Xavier23 said:

[FLAME SNIPPED - TOM]

Ifsixwuz9 said:

THE only reason yall gettin' so damn defensive is coz yall probably guilty of many of the things i stated as "being white" above, u dont want to be classed as such so u get all defensive. "im proud of who i am" ,"im black and im proud" (with a blonde weave on)


and guess what evrybody is entitled to their opinon and whether yall want to hear it or not it's the truth. and as for michael jackson as long as michael is happy im happy for him. and yes you would have to be an ignorant, stubborn, stupid, blind assed motherfucker not to see Michael always wanted to be white.

Ifsixwuz9 said:

ROFL!!

Xavier23 said:

So if a Black women dyes her AFRO or TWISTS light brown or blonde or even fucking burgundy she's trying to be White?? Are you kidding me?

Hotlegs said:

you're funny and it would probably suprise u to know that im black(well half anyway, my dad is white ) i really don't know why u are getting so angry , isnt this a free internet anymore? so what u guys are saying then is thatits quite okay for black women to wear blonde weaves and stuff and it doesn't mean they are trying to be white?

Xavier23 said:

So people who don't agree w/ you are automatically "guilty" of what you've stated? That's quite a narrow point of view you've got there

For your info I've never worn a weave or colored contacts, haven't worn a perm for about 10 years. My hair is dark brown & I've dyed it before - so you're telling me I fall under the "wanna be White" category? Really??

Xavier23 said:

[FLAMED SNIPPED - TOM] I am mixed but I claim myself as Black and I am curious about why you hate your Black heriatage so?
[Edited 4/25/05 18:33pm]

Xavier23 said:

Consider this for a moment, but just a moment b/c it might scare you :

Might you be overcompensating your own possible insecurities (about being half White) w/ the overly zealous Black purist rhetoric? I.E. proving you're "really down" by what you believe since it may be questioned via how you look? Just asking. Let's call it the "Alicia Keys Gotta Have the Braids Until They KNOW I'm Down!" syndrome

CalhounSq said:

my original post stated black women in particular fall victim to the nferority complex that white society has tried to ingrain in them(and so far succeeded) for generations. i went on to state that the acceptance of the complex manifests itself in several ways . the most common and easy way is trying to emulate the image of "percieved beauty" (that is the pale skinned, blonde, blue eyes), i was merely trying to point out that most black women who waer blonde weaves do it to look like "them" and have a"new look" and while i challenge you to give me another reason, i stick with my point...

CalhounSq said:

That's what it sounds like to me.

Hotlegs said:

im fucked up, you dont see me mutilating my skin trying to look lighter , bleaching my hair blonde, putting in green contact lenses







and calhoun about ur question about me being half white, it's nevr really been a problem since the black only shows out in my hair and i bleached it blonde so i pass for white

Xavier23 said:

Pardon the name change, I ran out of replies on this shit w/ y'all

Anyway... ... I understand what you said initially. BUT your rules for what constitutes "wanting to be white" are mighty strict & simply extreme. That's my point. There's a difference between a blonde weave & a blonde afro, no? And hell, sometimes a blonde weave is just a blonde weave. It's a little suspect but I wouldn't automatically assume that the wearer had a serious complex. I might wish another choice for them but damn, let a girl change up the color once in a while

Xavier23 said:

mmm wow...look at lil' Kim's hand-its still her origanal complexion now,i know she had 2 do somethin 2 her skin

Xavier23 said:

Well I've never had a blond weave. Have only every had one weave hated the shit and took it out the very next day. Never colored my hair. I've worn it natural, braided, twisted, permed, and pressed. So I don't have a complex. Sometimes it's all about convenience. You really need to check your self before you start passing judgement on others. Peace and hair grease.

Xavier23 said:

You got issues

On another note, I didn't realize Christina M. wore contacts (I guess) Never paid enough attention to her to realize

Crappallonia said:

OKay already, i get the poiny not evry black woman who wears a blonde wig wants to be white(although i nevr really said that..... okay maybe i did) i said that is ONE of the ways of trying to emulate the white "beautiful" look

Crappallonia said:

She does indeed need help . On a side note, I didn't know Christina wore contacts either. Hell, I guess you can never tell these days.
[Edited 4/25/05 18:54pm]

IT'S JUST AMAZING TO SEE THE DIFFERNET POINT OF VIEWS u get when start to talk about the inferiority complex. im writing a thesis on this topic for psychology course . thanks for your views

“The Modern Girl, Cosmetic Debates, and Racial Respectability in 1930s South Africa”


