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The Black Beauty and the Beast
By Waldron H.
Giles, Ph.D
Now in its third
year, the tragic irony of
Proctor & Gamble’s (P&G) “My
Black is Beautiful Campaign” moves on to continue the
exploitation of low self-esteem, the false idolatry of
star power, and the enormous purchasing power of Black
women. The latest twist in this two century old con
game is to search for “real” people to serve as models
to represent P&G’s version of “My Black is Beautiful.”
It is interesting
that there now is a personal possessive pronoun
associated with Black and Beautiful. Back in the day it
was a collective thing for all of us to Be Black and
Beautiful. However, since Black women choose to spend
more than three times more of their disposable income on
beauty products than the rest of the entire female
population; it becomes important to fathom the deep
rooted reasons why Black women feel the necessity to
spend their hard earned dollars for a “My Black is
Beautiful” campaign. These reasons do not obscure the
not so subtle message within the "My" which attempts to
economically divide a group of common-bonded people that
have collectively borne, over the ages, the wrath of
P&G,
GE,
J P Morgan,
Standard Oil,
E I DuPont, etc. as
these major corporations utilized the profits from
slavery to project and amplify their versions of white
superiority. Implicitly the "My" states: I, personally,
am financially able to spend large portions of my
unequal disposable income to purchase a commercially
defined false sense of beauty and if you (my sisters)
can’t afford to pay, then you are deemed ugly, have made
no progress toward integration into the American dream,
and you still bear the stains of plantation ignorance.
The tragic ironic
history of
My Black Beauty Campaign is that
Proctor & Gamble has a history of denigrating Black beauty and
through its strong participation in eugenic experiments
which destroyed both Black lives and self-images in
order to advance the imperialistic concept of white
superiority.
Dr. Clarence J. Gamble, one of the early
descendants of the Gamble soap empire actively
participated in eugenic sterilization practices on Black
women and men in North Carolina and Alabama. Dr. Gamble
became the southern regional director of the
Birth
Control Federation of America, a sadistic euphemistic
methodology, for limiting Black population growth after
the Civil War. Some years later this concept was
amplified by Henry Kissinger, former secretary of State
who was quoted “Depopulation should be the highest
priority of foreign policy towards the third world,
because the US economy will require large and increasing
amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less
developed countries.”
The titles of these
eugenic organizations were chosen so as to hide the real
intent of the organization, i.e., the eradication of
Black people. Eugenic organizations were supported by
most of the wealthy families in the US prior to and
during the exportation of these eugenic procedures
Nazi
Germany where all sorts of ghoulish procedures were
employed on Jews, Poles, Russians, and Gypsies,
Again, we are being tricked into worshipping the
false
gods which history has proven will continue to envelop
us in poverty and misery.
P&G, cares less about our
future and the future of our children as it sees only
dollars from a market that they played an evil hand in
its construction. Since we do not write our own history
and our memories are limited
P&G can brainwash us into
thinking we are ugly and then turn around and sell us
trinkets and trash that would make us "beautiful." We
need the real history to make us whole and then beauty
will radiate from within this wholeness. Since the
wholeness renders the purchase of beauty products
meaningless; we also gain security since our hard earned
dollars can now be used for other necessary items that
are more important in our lives and the lives of our
children. For example, had we invested in something
that would create jobs for our sisters, brothers, and
children then retribution for
P&G’s past and current
sins would be even sweeter!
For a moment let us
examine the Black experiences here in the US. Blacks
have become the model consumer since their per capita
consumption of products far outpaces other ethnic groups
with higher per capita incomes. There are good reasons
for why this is so. Black for the first 200 years of
their existence in the US were prohibited from all
participation in the market. After the Civil War,
segregation further limited Black participation in the
market. The Civil Rights campaign, the drive for
integration, quickly led to a pent-up market demand by
Blacks. This pressure of this demand was fueled by some
250 years of denial caused by slavery and segregation.
When the flood gates opened Blacks flocked to the market
to buy with any and everything by any means necessary.
Retailers had finally constructed and could service a
group of people who just wanted to buy and cared little
about quality and the quid pro quo between purchaser and
the market. Normally the products consumers buy create
jobs where the consumer is employed and via this
employment becomes more financially capable to purchase
more. However, these markets of deprived Blacks
appeared to care only to consume without considering to
other parameters in the market/production cycle, i.e.,
equal pay, demographic representation in the labor
market at all employment levels, and equal pricing.
With Blacks the market could provide lower quality,
charge more, and siphon a larger percentage of their
disposable income without being held accountable for
equal representation on pay day. The credit industry
which made purchasing possible maintained higher credit
rates for Blacks than whites.
Within this structure,
the white superiority was re-enforced with the myth that
Blacks were higher credit risks. The exploited Black
consumer had been created by setting various concepts
and practices in place that would render and continue to
render Black people as inferior consumers. This in
itself conditioned the Black consumer into the ideal
consumer since it was considered an honor for Blacks to
purchase goods and the more he or she purchased the
higher on the individual worth scale he or she became.
It was now possible to condition the consumer and the
market to the everlasting benefit to the bottom line.
P&G and their corporate peers began to understand very
well, that the Black market is the most lucrative market
in the land of the free! For this exploitation concept
to work effectively some of the US citizens had to be
freer than others. A reasonable comparison would be to
look at the pent-up demand after a war where rationing
has been lifted. Consumers rush to the market place
to
buy with unlimited energy. However, racially pent-up
demands are more easily controlled than the initiation
and termination of wars and with continuous manipulation
this demand can continue for generations instead of
years. We can now appreciate
P&G and their market
manipulation via
My Black is Beautiful.
A
P&G
survey found
that 80 percent of Black women are disenchanted with the
way they are portrayed in the media.
