"Colorism for white people" 😳 That's exactly it. I have red hair, and while I always loved it, I definitely felt all the cultural baggage that came with both having red hair and *not* having blonde hair. I got to be "special" in a way, but not in the same way blonde is "special". I never connected it with white supremacy but that makes so much sense. Being just a notch below in the hierarchy is a strange place of privilege to occupy. It has a lot on common with my experience being a white woman.
A different perspective: I am one of the rare naturally blonde adults. I have oculocutaneous albinism, and I am naturally a platinum blonde. I also have blue eyes - the whole red eyes thing is a myth. That can occur in other animals, but humans with albinism typically have blue or gray eyes. I did not inherit those traits from either of my parents. My OCA is caused by a genetic copying error. Some forms of albinism are heritable, but they are recessive genes - none of them are associated with a race. I'm also legally blind from birth - albinism causes vision loss. I've simultaneously spent my life being excluded from pretty privilege because beauty is for able-bodied people, and punished for other peoples' beauty standards because I am a blonde with blue eyes - but I'm also disabled, so I don't have that social cover that able-bodied people have. I'm simultaneously excluded and treated with hostility and suspicion by white people - and also treated as a scapegoat for white people. (This is the experience of someone who has white features - people with albinism with obviously nonwhite features have their own experiences. Albinism occurs in every race.) So yes, blonde is a racial identity - but it is also very much a hair color.
I'm old enough to remember the hair color ads that said, "If I only have one life to live, let me live it as a blond!" Marilyn Monroe dyed her hair to the point where she was losing it; you can see the lace edge of a wig in one of her photos. She also dyed her pubic hair so that she could be 'blond all over,' a process that was unhealthy and painful. We can't free ourselves from these stereotypes until we become aware of them. Thank you for helping us do it!
I have red hair. I was told by a very conservative hairdresser that I should go blonde. That I was so lucky that my hair would let me do that easily and that my skin color could pull it off. I would be so pretty, she said. The first time my red haired son was told he should dye his hair someday, he was a toddler. They hate redheads. It’s like we’re people who refuse to be both white and blonde or something. It’s bizarre.
I have always adored red hair and hate that it gets such a negative reaction, I used to try and make my hair look naturally red with henna as a teenager! My partner is a natural redhead, but dyes it purple (because neither of us ever grew out of our goth "phase"), I love when his natural roots come through but he got bullied something rotten for it as a kid.
It IS bizarre. Red hair is special and rare. Traditionally, the rare traits were the sought-after ones. 🤔 It is both a shame (red hair is really beautiful) AND illogical.
I'm a ginger too. My mother always hated my hair (the red comes from my dad's mom's side & she didn't get along with his mom - she was also racist, so now it makes more sense) & poured strong tea on it to "tone it down". I've always disliked blonde hair because it seems so colorless to me. As I've gotten older (I'm in my 50's),my hair has started getting lighter & to keep it from being mistaken for blonde (even "strawberry blonde), I've started using a henna rinse to keep it my natural auburn color (redheads rarely go gray, it just gets lighter reddish blonde until it goes white).
My natural hair went through all the shades of blonde, and it's now the shade of old asphalt. Even family members told me "Your hair isn't supposed to be that dark" and I had to tell them "well it grew out of my head that colour"
A common coloration in my mother's family was being born with dark hair that turned blonde or even white blonde. As you aged, it would darken to a dishwater blonde. And, by the time your hair started turning white, it would look like your original color was dark or even black.
Thank you for talking about this. I grew up in a pretty culty wing of American evangelicalism, and from my very earliest childhood, my father talked about wishing that my mother and I would dye our dark brown hair blonde. On my first day of second grade at a school run by the church, a little blonde girl told me that she wasn't allowed to be friends with me because I was "dark". (Context: my skin is the color of spoiled milk and my eyes are hazel. My favorite color at that age was bright turquoise, which I wore all the time. The only "dark" thing about me was my hair.) I later realized that my dad's disapproval of my hair color (and texture) was partly about wanting to cover up my mother's Jewish heritage, which was bad enough, but everyone ELSE was just being straight-up hair racist. I always explained it to people like this: The community was so white that they had a hierarchy of white people so they could still have someone to be racist at. I had people tell me I'd be lucky to get a husband, as "ugly" as I was, although a couple of people were into my "exotic" features, which wasn't an improvement. I always wondered why blonde hair was so prized in women in particular...but the connection to childlike features was not one I'd made. Fun hack for my fellow brunettes: if you want to make a white supremacist's head explode, say you're getting lowlights.
I remember when I was a little girl being sad because all the Barbie dolls were blonde. There were black Barbies, but no white ones with dark hair. All I wanted was a doll that looked like me. Now they come in all colors, shapes, sizes, hair colors, etc, which is great!
