Natural Black Beauty
and Black Drag
Margo Natalie Crawford
As some male writers and visual artists in the Black Arts Movement attempted to castrate white power and render it feminine, black women were often objectified as the embodiments of black beauty ("African Queens" and "natural black beauty"). The male gaze of some Black Arts poets and photographers objectified black women even as it engaged in the laudable attempt to remove black women from the dominant visual culture that continues to define quintessential femininity through the sign of the white woman's body. The body of the black woman was often imagined as the motherland, the receptacle for the black (male-dominated) nation, and this black motherland became the ambiguously gendered space between the black phallus (the male position in the Black Arts ethos) and feminized whiteness.
In "Natural Black Beauty" (1969), an essay in Black Arts: An Anthology of Black Creations, poet Joe Goncalves explains the "Black is Beautiful" ideology of the 1960s in the following manner: "As for our natural beauty: Our lips complement our noses, our noses 'go with' our eyes and they all bless our skin, which is black. If your face does not complement itself, you are in a degree of trouble.… The real geometry of our faces, the natural geometry in terms of art is found, among other places, in African sculpture. Our natural architecture, our natural rhythm."1 The idea of natural black beauty was a key part of the body politics of the Black Arts Movement. Black Arts participants often imagined that the black body was the most local site of the black nation that needed to be protected from dominant beauty standards. The new physical beauty standards privileged looking "natural" and looking "African." "Africa" signified nature, roots, authenticity, and purity within this Black Arts imagination. Clothing and hairstyles that were deemed "African" became signs of this natural black beauty. The short "afro" hairstyle began to be named the "natural." The cover story of a 1967 issue of