. Scarcity of food and money may also encourage disordered eating.

Professionals—therapists, doctors, and nutritionists—have failed to take an intersectional approach to this issue, based on the paucity of culturally sensitive research on eating disorders among women and children of color and the obsession over body mass index as a measure of health. They fail to note that for many women and children of color, life is filled with so much trauma, including “vicarious traumatization” (124)—trauma induced by observing violence inflicted on members of one’s community, for example—that harmful coping mechanisms like disordered eating may develop. The myth that Black girls do not develop eating disorders and that women of color are too strong/feisty/submissive (stereotypical labels for women of color) to experience disordered eating means help never comes. That lack of support is apparent even in feminist spaces where body positivity supposedly rules (but only if a women more closely approximates Whiteness).

Feminists can be good allies by acknowledging eating disorders among women and girls of color, working to address disparities in access to good mental health care, and refusing to exacerbate the problem by adding additional emotional labor to the heavy load people of color already carry.