Same! I grew up in NorthWest Russia, in small town, and I had very dark hair and eyes, and almost everyone had much lighter hair and eyes. And the beauty standards of the time were very much blonde-thin-blue eyed girls, both due to western pop culture influence and Russian nationalism being at its peak back then. How many times I heard that "real Slavs" are supposed to have blonde or rather light hair and blue or grey eyes
I had passed-down, old-fashioned Barbie dolls with brunette hair and white skin and so, of course I dreamed of having Malibu Barbies. Some of this is just human nature. I couldn't figure out why all my friends wanted to play with my dolls and I always wanted to play with theirs.
Was raised Mormon, so, SO much internalized racism growing up (family tree is 1/4 Puerto Rican, 1/4 Italian, the rest Irish/Scottish/Welsh) and long after I stopped going to church when I was 16, dyed my very dark brown hair blonde for over a decade and was praised endlessly for it. Never again! Stopped in 2019 and let it grow out. Will do whatever I can to tell my toddler every day as she grows up how beautiful her brown hair and brown eyes are. ❤❤❤
When you're Eastern European but the "short curvy Jewish kind with dark hair" 🤣🤣🤣 anyway, thank you for breaking this down. I think especially a lot of gentlemen don't understand about blondness, femininity, and white supremacy. (Most dark-haired girls know that they'll never be considered as "beautiful" as if they were blonde. It's preposterous.)
I have two tow headed kids and I’m never sure what to say when people get excited about how blonde they are. Like, it makes sense from the fact that it is more rare (just like how natural red hair can be exciting to see), and people tend to make small talk about whatever is unusual, but the fact that it’s so racially tied up makes it complicated. I’ve also wondered if my kids are treated better and given more slack than brunette white kids. We associate blondeness with purity and innocence. I wonder if I would feel more pressure to keep my kids’ hair super neat all the time if they were brunette (I let their hair be messy in public more than I would like). I know that if they were black then keeping their hair neat would be more of a survival/safety issue.
🤯 I was a tow-head kid and I’ve only ever dyed my hair for fun with Halloween-type intentions. I’m currently watching it turn gray with anticipation & curiosity. So I NEVER understood the bottle blonde thing until you added it to the list of other ways women try to be pre-pubescent for the male-phile gaze… it completely makes sense now…
Yeah, I've kind of felt this myself from a different angle. I've got white skin, but my hair was red when I was young and I have a relatively large nose so I never really felt like people saw me as fully "white" until it was convenient for them. When I started to deviate from white cultural norms, wypepo were quick to take ownership over me and remind me that I don't fit into any other race or culture either. When I tried to fit in with them they made it clear that I need to know my place in the white heirarchy and that it's below basically everyone else with white skin. As I've gotten older I've learned that people hated my red hair because they associate it with the Irish people (I'm British for context and this country still maintains a colony in Northern Ireland to this day) and they hate my large nose because they associate it with Jewish people. I am neither Irish or Jewish, I got my red hair from the Scots on my mum's side of the family and the nose from the Italians on my dad's side of the family. None of that matters to prejudiced white people, it's all superficial to them so my actual heritage means less than nothing to them and besides the fact that it doesn't matter to them, they were never justified in their hatred towards Irish or Jewish people anyway. Just being not white enough for white people has atleast given me some perspective, no matter how badly they treat me I know they treat black people even worse. People might mistake me for Jewish, but I've never had anyone vandalising my deceased relative's graves. Every time white people claim "it isn't that bad for x, y or z group" I know well enough that, yeah, it's not that bad- it's worse.
Having had every color hair possible, from technicolor pallette to all the so-called "natural" colors, I can confidently say that the 'blonde is best' whiteness mindset is glaringly true. Regardless of my body being thinner or overweight, I was blatantly treated the best as a blonde! The lines ALL ages, genders, and races of folks crossed to speak or treat me favorably was overwhelming. Especially when young black or brown girls did that. It broke my heart. It made me so angry. And I had no luck trying to point out these overt things you're saying here... people cannot really conceptualize that they're part of the problem, nonetheless how to look beyond simple terms which anchor them to it.
I'm a natural blonde and I had the opposite experience. I got labeled with the "dumb blonde" label and have been given crap about being a "dumb blonde" my whole life. When I was in my 30's I dyed my hair dark brown and it was LIFE CHANGING. People treated me like an adult for the first time in my life. Women, especially, were kinder and friendlier than I'd ever experienced. I told my hairdresser about this and she confirmed that she had other clients experience the same thing.
I’ve had that experience too. I grew up with brown hair, blue eyes and very fair skin. I grew to love my brown hair eventually. When I started to go grey in my late 30s, I started dying my hair different colours and had blonde highlights for a while. I remember being treated so differently when I was blonde, people would be so friendly and strangers would chat easily. But I got tired of constantly having to dye my hair to hide the grey. So now I have openly grey hair and am invisible. Honestly, sometimes I’m tempted to get blonde highlights again just so that I’m treated better again. The other day I overheard a woman and her hair stylist discussing how grey hair ages a person by 10 to 15 years. I have spent a lot of time thinking about that. It’s not very nice out there in the world sometimes and I’m white. I can’t imagine what it’s like for non while folks. Anyway, I think I’ll keep my grey hair as an act of rebellion.