P&G participated
in making 80% of Black women disenchanted with their
eugenic participations of the past. They manipulated
the market which in turn led to an ethnic beauty market
that is extremely large and has grown by double digits
within the last five years, in spite of an extremely severe
recession. It is proof that slavery generated pent-up
demands outlive the participating generation and is
money in the bank when corporations can control your
image over generations; in fact this is the ultimate
control which continues some 150 years after the end of
slavery. We, after all of these years, should control
our own image!
The heartening fact
is that
P&G
can see the value of our money far beyond our ability to
target and leverage it into something that is going to
reap greater tangible benefits than a coating over our
eyes. It would make better sense to let
P&G
know that we want more for our children than an eye
shadow. We want our children to have security, a
college education, jobs, etc. Merely giving us a real
person who personifies
My Black Beauty just doesn’t get it! We need and
deserve more and we will shop elsewhere or better yet,
stop shopping, until we get what we deserve.
What
Gamble and the
other disciples of Eugenics believed is—if Western
civilization were to survive, the physically unfit, the
materially poor, the spiritually diseased, the racially
inferior, and the mentally incompetent had to be
suppressed and isolated, and eventually eliminated.
After all the earth has limited natural resources and
survival of the fittest means the survivors are the one
who are able to control the earth’s resources. Being
the victims of sterilization experiments
in North Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, and even Harlem to
name a few; makes it virtually impossible to develop a
healthy self-esteem. By virtue of these methods of
destruction of healthy self-images it is now possible to
turn these victims into massive targets of opportunity.
In this ultimate capitalistic model, befitting some
serious case studies by any Harvard MBA student, is the
methodologies employed first to create inferior
self-beliefs and then to sell them personalized products
that the victims believe will cure this socially
induced sense of inferiority. Since the sense of
inferiority is false, thus the purchased items to make
one beautiful are also false. Purchasing false
ideals is not the worse sin. The greater sin is
the destruction of the self-development that wreaks
havoc over many, many generations. As Eleanor
Roosevelt was quoted saying "No
one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
The mistake of not
knowing the full history of P&G allows us to forget
about all of the beautiful women of our culture who
developed their beauty without buying it. Women like
Lena Horne, Sojourner Truth, Ruby Dee, Harriet Tubman,
Zora Neale Hurston, Phyllis Wheatley, and many, many
more. These women were inherently beautiful and needed
no self-esteem boosters-in-a-bottle to move them upward
and onward. The important side benefit is that they
conserved their hard earned resources for the more
important aspects of personal development which
ultimately paved the way for racial upward movement in
some rather perilous times. They did not allow the likes
of P&G with their historic demagoguery of superiority to
either define our own Black beauty or manipulate our
Black minds into to purchasing their trinkets and trash.
Our own definitions of beauty
determine our future and will continue to be our best
defense against our eugenic demise. To condition our
own minds is to seize both - the time and our destiny.
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My
Black Is Beautiful (Episode 1)—Defining Black Beauty
/
My Black is Beautiful (Episode 2)—Shades of Black
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“My
Black Is Beautiful” Campaign Connects With
Black Women
The
campaign which includes a series of events
across the country and a show in its second
season on BET, has received a huge boost by
its association with celebrities such as
Queen Latifah and
Angela Bassett.
Three
years ago, “My Black is Beautiful” was an
idea that was created by African American
employees of the company. A campaign meant
to start a conversation about beauty and
change the negative portrayals of Black
women in the various forms of media.
Currently, over 70 percent of African
American women feel that they’re portrayed
negatively by the news media. The goal of
the program is to encourage Black women of
all ages to define and promote their own
beauty standard.
News One |
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Procter & Gamble's 'My
Black' Campaign
connects with
African-American women
The "My
Black is Beautiful" television show on the
BET network began its second season in May,
featuring a half-hour of talk and features
on health and beauty and culture. Hosted by
actress Tasha Smith, the show has delved
into cultural issues as well as trends in
accessories, lipstick and hair coloring.
My
Black is Beautiful has gone on the road to
Chicago, Atlanta and Charlotte, bringing
celebrities and "pop-up salons" in free,
open-to-the-public events that offer skin
analysis, hair consultations and makeovers.
In April, P&G kicked off the second season
of the TV show with a similar event and
salon at the company's downtown Cincinnati
headquarters. |
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The campaign
sponsored the Essence Music Festival July 2-4 in New
Orleans, where it set up a "Bronze Goddess Spa."
Appointments were booked within two hours of opening,
P&G spokesperson Felisa Insignares says.
The campaign is
about improving black women's image of themselves,
offering a forum for information and expression and
promoting loyalty to P&G beauty brands.Cincinnati
News
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The State of African Education
(April 200)
Attack On Africans Writing Their Own
History Part 1 of 7
Dr Asa Hilliard III speaks on the assault of academia on
Africans writing and accounting for their own history.
Dr Hilliard is A
teacher, psychologist, and historian.
Part 2 of 7
/
Part
3 of 7 /
Part 4 of 7
/
Part 5 of 7 /
Part 6 of 7 /
Part 7 of 7
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John Henrik Clarke—A Great and Mighty Walk
This
video chronicles the life and times of the
noted African-American historian, scholar
and Pan-African activist
John Henrik Clarke
(1915-1998). Both a biography of Clarke
himself and an overview of 5,000 years of
African history, the film offers a
provocative look at the past through the
eyes of a leading proponent of an Afrocentric view of history. From ancient
Egypt and Africa’s other great empires,
Clarke moves through Mediterranean
borrowings, the Atlantic slave trade,
European colonization, the development of
the Pan-African movement, and present-day
African-American history. |
 |
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 18 August 2010 |