In the 1930s, a debate raged in the black South African newspaper Bantu World over school-educated unmarried young women, often referred to as the African “modern girl.” Some writers praised the modern girl for her wit, fashionable appearance, and self-assuredness. As one columnist put it, “when you ask her what chocolates she wants, she smiles brightly and says, ‘Chocolate Gingers please!’” With this anecdote, the columnist sought to convey that the modern girl was familiar with cosmopolitan things, knew what she wanted, and knew how to ask for it. Many other observers questioned the African modern girl's comportment and consumer habits, arguing that she was too self-indulgent, too reluctant to marry, and too concerned with imitating her “white sisters.”
This paper will examine these debates by focusing on how Bantu World advertisers, journalists, and letter writers defined, defended, and denounced young women’s use of cosmetics – specifically red lipsticks, white face powders, skin bleach creams, and hair straightening products. Founded in 1932 by white businessmen and edited by moderate black male nationalists, Bantu World, aimed to both cultivate and cater to black consumers. This paper will explore how, within the pages of Bantu World, cosmetic usage became one of the most common topics through which newspapers writers and readers considered whether school-educated African young women were vainly attempting to become white or elaborating fashionable appearances and hygienic practices that could contribute to “racial uplift.” It will also trace how the movement of African American entrepreneurs, products, and ideas into South Africa informed these debates about racial respectability and how these American elements were reworked amid the particularities of South Africa’s racial hierarchies. The paper’s conclusion will briefly consider these pre-World War II discussions in relation to the much more wide-ranging debates about the Modern Girl and cosmetics, specifically skin bleaches, that took place during the 1960s-1980s in postcolonial west and east Africa, and apartheid South Africa.
This paper represents an early step towards examining Modern Girl debates in Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa to produce a transnational history of gender politics, sexuality, and consumption in twentieth-century Anglophone Africa. It grows out of my ongoing work with the Modern Girl Around the World research group at the University of Washington, including six faculty members from the departments of English, History, International Studies, and Women Studies, and with regional expertise in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. Our group has developed the Modern Girl heuristic to explore the global emergence, during the 1920s and 1930s, of female figures identified by their cosmopolitan look, their explicit eroticism, and their use of specific commodities including make-up, toothpaste, and cigarettes. Whether known as flappers, moga, garçonnes, or simply modern girls, these figures appeared to reject the roles of dutiful daughter, wife, and mother through their engagement of imperial and international commodity cultures, mass media, and political discourses.
A monograph on Modern Girl debates in sub-Saharan Africa will provide a colonial/postcolonial counterpoint to existing literature that examines the Modern Girl in Europe, United States, and Asia. It also promises to contribute to and challenge Africanist historiography on women and gender at a number of different levels. First, it will explore the complex relations between local, regional, and international processes. Most studies of women and gender in Africa have examined local processes rather than tracing connections between colonies and countries. This project challenges that paradigm by drawing more than thirty years of nuanced scholarship on women and gender in east, west, and southern Africa into dialogue with a growing literature on the imperial and transnational movement of ideas, peoples, and things. Second, such a monograph will enable examination of how and why various “modernizing” projects in colonial/postcolonial contexts – whether promoted by missionaries, nationalists, or development experts – sought to reshape young women’s sexual desires and consumer habits. All these reform efforts sought to ensure that young women became well-disciplined mothers and wives who cared for their families and consumed wisely. A close reading of Modern Girl debates will illuminate the specific discourses and practices through which regulation of young women’s everyday practices became a pivotal part of “modernizing” projects.
The monograph’s third contribution will be to situate race as a key category of analysis in scholarship on women and gender in twentieth-century Africa. Too often Africanist historians and anthropologists have assumed racial categories and racist ideologies as the backdrop for studies of women’s agency or gender relations without exploring their everyday manifestations. This project foregrounds such exploration as contemporaries consistently debated the Modern Girl in racialized terms: would she contribute to “racial uplift” or was she just mimicking her African, African American, Coloured, European, or South Asian counterparts? Although race figured into the Modern Girl’s formation elsewhere, it was a particularly potent force in colonial and white-minority ruled Africa where the very distinction between the “modern” and the “traditional” was firmly rooted in racial logics.