I had made this connection years ago since it's uncommon for adults to have naturally blonde hair, but it's a lot more common in children. I've never dyed my hair blonde, though. I'm white (debatable), but "spicy white," thanks to my paternal grandparents being Ashkenazi and my maternal grandmother being Indigenous Australian. I would look terrible with blonde hair.
Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom has written insightfully about this. As a Black woman, she addresses the hierarchy of colorism even within 'white' culture. Definitely worth read. ETA: I should have waited until the end! 😆 My bad.
This is really interesting. I grew up as the ultra white blonde curly haired kid, adopted by parents with ultra dark hair and eyes, and picked on and othered by all the kids in my class, and sometimes my brother, for having weird hair. When I was younger I always wanted super dark hair. I’ve coloured my hair pretty much everything, but the white blonde with a pop of unnatural colour is still always my favourite and actually feels like healing reclaiming that wounded part of my inner child
Another channel I watch Miss Moonshine Dance just uploaded a video yesterday. She tap dances, clog dances and travels around with her chihuahua, Mr B. She is middle aged and is very healthy and fit because she dances but because her hips are narrow, men keep commenting that she has a beer belly or she must be pregnant. The misogyny that men have for single by choice women, middle aged women, women who are not blonde, independent women is ubiquitous especially online where men can anonymously let their hatred of non-blonde, non-trad wives flourish.
I remember my father saying I looked like some Aryan ideal of being tall and handsome Which was a really uncomfortable bit of praise to hear I started out as a blonde kid with hazel eyes, turned brunette, but my hair goes golden in direct sunlight A friend gave me praise and asked me if it was my natural hair colour, which stunned me and made me realise how cool my colour specifically is When you're a blonde kid, you do feel special I absolutely get what you mean about blonde being a racial category I knew this mentally ill girl in highschool who was trying so hard to live up to beauty standards, and she was destroying her hair with bleach just trying to be blonde, destroying her hair and getting crazy split ends (that she wouldn't cut because her hair has to be long) Being blonde carries so much more weight than just being a hair colour You're a sub category, you're almost a shiny Pokemon or something, a rare colour of white other than brunette Kinda like having red hair but without the bullying for being ginger It's pretty shit to have colourism let alone racism infect our beauty standards I still love that my hair changes colour in the sunlight, but I won't think about our cultures predisposition towards favouring blonde hair in the same way again
Ooft, this hits in a couple of ways. My grandmother is half Indian, born and raised in the UK, with a sister who was openly referred to as "the pretty one" because she was more yt passing. She calls me her "English rose" and says I'm a blue eyed blond. I'm olive skinned, brown haired and grey eyed. It's like she literally cannot see it because she doesn't want to. I also remember at school in the early 2000s, everyone in my class used some combination of Sun-In and/or Frizz Ease. I have naturally wavy hair, and had a bottle of Frizz Ease passive-agressively left on my desk... so of course I used it to make my hair curlier 😂 When I went to my cousin's wedding in India, there are cultural expectations where straight hair is more highly valued, and in our region you have to wear it at least partially tied back - one of my cousins used to wear her natural curls loose, and would get shouted at and called a prostitute or a witch by older women in the street. There were ads on TV for skin lightening creams which were heartbreaking, and my uncle was approached at the wedding with matchmaking proposals for me simply because of my lighter skin 🤢 My cousins are beautiful, just not by a western standard. And I hate that the standards have spread like that.
I know that in life it’s never “just you”with any experience, but when you talked about the questioning of “how close” you got to using powers of persuasion for coercive control as an individual; I felt seen and understood about a thing that I didn’t even really put into words before this moment. Thank you again for what you do.
That one stuck out to me as well, which could be a whole separate topic. The lightbulb turned on for me because I'm an artist, and have felt that same feeling; like I was some how helping Darth Vader build his brand...I knew in my heart that I shouldn't do that kind of art work.
That's so fascinating and I really want to look up the author you're mentionning now. As a child I really wanted to be blonde and I only recently made the connection that I wanted to "look white" as someone who don't according to where I live's standards. But I never extended the thought about non-blonde white appearing people. The part with "blonde children being praised for being blonde" reminds me of how my little brother was SO much as kid, it was quite infuriating to see for us "darker" kids. Even though it's not the only thing, (he's the only amab kid and the youngest) I may to this day downplay the role of his proximity to whiteness in how he was always precieved as cuter, more innocent and deserving of more than the rest of us. Also I never understood how people are still calling him blonde even though he hasn't been since he was 6, and why when I stated the fact he was not anymore people would react as if I was insulting him ? I feel like I should have caught up sooner on blondeness being more than a hair color
Fun fact about the wanting to be blonde thing : as a child I was really happy that my hair would lighten so much with the sun that the ends would end up kind of a dark, red blonde. I guess in my head it was closer to blonde but turns out that having hair that lighten that much (along with skin that tanned just as much) made me look even less white. Stuff I realized as an adult 😂
This was such an interesting perspective. Thank you so much for sharing. I find it so valuable to know that colorism also exists a in white people. I would have never guessed. I’m black on dad’s side and white Puerto Rican on moms side and she used to talk a lot about how she wish I had her hazel eyes and she also used to force me to cut my hair as a kid. Even as a teenager my family would say “well sometimes eyes get lighter with age too it may still happen”. It’s funny you mentioned a Dominican guy. I grew up with a lot of Dominicans in Connecticut and a lot of them are maga! Most of them are either mixed or just black Dominicans too! And they hated being called black
ayyye we match with pinkish-purple hair! Yeah, I think it really is important to take a deep look into what we consider beautiful and why, but also to push back against those beliefs. I wonder if you could talk a bit about the "Dumb blonde" stereotype, and how that also plays into white supremacy. I've seen it be used (and also used it myself, when I was younger) as a dismissive jibe against others, but also as a way to excuse my own actions. I would see my brother be a little shit to others, and then just be like "it's fine, I'm blonde too". Looking back that feels like both a thought stopping cliche and a responsibility diffusion tactic.
When i was a kid people would argue with me about whether i was blonde or brunette. They would say I'm dirty blonde, but looking back at older pics, i definitely wasnt. My hair would lighten at the top from being in the sun, but not to the point of blonde. It was so weird to me how invested other people were in what hair color category i fell under.
After moving from the US to Europe in 2019, I've had a difficult time adjusting to the indoctrination I received as a US citizen. It's brutal. My husband is a veteran, and he has had more difficulty. We have days we both cry after reading a news story, watching a movie, and just observing the differences we now see. Thank you for sharing your knowledge!
You're rocking the purple! The closest I ever got to blondness was something that affected my hair at birth: I had a chunk of bright golden blonde hair on the right side of my head (it faded over time). Other than that I am as I have always been, a curly brunette with green-hazel eyes and features not aligned with the so-called Western ideal. As a kid I always wondered why the blonde (straight-haired) girlies could get away with the wildest things while I got the shaft on the regular; it wasn't until a few years ago I learned how and why this sort of treatment had its roots in white supremacy. Then come to find out that my maternal grandfather's ancestors converged on Poland from places where the population was widely considered non-white. Thank you for this video!
So well said. There are striking similarities to colorism, as the idea of blonde is so tightly bound to white skin. I don't fault anybody that still wants to cling to something like blonde hair, because that can be so integral to identity, but it is so important to deconstruct why blonde is on a pedestal, to question its importance, to recognize if we are accidentally praising some people more than others due to unconscious cues like blonde hair as opposed to substance. I would love to see an Oscar Wilde play on blonde hair, I feel like he would perfectly encapsulate the absurdity of how blonde hair impacts our daily lives and interactions.
I have dark blonde hair and I was thinking, “Does this video mean I need to feel guilty about my natural hair?” Then I realized, “Oh, it frees me from the anxiety of worrying about it continually getting darker as I age.” And then I realized, “Oh, just like the more I deconstruct white supremacy the less I worry about aging in general.” Then I realized, “Oh! Because not only does this blonde obsession have to do with pdf Ophelia, it also has to do with the ageism that is inherent in white supremacy.” We fear growing old. We don’t respect and care for our elders. Anyways, just a stream of consciousness
Oh yeah for sure, theres cult behavior in the police. Even when they're wrong they'll protect their own & "good cops" who report things get driven out. Not in all places but in a lot of them
My Sister from another mister!! I have had purple hair for 2 years now and I loveit!! I am a light skinned black woman and I swear, big blonde women almost always treat me some type of way. It's happened so many times that I just find it hilarious now. I am all out of F**KS to give😂
I'm in awe of your wisdom here and your willingness to be open and honest about this topic! I'm not even sure how you popped up on my feed, but as a woman of color, I've never heard such an honest and non judgemental individual view of the system created (those of us that know innerstands that none of it is personal) by a fellow sister a few shades lighter 😊. You rock! I will be looking into your books, I appreciate your truth so much...keep kicking a** and taking names!
The “almost prettiest” part is so real and heartbreaking. My stepson is white, blonde hair, hazel eyes. He didn’t inherit his mother’s blonde and blue. No one in his biological family talks about it, but it’s been a struggle for him in so many ways.❤
That's so sad. Hazel eyes look great in my opinion. I wish we could learn to look at different combinations and permutations of hair, skin and eye colour and see that they all can look good.