Bantu World and the Cultivation of Women Readers and Consumers
The earliest sustained discussion of the African Modern Girl that my research assistants and I have yet found took place in the pages of Bantu World during the 1930s. As the Modern Girl was associated the world over with new interwar patterns of mass production and marketing, it is no coincidence that Bantu World was the first black newspaper in South Africa to promote consumerism on a broad scale and to attract substantial business support. The paper was founded in April 1932 by a white advertising salesman, Bertram Paver. Moderate black nationalists like R.V. Selope Thema edited and staffed the paper and by the end of 1932 one-half of the 38 shareholders were African. Bantu World’s black journalists were given broad latitude in determining the paper’s content as their political views largely overlapped with the liberalism espoused by the paper’s white management and investors. According to historian Les Switzer, Bantu World quickly became “the arbiter of taste in urban African politics and culture and by far the most important medium of mass communication for the literate African community.” Published out of Johannesburg, the economic capital of southern Africa following the mineral revolutions of the late nineteenth century, Bantu World insisted that “civilized,” particularly urbanized, blacks had important commercial and political roles to play in the new industrial South Africa. Bantu World, as Switzer has argued, elaborated the political concerns and “leisure-time activities of the African petty bourgeoisie.”
Discussions of female beauty and cosmetics featured prominently in the early years of Bantu World. In fact, the paper viewed these topics as key to attracting female readers. In October 1932, it introduced a women’s page, under the masthead “News of Interest to Women of the Race,” and launched a beauty competition. “All African Ladies” were invited to submit their “best photos for publication” and promised cash prizes. The paper explained its new attention to girls and women in an article written by “The Son of Africa,” perhaps editor Thema. The article evoked the contemporary nationalist axiom that “no nation can rise above its womenfolk.” Women’s progress was, the article-writer argued, an integral part of racial improvement. In keeping with the paper’s embrace of liberal political values, the writer singled out white women as the appropriate role models for African women: “Get into the open and face the world with your men, unashamed, undaunted, determined to emulate your white sisters in all that is noble, true, and good.” The article also explained the multiple motivations behind the beauty competition: to prove that “there are beautiful women and girls in Africa”; to promote “diligent perusal of enterprising Bantu newspapers”; and to encourage “careless or lazy [ladies] to give a little more attention to their toilet.” According to this logic, the beauty competition would simultaneously foster a female readership, race pride, and conscientious consumption.
Beginning in November 1932 and continuing for the next four months, Bantu World ran photos of the beauty competition entrants on the women’s page. The photos ranged from studio portraits of the contestant’s head and upper body to full-length snapshots taken outdoors (see figure 1). Some photos included more than one woman and, on occasion, a man. Suggesting the close connections between the beauty competition and other displays of racial pride and elite publicity, the women’s page for February 25, 1933 used the same format to feature nine photos of “Some of the Leading Women of the Race.” In the March 24th issue, the beauty contest winners were finally announced. Under the banner “Hail, Miss Africa, Queen of Beauty!,” the photos, names, reader vote totals, and towns of the top six finishers appeared (see figure 2).
What readily distinguishes the photos of the first and second place finishers is their open teeth-revealing smiles. In the initial article announcing the competition, “The Son of Africa” had impressed upon potential contestants the importance of smiling:
Smile sweetly while the camera clicks and post the result to the Editor of this paper . . . . The trouble with some of our ladies is that they do not know how to smile. Yet what a glorious transformation a smile can give to your features! Practise it in front of your mirror every morning before or after meals it does not matter when.

The full-smile Modern Girl look advocated by “The Son of Africa” and endorsed by Bantu World reader-voters had been promoted in the United States and around the world since the 1920s in toothpaste and cosmetic ads and by glamorous film stars. In the editorial that accompanied the competition results, Thema insisted that the “sole purpose” of the contest had been to cultivate reading among women and that altruism mattered more than beauty: while the “Bantu race is certainly proud of its beautiful women . . . it will be more proud of women who take interest in the welfare of the people, and whose purpose in life is to serve the community in which they live.” What ongoing debates about the Modern Girl in the pages of Bantu World make clear is that the emergence of a group of school-educated young women committed to community and racial betterment could not be disentangled from the cultivation of new cosmopolitan looks and consumptive practices, including smiling for the camera.