Interesting that the next video is from Alyssa Grenfell talking about her "cult voice" from when she was a Mormon- the same breathy soft voice you mentioned. She also has a video pointing out the "sameness" in mormon women's appearance which I think ties into this as well, the ideal Mormon woman is heavily racialized as white, blonde, and blue eyed
There's this song I like from the 90's with the refrain "I will not be afraid of women," that has lines at the end I really like: "You look out of the kitchen window and you shake your head and say low 'If I could believe that stuff, I'd say that woman has a halo.' And I look out and say, 'Yeah, she's really blonde.'" This hits me a lot like that. Looking it up, it's "Cool As I Am" by Dar Williams.
Omg, so much of your content makes so many pieces in my life that I understood at the time were 'off' in some way but couldn't quite pinpoint *why*... it's *all* WS 😅🥴 I have blue eyes, very pale skin, a was a blonde with some strawberry growing up; in college, I started playing with bringing out the red. My mom lost her entire 💩 about it the first time I came with a temporary chestnut color. I attributed her ire to the dyeing itself; it wasn't a 'fake' color - most people who didn't already know me thought it was natural. I'd even had highlights before, but never a 'no hair left behind' situation. In a similar vein, my pin-straight blonde hair started growing in curly when I hit puberty. To my mom's credit, she did find me a stylist to help figure out what to do with it, but I struggled to recreate those results myself. Plus, the additional products I glopped on to help the taming made my hair stay looking a bit wet, and therefore darker. Both my parents and only sibling have medium to dark brown hair. Sib and dad have blue eyes, mom has green/hazel, but in retrospect, I hit the WS lottery in my combination of appearance genes, and have spent most of my adult life playing with red hair and embracing my curls. It's only listening to this now that the pieces of my mom's issue with my coloring my hair even more so than the curls (I caught on to the racism there pretty quick when I tried working with them again as an adult), is WS in play. Tangential, but related: my BIL is German-born. I grew up hearing my mom rail against her dad's yahtzee sympathies and talking 💩 on Germans, which seemed like guilt by association rather than generalized xenophobia. My mom is barely civil to him, despite him being, overall, a great partner and father. In recent years, I've come to understand it more that, down in the brass tacks level, he's the ~wrong kind~ of German - egalitarian with socialist leanings. Thanks for the education and work you're sharing. The purple looks fantastic! Happy holidays 💚
Thank you for speaking out on these very serious important social issues. It’s not easy to face reality but it sure feels good to explain how not to let these constructed believes control our lives ! 🦋
Tangential question: I watched "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" not long ago, because it was talked about so much after Maggie Smith passed, and it was quite different than I expected from the lore I had heard about it growing up. I was expecting a kind of highbrow Auntie Mame, or a girl's school version of Dead Poet Society, but it's a lot more complicated than either. I wonder if you have seen it, and if so, whether you could speak to the cultish themes it explores (including beauty and fascism).
Excellent points you've revealed here...lots to think about from this short video..incredibly deep, and sad..yet leaves me hopeful that as we begin to recognize these deep rooted problems we can work toward a better world for every child.
Is it just me or when we (millennials) were kids did the news seem to report blond kids getting kidnapped way more than other hair colors? I noticed (maybe perceived is a better word) this when I was young and figured that I was safe because I wasn't blond.
Not quite the same thing, but I grew up watching true crime (my dad saw how excited I was about carbon 14 dating during my mummy hyperfixation phase and was like “this kid is going to love forensic science” and he was right), and if you didn’t have any other frame of reference, you’d think the average unalive victim was a young blonde angel loved by everyone from her wholesome small town where this never happens.
Thank you for outlining this. My hair is now white and I don't know what you'd call that color - ash blonde? Yes, it darkens as you get older until it stops producing mealanin altogether. So, in a way, lucky me; the effect is good; it looks like Barbie's. But all that is to lead up to this: I had a stroke a couple years ago and ever since, I'm slightly unsteady. So I joke that I give literal meaning to the term dizzy blonde. Um... I'd *thought* I was joking, reversing "blonde jokes" as a funny irony. However, the stereotye blonde jokes are based on is that they're all looks and if they look good, they're dumb (because women can't be both). It never occurred to me that yes, there is a racist root in those blonde-to-the-scalp roots. Why would blonde hair be considered prettier? I used to likewhen I sat behind a certain woman at a regular gathering we both attended so I could see her PERFECTLY black, thick, textured hair! It's never made sense to me.
When I started going gray I stopped coloring my dirty-blonde hair the color of golden blonde. I took an honest look in the mirror in natural lighting and I like my natural hair color. I don't think I'll like it going gray but maybe at some point I will. I think in most cases, Mother Nature really does know what's best for each of us.
You are the most brilliant woman I've discovered online in a long time. As a little girl who grew up not being "white enough" for my father's side of the family, you've helped me put a lot more pieces into place. I can't wait to read your books! ❤
@@jamieellohengee2667 thank you this is so kind. Helping people find language in context to tell their own stories is exactly what I hope to be able to do. ❤️
5:06 I dated a guy who was in the Navy. I wear wigs for medical reasons and he bought me a $300 blonde wig once after one month of dating. When I didn't wear it he'd ask where it was. He told me he didn't like"tattoos" after I said I wanted one. He told me to shave more, and after reasoning I realized he wanted me waxed. One thing he liked was my facial features. The guy wasn't even white... it permeates everywhere. He thought I looked somewhat like Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bepop. Get this. I was 21 and he was 30. What makes it worse is he said girls who are 18-19 are easier to mold. It made me feel dirty and I don't have much control over the face I was born with.
I’m a Brazilian of Central and Southern European descent. My hair is the same color as yours nowadays and also used to be lighter (mostly because of sunbathing/playing at the beach), but still tending towards brown for white supremacy standards. Still, I was always “the blonde one” growing up. I live in Germany now and some people still read me as “blonde” because of my facial features, I suppose. Funny how these categories work.
@@tangerine966 Categories of what being blonde or white is definitely depend of the context. I grew up in France and would not be considered white but when in South America I totally was. My best friend who's half Brazilian has "white" as the race on their birth certificate but for sure isn't treated as such here either. Now I'm revisiting the blondness concept whithin the context of race and many things are making way more sense, like how people with blue eyes are much more likely to be considered blonde than others with the same hair color but hazel eyes, or on the other hand how people with hair too curly to seem white are not really considered blonde even when they truly are.
Crazy. Growing up, I always wanted to b brunette. Or red. Blonde washes out my face. Thankfully, as u pointed out, my tow head turned brown as I got older. How we identify with ourselves can b weird but always an interesting journey through out our lives.
I know how you feel about “how close did you come “ it took me a long time to be able to realize fully and come to terms with my family’s racism…. Now I am so triggered by anything that I fear could bring that crap back into my home and life on a personal level…
The summer i was dating my ex, he would insist by the fall my hair would be blonde 😂 lol i remember telling my hair doesn't do that anymore even if i go in the ocean everyday. if that isn't the biggest admission that he wasn't that into me idk what is. Glad he's my ex
Thank you for engaging in this process and for sharing it. One thing we can do to help thwart this worldwide misunderstanding is better question the use of "Aryan" as a tool for the WS system. When I learned of its arbitrary, absolutely whackadoodle origins being ascribed to whiteness (you say pa and ma and so do I = you, Sanskrit speakers, must be white = we, much fairer skinned people from somewhere entirely else, must be Aryan/the so-called scholar wanted the social status of the term and not the obvious brown-ness of the people who actually spoke the word, much like the swastika), I was baffled as to why this hasn't been further exposed and already discarded. Along the same lines of logic, the Caucasus mountains being attributed to whiteness also makes any literate adult question reality. When I sing mantras of the Hindu/Buddhist.deity Arya Tara, I don't sing of the purity of her genetic lube and blonde hair/blue eyes. I wish you all the best in your effort and personal exploration. Stay beautiful! 💐🙏🏾
Ooh interesting! My mind immediately went to youthfulness as you were talking- that nostalgia for our blonde childhood, but I hadn't fully put it together with WS until you made the connection. I always wished I'd either stayed blonde or had my hair darken to my mom's dark brunette instead of the plain light brown I have. In grad school I dyed my hair unnatural colors- bright red and purple but since then, I've had my natural color but with blonde highlights to kind of set off my haircut. More recently, I've gone natural red something I've loved since I was a kid (probably influenced by Harry Potter and Anne of Green Gables) but its definitely something to sit with as that color is also associated primarily with a specific subset of white people. In my ideal world I'd have fun colors like yours but I'm not allowed to by work. Thanks for giving me something to chew on!
Fire!! Love the hair.... 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉 Love your content!! So excited for this to come out. As one who has side shave and changing colors for fun for years.... feral 40's❤❤❤
I’ve been dying my hair whenever I have the inspiration but I do understand the urge to go blonde. I did that during my most ED time of my life and I sympathize with that stage of creative identity sacrifice.
I’ve been watching you on TikTok previously, and now on TH-cam, and I am a fan and appreciate your content. Your ability to communicate and educate is wonderful. You may have covered this before and I missed it, but… How are you doing? You’ve had quite a journey. Do you feel like you are in a good place now? Are you are at peace? In any case, thanks for your contributions and I wish you the best.
Have u seen outside? All kinds of crazy. How could we ever be ok? Denial of the world doenst make it go away. U reminded me of a scene in tv.. "why the only time we ask - 'are you ok?'. Is when we know the answer is no" Clarify i wanna believe u came at this with good intent and im not answering for OP. I'm just ranting a tad at your sentence structure. May we all find what we are looking for. 💫
When my son started 1st grade in a new school, the Indian teacher gave him an actual place of honor in front of the class. My son was the only blond/blue-eyed child in the class and one of only two in the school (We lived in a majority Hispanic area of Cali). I was blown away at how blatant it was. BTW, it also set my son up for severe bullying. Because the teacher was so obviously racist.