White Face Powder and Red Lipstick
Not all aspects of women’s new beauty culture could be so easily absorbed into Bantu World’s project of racial uplift. One of the most contentious issues surrounding the Modern Girl was her use of white face powder and red lipstick. Many journalists and letter-writers ranked the Modern Girl’s use of these cosmetics among her most disturbing “imitative” habits. A sub-headline from February 1933 announced “Daughters of Ham Take to Powdering their Faces.” The article’s author described how face powder had caused him to mistake a “pink-cheeked lady” for an Italian until she inquired in “faultless vernacular” (most likely Xhosa) about the winner of the Bantu World beauty competition. Within South Africa, “children of Ham” was a common epithet for Coloureds, the descendants of mixed marriages and sexual liaisons between Europeans, Khoisan peoples indigenous to the Cape region, and enslaved peoples brought from Southeast Asia, Madagascar, East Africa, and elsewhere during the Dutch colonial period. The young woman’s Coloured identity is further revealed when she invites the author to her birthday dinner “in one of the Malay Camp’s ‘aristocratic’ tenements.” In this article, face powder enables a Coloured Modern Girl to pass as an off-white European. It was only her interest in Bantu World’s beauty contest, expressed in an African language, that revealed her local identity.
A short story published a few months earlier suggested that not all black women, notably dark-skinned African women, could pull off such racial masquerade. Lena, the story’s protagonist, prepared for a night of dancing with her boyfriend by donning a “gorgeous gown” that she was sure would make other women “green with envy.” Lena then turned to applying her make-up: “She wanted to powder her face, but a wiser sense warned her that powder would make her look like a clown. Her face was too dark to be blessed by a touch of powder. She wished she had a light complexion.” Realizing that “wishing could not change her skin,” Lena resigned to “touch[ing] it here and there with glycerine.” Unlike the “pink-cheeked lady” who successfully lightened her skin color with powder, Lena could only make her skin glisten with dabs of an oily solvent. The story culminates with Lena arriving early at the dancehall only to find her boyfriend “patting the face of Gertie,” one of the women whom she had hoped to make envious. Within the story, Lena’s frustration with her inability to apply face powder foreshadows her disillusionment at the dancehall thus aligning dark skin color with romantic disappointment.
Many readers would have probably deemed Lena’s decision not to apply face powder to be a wise one. Beginning in March 1933, male journalist R.R.R. Dhlomo, the “Editress” of the women’s page and the author of the “Over the Tea Cups” and “R. Roamer” columns, launched a campaign against white powder and red lipstick. Through the voices of various literary creations, Dhlomo argued that these cosmetics looked foolish on faces that were “black as coal” and that “indiscriminate aping of European women was doing Bantu girls more harm than good.” According to Dhlomo, while there was nothing inherently wrong with lipsticks and powders, they did “not suit dark skins.” The use of white powder, in particular, Dhlomo wrote, was motivated by the shame of being black and the desire to look white. Suggesting other racial role models, he reminded readers that “some of the most beautiful of Eastern women have been admired for their dark olive skins.” Readers wrote letters in support of Dhlomo’s campaign, including one “Swanee” who testified that she had recently stopped wearing face powder and lipstick after realizing (with the help of a male friend) that the make-up made her look like a “guinea baboon.” She advised women to limit their cosmetic usage to “face-creams” that would moisturize their skin but not alter its color. Swanee warned readers that they would “never change from black to white.” Another letter writer noted that the Modern Girl’s “imitative” habits were not reciprocated by “European ladies” as they never wore imbola. Dhlomo and his supporters framed black women’s use of white powder as an unsightly racial betrayal.
In part, this Bantu World campaign against white face powder and red lipstick needs to be seen as a piece of wide-ranging debates about natural versus artificial beauty that took place in a variety of Modern Girl contexts. In her history of American beauty culture, Hope in a Jar, Kathy Peiss examines how concerns about the moral dangers of artifice animated discussions of cosmetics from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The most dramatic transformation in U.S. beauty culture over the twentieth century, according to Peiss, was the shift in cosmetic usage from being “a sign of disrepute” to being “the daily routine of millions.” In 1931, the year before Bantu World commenced, the Port Elizabeth office of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency compiled the results of an investigation into cosmetic usage in South Africa. Suggesting a growing consumer market, the report noted that urban “non-Europeans” (including Africans and Coloureds) tended to “echo” the social life of Europeans. The report, however, limited its discussion of make-up to European and Coloured women, explaining that they tended to use rouge powder, lipstick, and face powder sparingly: “its free use usually draws forth unfavourable comment.” At one level, then, condemnation in Bantu World of black women’s use of make-up was in keeping with broader notions of middle-class and petty-bourgeois respectability in South Africa, the United States, and elsewhere. Many contemporaries in Modern Girl contexts would have shared letter-writer L.T. Baleni’s sentiments that the “the original meaning of the word ‘Beauty ‘ . . . [is] ‘Natural Beauty’” and not the “modern meaning of ‘artificial beauty’” achieved through “powders and paints” as well short haircuts, gowns, and high heels.
Yet, as Peiss and other scholars of U.S. beauty culture including Noliwe M. Rooks, Ingrid Banks, and Maxine Leeds Craig have argued, concerns about natural versus artificial beauty have taken on a different salience when directed at black women living in contexts dominated by white racism. Critics have often denounced black women’s use of cosmetics and hair straightening products as demonstrating both their rejection of “natural “ aesthetics and their acceptance of Eurocentric beauty standards. As we have already seen in Bantu World, writers frequently paired accusations of artifice with arguments that black women were misguidedly mimicking white women. In a letter-to-the-editor, for example, M.F. Phala singled out the use of face powder as evidence of how “Bantu people” were not “proud” of their skin color. Unlike white women, black women criticized for using “artificial enhancers” including face powders and lipsticks were vulnerable to charges of racial shame and betrayal.
From analysis of Bantu World alone, it is difficult to know how black women who wore face powder and lipstick understood and responded to such charges. Male journalists and letter-writers penned most of the discussion. A letter by Sarah Ngcobo of Durban, however, suggests that some female readers became annoyed with the attention devoted to women’s cosmetics. Ngcobo wrote that she was “fed up” with reading articles that blamed “women, particularly young girls, for everything . . . . [including] for powdering their faces, for going out at night, for snaring other women’s husbands, for dressing expensively.” She requested the Editress to publish more “encouraging” and “educative” articles lest young women like herself “who try to do good will be tempted to give up.”
While Ngcobo depicted the cosmetics debate as a distraction from young women’s “good deeds,” another female author defended using powder and lipstick in moderation. In July 1935, one Miss Rilda Marta who had just returned from the United States urged “African ladies” to embrace the wisdom of African-American beauty culture entrepreneur Madame C.J. Walker: “They key to Happiness and Success is a good appearance. You are often judged by how you look.” Noting that even white women used “powder to make themselves lighter” and “lipstick and rouge to improve themselves,” Marta cautiously endorsed black women’s use of these cosmetics: “I do not mean that you should go and use lipstick and rouge because our colour is different to theirs; but if you do want to use some, remember there is a way of doing everything.” Marta, thus, evoked the examples of black women in the United States and white women in South Africa to persuade her readers that moderate cosmetic use could be an acceptable part of personal hygiene routines. Compared with Dhlomo and his supporters, Marta demonstrated a greater sympathy for the challenges that black Modern Girls faced in trying to achieve a cosmopolitan look and racial respectability.
Some women may have disagreed with the very meanings that Dhlomo and others attributed to their use of face powder and lipstick. Recent studies of African-American beauty culture have warned against assuming that black women’s use of white powder was about emulating white women and against reducing practices like hair straightening to “the desire to be white.” Instead, these scholars have emphasized the need to leave open the possibility of parody in black women’s use of white powders and to consider the varied meanings that black people having assigned to straightened hair, ranging from respectability to self-control to elevated class status. Similarly, in a recent analysis of hair politics in South Africa, Zimitri Erasmus recalls her own experience of hair straightening during the 1970s and 1980s as partly about “aspirations of whiteness in the coloured community in which I grew up” and partly a “ritual of affirmation for me as a young black women.” For Erasmus, while black hairstyles are always “mediated through racial imagery,” they are not “eternally trapped by ‘race.’” This scholarship suggests that when considering contexts dominated by white racism, like 1930s South Africa, black women’s use of cosmetics needs to be understood in relation to but not reduced to Eurocentric standards of beauty. We should be wary of reproducing the position of Dhlomo and his supporters who saw only racial mimicry and betrayal in black women’s use of white face powder and red lipstick.