Ive always hated my blonde hair i wanted dark hair. And even now as an adult my mom will comment about how i should just let my hair go back to being natural (i do fashion colors). I am her only child who stayed blonde (my sister grew out of it and ny brother had dark hair) Her sisters kids both stayed blonde.
My husband who is the father of my kids has natural white blond hair, even in adulthood, my oldest son is the only one whose hair is as bold as his and it all fell out in his early 20s, my other kids have my strawberry blonde hair…. I never thought about all this with hair color, interesting…
Speaking from a bald black guy guy point of view: Fascinating! I just happened to get this video in my feed and was interested in the topic. I like knowing others POV. Very helpful to learn! ✌️
@KnittingCultLady Fascinating topic from you! Something that I've never heard before on WS, the blonde hair and blue eyes thing that gives ppl the sense of purity, if you will. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised by it thinking about what happened in Germany, but you seem to give it a more modern look! I watched the historian Nell Painter on the 'History of White People' and I think she dealt with a part of it, historically, but in a different way also, I think! Anyways, the more people know maybe the more we get better in the treatment of humankind, hopefully! ✌️
I have natural blonde hair, not platinum, more like a dirty blonde. As I've aged it's darkened to a golden/dirty brown w/some gray. I always marvel at older women who dye their hair blonde because to me, it's just fake. And it doesn't mean anything to me. I always loved women with lush, thick, dark hair, or fiery redheads. However, growing up in the 80s and 90s, the #1 popular girl was a beautiful blonde, blue-eyed ballerina. It was definitely a Barbie stereotype.
"White kid blonde" and "white kid brown" is what my mom used to call it lol. My mom was a white blonde who's hair went black (amber eyes), had 2 black haired brothers (one dark blue eyes, one nearly black) a white kid blonde brother (Hazel eyes), and a white kid brown sister (green eyes) (dirty blonde and dirty brown). Funny enough, she was in beauty pageants and has the eastern European bone structure. I used to ask her what color the kids had in school because I didn't have that color. I went from strawberry blonde to nearly black auburn (my sister and i have dark amber eyes, our brother has Hazel), my brother went from white kid blonde to brown, and my sister always had black. The black haired, blue eyes brother married a half black foot native, half scotch-irish woman and their 2 daughters are our only blonde hair blue eyed relatives. So yeah, being blonde with blue eyes doesn't mean you're the whitest lol.
I’m a natural blonde but dye my hair red, because it’s fun. But I have no shame in being blonde. I think it’s odd to try and mark it as a negative. You definitely did here. I’m sure you have good intentions, but sometimes you can have good intentions, but it’s still not a good thing.
She didn't make it negative, she pointed out that in a culture affected by white supremacy blonde hair is held as superior and that impacts what we see as beautiful & we should be aware of that especially if we are changing our appearance to fit that beauty standard. It's about how blonde hair intersects with the construct of race & not saying that having naturally blonde hair is bad.
Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? for the LORD hath created a new thing in the earth, A woman shall compass a man. Authorized (King James) Version, Ecclesiastes 1:10 & Jeremiah 31:22
When you say "Eastern European," surely you know that Slavs, which are a large part of Eastern Europe, weren't considered white people (many are VERY white physically, so don't ask me the stupid logic) and that "Aryan Beauty" is more to do with Anglo-Saxon looks. The features you described are actually Anglo-Saxon looks. That said, Eastern Europeans definitely are close behind and drowning in white supremacy, but there are many of us from that part of the world that are mixed with different cultures/races and races that do not fit the Aryan standard of beauty and we are a large part of the Eastern European population so to say it's an "Eastern European beauty standard" is a bit misleading. And not to mention, at one point the white supremacists didn't even consider the whitey whitest of the Slavs, white. It's the Germanic people they felt were superior.
@@honeybeeart9382 this is my favorite part of this fact. That the “Aryans” were so bad at their own racism they accidentally promoted Slavic features above their own. 🫡 (and this always happens every time, because racism is not logical.)
I don't think hatred of one's traits and lineage is the way to go either. Spreading knowledge is. Living as though beauty comes in all shapes, sizes, colors, races, cultures is.
"Colorism for white people" 😳
That's exactly it. I have red hair, and while I always loved it, I definitely felt all the cultural baggage that came with both having red hair and *not* having blonde hair. I got to be "special" in a way, but not in the same way blonde is "special". I never connected it with white supremacy but that makes so much sense. Being just a notch below in the hierarchy is a strange place of privilege to occupy. It has a lot on common with my experience being a white woman.
I was a natural redhead... Are you left-handed?
@winros yes, I'm left-handed! How did you know?