Skin Bleaches
When it comes to skin bleaches, scholars of U.S. beauty culture have refrained from making arguments about multiple meanings and variable appropriations. In general, scholarship on African-American culture has devoted far more attention to hair straightening products than to lightening or bleaching creams. Beginning in at least the mid-nineteenth century in the United States, manufacturers marketed commercial skin bleaches containing lead and, later, mercury and hydroquinone to both white and black consumers. Contemporary medical journals chronicled the ill-health effects of many of these products, often scorning female patients for their vanity and desire to transgress the boundaries of “natural” beauty. As Peiss has argued in Hope in a Jar, women of European descent used skin whiteners (bleaches as well as white powders and paints) to achieve lighter complexions associated with “bourgeois refinement and racial privilege,” while African American women’s use of the same products similarly “reinforced a racialized aesthetic.”
Some African American newspapers, particularly from the 1910s onwards, denounced the use of skin bleaches as well as hair straighteners as a form of racial self-loathing. Black journalist George Schuyler most famously attacked the “hypocrisy” of skin bleaches in his Messenger columns and in his satiric novel, Black No More. By the 1920s, however, some of the most successful black-owned businesses manufactured and sold cosmetics, including hair straighteners and skin bleaches. Several of these companies, including Madame C.J. Walker, Poro, and Apex, were women-owned and marketed their products through a network of female agents who sold house-to-house. Although W.E.B. Du Bois’s journal The Crisis refused to run bleach ads, other black publications including The Afro-American (Baltimore) and Marcus Garvey’s Crusader and the Negro World received much of their revenue from advertising these products (see sample ads, figures 3 and 4). As Shane White and Graham White have argued, the success of black-owned cosmetic companies embodied African American women’s desire for “personal liberation” through self-improvement: “to an even greater extent than was true of the white beauty industry, black cosmetics were associated with modernity and, most importantly, with progress.” These American associations, debates, and products eventually made their way to the distinct but linked political and cultural contexts of South Africa.
The Modern Girl Around the World research group’s examination of the colonial press in China’s treaty ports, India, and South Africa has revealed that during the 1920s and 1930s bleach ads were largely directed at white women living in these outposts of European imperialism. Newspapers advertised products that promised to “whiten” the skin and remove sunburn and redness caused by the harsh elements of tropical climes. A pale complexion would have distanced these white women from the lower-class taint of outdoor manual labor. Based on a sampling of South African newspapers from the 1920s onwards, the earliest ad that my research assistants and I have found for a cosmetic product explicitly marketed as a “bleaching cream” is from a1927 issue of the Rand Daily Mail , an English-language paper that targeted a white readership. The ad features the line drawing of a bobbed-hair white Modern Girl holding binoculars at the seaside with the accompanying text proclaiming that “Nyal Face Cream with Peroxide” will “protect your skin against sunburn, windburn and chap” (see figure 5). This ad, consistent with the group’s findings, illustrates how advertisers of this period deployed Modern Girl figures to market products that altered or adjusted skin color. In South Africa, the late 1920s may also have been a time of heightened concern about skin color for some white women. During this period, many daughters from poor Afrikaner families migrated from their rural homesteads to urban areas in search of waged employment to support themselves and their families. Using bleaching creams and other cosmetics may have been one way that these young women sought to don a more urbane appearance, and to distinguish themselves from Afrikaans-speaking Coloured women.
The earliest ads for skin bleaches from the black South African press that we have found appeared in Bantu World in 1933 and promoted products for the New Jersey-based Apex Hair Company. Apex was one of the largest black-owned businesses in the U.S. during the 1920s and 1930s and, according to one of its Bantu World ads, the first “all Negro Company” in South Africa. Although Bantu World had previously run ads for hair straighteners (“Kinko: The Famous American Hair Straightener” and “The Lion Hair Straightner”), the Apex ads were the first to promote a skin bleach alongside of various hair straightening and strengthening products, soaps, and facial creams.
In contrast to earlier hair straightener ads that featured images of carefully-groomed men (for example, see figure 6), Apex ads included line drawings of black Modern Girls. One Apex ad featured a bobbed-haired Modern Girl in a sleeveless evening dress gazing into a handheld mirror (see figure 7). The accompanying text promoted a hair straightener, a hair strengthener, and a skin bleach that “instantly lightens complexion.” Another Apex ad featured a bobbed-haired beautician combing the long straight hair of a client (see figure 8) and promoted a long list of beauty preparations including hair products, a deodorant, a skin bleach, and, interestingly in light of the ongoing Bantu World debate, face powder of “all shades.” Later Apex ads included a photograph of a light-skinned black woman with a straightened short hairdo and the American-sounding name “Mrs. E. Garson” (see figure 9, for example). Garson may have been an Apex agent from the United States who decided to set up business in South Africa. Various ads described Garson as a “regular user of and firm believer in APEX products” and provided her address as 66a Gold St., Johannesburg while inviting readers to visit the Apex show room housed in the Bantu World Building on Hardy Street. By providing the name, photo, and address of an Apex user resident in South Africa and inviting readers to a show room housed in the newspaper’s own building, such ads sought to make these U.S.-made products more familiar and accessible to black South African consumers, and to indicate the close connections between Bantu World and Apex. In a further attempt to localize the marketing campaign, some Apex ads provided product descriptions in Setswana (see figure 10). Suggesting that Mrs. Garson was beginning to develop a network of Apex agents in South Africa, this same ad encouraged readers, in English, to join the Apex School of Beauty Culture & Hairdressing and proclaimed: “It will make you independent by giving you a valuable profession.” The Apex campaign depended on developing a local resonance for African American enterprise.
A few months after the first Apex ads appeared, Bantu World ran an article on and accompanying photo of the founder and president of the Apex Hair Company, Madame Sara S. Washington. Elaborating this African-American businesswoman as a commercial and cultural role model for black South Africans, the article carried the headline, “Remarkable Business Acumen of Negro Woman Shown in Her Work.” The article discussed how the Apex Company and Beauty Colleges had created profitable “legitimate business” opportunities for many black women in the United States and how the Company was “one of America’s largest concerns doing an international business.” The final paragraphs explained that the Company’s arrival in South Africa meant that “hundreds of young men and women” could follow “in the footsteps of this great American Negro Concern” and that the “Bantu race,” more broadly, could benefit from using beauty products “so successfully manufactured for them by their brothers and sisters in America.” According to the article’s logic, racial uplift could be practiced and diasporic affinities forged through the manufacture and purchase of cosmetics that, among other things, promised to lighten the appearance of black consumers; after all, some blacks had already achieved tremendous commercial success through marketing these same products in the United States.
Bantu World did not publish any commentary on or reaction to the Sara Washington article or the Apex ad campaign. This silence is notable given that they appeared in 1933 at the height of Dhlomo’s campaign against white face powder and red lipstick. As was the case with segments of the African American press and bleach manufacturers, editors of Bantu World may have viewed the advertising revenue to be gained from Apex or its agent(s) as placing their products beyond reproach. The silence may also reflect limited consumer interest in the company’s products. The Apex ad campaign stopped after fifteen months, suggesting that either the limited demand for the products could not justify the advertising expenses or that the close working relationship between Bantu World and Mrs. Garson had come to an end, perhaps because she returned to the United States.
In 1936 and 1937, Bantu World carried ads for another line of African American cosmetics, Sweet Georgia Brown Beauty Products. Like the Apex ads, these ones encouraged readers to “ be independent” by writing to the company’s Chicago office and becoming sales agents (see figure 11). They featured the faces of a black man and woman. Both had straightened hair, the woman’s in a bob. The man’s skin was white while half of the women’s face was white and the other half, dark gray, demonstrating the power of the company’s bleach cream. Although these early campaigns may not have convinced many Bantu World readers to buy and use their products during the 1930s, they are significant for revealing how commercial skin bleaches targeting black consumers first reached the shores of South Africa through African American enterprise and how these early skin bleach appeals proposed Modern Girls as key consumers and agents.
The first and perhaps only Bantu World piece to specifically criticize skin bleaches appeared in 1939 and was a letter penned by James R. Korombi of Johannesburg. Korombi chided “African youth” who sought to straighten their “woolly hair” and “even attempted to change their colour with expensive cosmetics.” Evoking the long-standing distinction between natural and artificial beauty, he held adults responsible for much of the problem:
The purpose of refinement is not to enable people to change their hair and skin but is to make them naturally perfect; and therefore grown-ups who encourage the youth to cultivate such habits of adopting artificial outlooks should be blamed. In brief, African youth can learn to have respect for and be proud of their race and colour on condition that the adults become responsible for and be capable of imbuing them with a spirit of national pride, unity and patriotism.

In contrast to earlier writers who criticized African women’s use of face powder and lipstick as a vain attempt to become white, Korombi identified other objects of racial mimicry: “African youth could be taught to be proud of their race and colour and should not be encouraged to pretend to be Indians or Coloureds.” This remark suggests that although commercial skin bleaches targeting black South Africans originated in the United States, they quickly became entangled with the particularities of South African racial hierarchies. According to Korombi, African youth’s use of hair straighteners and skin bleaches was not about looking white but passing for a lighter shade of black.
A new line of cosmetics, claiming to be attuned to South African particularities, appeared in Bantu World in 1939. Keppels seems to have been a South African company: the ads touted local rather than foreign affiliations and the products were marketed through chemists rather than sales agents. The Bantu World ad featured three sets of drawings to promote three different products (see figure 12). The first drawing was of a pimply gray-skinned black man and accompanied the text and image for Keppels Acne Cream. The second featured three versions of a black woman’s face, shifting from gray, pimply, and stoic to white, clear, and smiling after using Keppels Freckle Wax that “makes the face lighter in colour.” Freckle Wax was a common euphemism for skin bleaches, often used in the United States, at least, when appealing to white consumers. The ad’s final drawing was of a dancing white-skinned black couple, the man in a tuxedo and the woman looking decidedly like a Modern Girl with her flattering and flowing gown, short hairdo, and open smile. The accompanying text read as follows:
SHE’S THE SMARTEST WOMAN IN THE HALL – thanks to Keppels Face Powder, Olive Tint.
Keppels Face Powder (Olive tint) is especially recommended for dark ladies. Don’t use pink or naturelle – insist on Olive colour! This wonderful powder stays on all night at dances and costs only 3/6 per large box.
YOUNG MEN! BUY YOUR LADY FRIEND A BOX OF KEPPELS FACE POWDER (OLIVE TINT).

Keppels offered black South African women skin bleach under the guise of Freckle Wax and a face powder, like Apex’s various “shades,” specifically tinted for “dark ladies.” Keppels’s development and designation of “olive tint” may have been a direct response to the earlier debates over white (“pink” or “naturelle”) face powder. Dhlomo, in fact, had singled out Eastern women’s “dark olive” complexions as a skin color long worthy of admiration .
Based on an ad that appeared in the Cape Times in 1945, Keppels soon shifted its color schema from olive to avocado (including an avocado face powder, foundation cream, skin food, and cold cream) and adopted a marketing strategy that more clearly asserted a claim to South African specificities (see figure 13). Although the Cape Times was a daily newspaper aimed at both white and Coloured readers, the avocado-tinted make-ups and dark gray skin color of the ad’s primary female image suggest that Keppels was targeting the latter group. Rather than directly discussing skin color as did many of the Bantu World ads, the Cape Times ad situated climate as the “difficult local beauty problem.” The ad featured a blustery outdoors scene and its largest type read: “SOUTH AFRICAN CLIMATE RAVAGES COMPLEXIONS but Youthful Beauty can be preserved with Keppels cosmetics.” By stating that Keppels had undertaken an “exhaustive, scientific study” of South African beauty challenges, the ad combined claims to both specific and universal forms of knowledge. These Keppels ads suggest the varied ways that a South African cosmetics company appealed to a racially-segmented market by deploying the euphemism “Freckle Wax” for its skin bleach, by asserting scientific command of local conditions, and by reconfiguring distinctions of color as matters of climate.

Conclusion
In the post-World War II period, the marketing and sale of cosmetics, specifically skin bleaches, expanded dramatically in southern, east, and west Africa. Crucial to this expansion was the growth of black media, particularly the South African popular magazine Drum that featured the glamour and grittiness of black urban life. Begun in 1951 in Johannesburg, Drum became one of the most influential publications in sub-Saharan Africa with regional editions published from Nairobi, Lagos, and Accra. Ads for skin bleaches appear early in Drum and, by the 1960s, many issues feature a dozen or more such ads, often occupying prominent positions including the colored inside front cover and outside back cover. An Artra skin bleach ad that appeared in the Lagos edition of Drum in 1962(see figure 14) echoes the earlier Bantu World ads that featured Modern Girl figures and American affinities. Like the Cape Times Keppels ad, it also appeals to scientific knowledge.
From the 1960s onwards, the growth in sales of skin bleaches was accompanied by increasingly vocal criticism of them by black nationalists and medical professionals. In 1971, the Kenyan National Assembly banned a skin bleach ad playing at cinemas that insinuated that “new Africans” were “light skinned Africans who had used Ambi.” Tanzania banned skin bleaches along with wigs, mini-skirts, short shorts, and tight trousers in 1968 as part of African socialism’s efforts to safeguard youth against the “moral decadence “ of Western culture. Under Idi Amin’s leadership, Uganda followed suit in 1972. In South Africa, Black Consciousness, a movement that advocated black pride and political self-reliance and posed significant challenges to the apartheid state by the mid-1970s, also denounced the use of skin bleaches. Around this same time, medical practitioners in several parts of the continent, including Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, and Senegal had begun to recognize and report on the ill-health effects of skin bleaches containing ammoniated mercury, monobenzone, and hydroquinone. Many of their studies identified the primary users of skin bleaches as school-educated young women. In 1991 and 2001, respectively, South African and Kenya governments introduced wide-ranging health bans on these products.
This paper originated in a desire to situate skin bleach debates since the 1960s within a longer history of discussion about the Modern Girl and cosmetics. In South Africa, skin bleach ads targeting white women date back to, at least, the late 1920s and those targeting black women to, at least, the early 1930s. As Peiss has argued for the United States, both white and black women’s use of skin bleaches reinforced a racialized aesthetic that privileged light-colored or pale skin. During the 1930s, Bantu World debates over white face powder, red lipstick, hair straighteners, and skin bleach creams revolved around issues of racial respectability: was it possible for black women to use some or all of these products to cultivate cosmopolitan appearances without betraying their race?
Answers to this question were varied and complex. R.R.R. Dhlomo, the “Editress” of Bantu World’s women’s page, denounced black women’s use of these products as unsightly racial mimicry and received substantial support from readers. A couple of black South African women responded either by situating the cosmetics debates as a distraction from young women’s good deeds or by advocating cosmetic use in moderation. At the same time, Bantu World ran ads by African American companies and their agents promoting the use and sale of hair straighteners and skin bleaches (alongside other beauty products) as a path towards self-improvement and liberation. One letter writer suggested how these African American products quickly became entangled in the particularities of South Africa’s racial order in which African use of hair straighteners and skin bleaches could be associated with passing for Indian or Coloured rather than looking white. The range of these answers reveals that, even as early as the 1930s, South Africa women’s efforts to create a fashionable look were already enmeshed in transnational commodity and cultural flows, and the subject of nationalist political concern.

Xavier23 said:

White women wear blonde weaves all the time. I see it alot while watching Young & The Restless. Look at that above pic of Paris compared to the way she is on The Simple Life, WEAVE WEAVE WEAVE. All girls waer weaves in their life. Now it's just kind of more evident that the "lighskinned" sista in black industry (especially for video ho's) are more wanted than a chocolate sista.

Xavier23 said:

You did... repeatedly

paisleypark4 said:

HAVE YOU EVR WONDERED WHY???


* begins to write new thesis*

I'll just say this to all my black & latina sistas(light, dark or in-between) - please don't buy what Madison Avenue & the media's trying to sell you. Leave your natural beauty alone. This brotha love y'all just the way you are.

paisleypark4 said:

Exactly!!!

My goodness what have I started? I'm happy I brought this topic up, though I didn't mean for everyone to get so hostile about it.

To Xavier23, Do you consider yourself black or white? I think I kind of unsertand what you're trying to say when you talk about black women wanting to be white when they alter themselves this way but I certainly don't think it's the case for everyone. Sometimes we just want to change the color though i've never dyed my hair before.

Unfortuanetly black people have a lot of issues, yes, all of us!! We're all prejudiced amongst our own people. very sad. How many times have you heard some one say "ooh, she got good hair" about someone whose hair is not so kinky. I can't stand that term "good hair" what the fuck is that? I always wear my hair braided for 2 reasons, 1, it really suits me better than any other style and trust me i've tried everything and 2, it's simple to style. Once I get it braided I don't have to deal with it for 2 months.

I honestly think that black men discriminate us ganist darker skinned women more than anyone else. I know a lot of black women of all shades find dark skinned guys very attractive yet black mean only want a light skinned trophy they can go and flaunt back to their friends. Sad but true.

One of my favorite models is Alek Wek. One should not feel ashamed about their color, race, religion or anything like that. It's awful when people judge. I find beauty in the palest of the pale (Rose McGowan) to the darkest of the dark (Alek Wek).

dancerella said:

Dancerella, you knew that this was going to be a touchy subject. So don't sweat it!

Now if you really want some controversial research, check out Race Relations In 20th Century New Orleans Louisiana History.

When it comes to subject of skin color, Dark vs. Light was far worse in New Orleans (IMHO) than anywhere else in American History.

And everything basically hit the fan during the 1980's as well. I remember firsthand watching the light-skin (red) black men being able to have as many options of women of their choosing (including black, red, white, latina, & asian). Meanwhile, the dark-skin (jet black/brown) black men had to settle for whatever was left (and even if white or latina was still an option, it was only the full-figured ones. Asians was alomst never an option at all. And some dark-skinned black women rejected them for the light/red ones)!!!

Sad indeed!

TonyVanDam said:

Yeah, I kind of knew this would be a hot topic but it is something that I thought we could talk about here and see what everyone else thought. I was happy that most people didn't care about skin tone but then again we're all Prince fans, therefore we're a lot more open minded than fans of some other artists. I wonder what people would say on this topic on 50 Cents board?

Thanks for the tip on the race relations book. I'd liek to check it out! It must have been 10 times worse back then.

dancerella said:

There's a movie that covers this issue. It's called FEAST OF ALL SAINTS. It was originally a book by Anne Rice, yes she writes other stuff too. The cast in the movie is BEAUTIFUL. One of the loves of my life is in the movie, Daniel Sunjata.