@maura423 Because people, especially girls that were born with naturally red hair, are usually left-handed, and i'm left-handed as well. 🤗
@winros wow, I didn't know! I have 4 redheaded sisters. 3 out of 5 of us are left-handed
@maura423 So different we are!!!!😅
A different perspective: I am one of the rare naturally blonde adults. I have oculocutaneous albinism, and I am naturally a platinum blonde. I also have blue eyes - the whole red eyes thing is a myth. That can occur in other animals, but humans with albinism typically have blue or gray eyes. I did not inherit those traits from either of my parents. My OCA is caused by a genetic copying error. Some forms of albinism are heritable, but they are recessive genes - none of them are associated with a race.
I'm also legally blind from birth - albinism causes vision loss. I've simultaneously spent my life being excluded from pretty privilege because beauty is for able-bodied people, and punished for other peoples' beauty standards because I am a blonde with blue eyes - but I'm also disabled, so I don't have that social cover that able-bodied people have. I'm simultaneously excluded and treated with hostility and suspicion by white people - and also treated as a scapegoat for white people. (This is the experience of someone who has white features - people with albinism with obviously nonwhite features have their own experiences. Albinism occurs in every race.)
So yes, blonde is a racial identity - but it is also very much a hair color.
We just can't win in this world. Scapegoated to the max. It's upsetting.
I'm old enough to remember the hair color ads that said, "If I only have one life to live, let me live it as a blond!" Marilyn Monroe dyed her hair to the point where she was losing it; you can see the lace edge of a wig in one of her photos. She also dyed her pubic hair so that she could be 'blond all over,' a process that was unhealthy and painful. We can't free ourselves from these stereotypes until we become aware of them. Thank you for helping us do it!
I have red hair. I was told by a very conservative hairdresser that I should go blonde. That I was so lucky that my hair would let me do that easily and that my skin color could pull it off. I would be so pretty, she said. The first time my red haired son was told he should dye his hair someday, he was a toddler. They hate redheads. It’s like we’re people who refuse to be both white and blonde or something. It’s bizarre.
I have always adored red hair and hate that it gets such a negative reaction, I used to try and make my hair look naturally red with henna as a teenager!
My partner is a natural redhead, but dyes it purple (because neither of us ever grew out of our goth "phase"), I love when his natural roots come through but he got bullied something rotten for it as a kid.
It IS bizarre. Red hair is special and rare. Traditionally, the rare traits were the sought-after ones. 🤔 It is both a shame (red hair is really beautiful) AND illogical.
I'm a ginger too. My mother always hated my hair (the red comes from my dad's mom's side & she didn't get along with his mom - she was also racist, so now it makes more sense) & poured strong tea on it to "tone it down". I've always disliked blonde hair because it seems so colorless to me. As I've gotten older (I'm in my 50's),my hair has started getting lighter & to keep it from being mistaken for blonde (even "strawberry blonde), I've started using a henna rinse to keep it my natural auburn color (redheads rarely go gray, it just gets lighter reddish blonde until it goes white).
I just commented my own experience with blowback for embracing the red (and curls) in my hair when I'm a born blonde 😆
It's so freaking warped!
You are blessed to have beautiful hair. It's got to be a jealousy thing.
My natural hair went through all the shades of blonde, and it's now the shade of old asphalt. Even family members told me "Your hair isn't supposed to be that dark" and I had to tell them "well it grew out of my head that colour"
A common coloration in my mother's family was being born with dark hair that turned blonde or even white blonde.
As you aged, it would darken to a dishwater blonde. And, by the time your hair started turning white, it would look like your original color was dark or even black.
"Well it grew out of my head that colour" 😂
Can't argue with the head, huh? 😂
🙏
Thank you for talking about this. I grew up in a pretty culty wing of American evangelicalism, and from my very earliest childhood, my father talked about wishing that my mother and I would dye our dark brown hair blonde. On my first day of second grade at a school run by the church, a little blonde girl told me that she wasn't allowed to be friends with me because I was "dark". (Context: my skin is the color of spoiled milk and my eyes are hazel. My favorite color at that age was bright turquoise, which I wore all the time. The only "dark" thing about me was my hair.)
I later realized that my dad's disapproval of my hair color (and texture) was partly about wanting to cover up my mother's Jewish heritage, which was bad enough, but everyone ELSE was just being straight-up hair racist. I always explained it to people like this: The community was so white that they had a hierarchy of white people so they could still have someone to be racist at. I had people tell me I'd be lucky to get a husband, as "ugly" as I was, although a couple of people were into my "exotic" features, which wasn't an improvement. I always wondered why blonde hair was so prized in women in particular...but the connection to childlike features was not one I'd made.
Fun hack for my fellow brunettes: if you want to make a white supremacist's head explode, say you're getting lowlights.
I remember when I was a little girl being sad because all the Barbie dolls were blonde. There were black Barbies, but no white ones with dark hair. All I wanted was a doll that looked like me. Now they come in all colors, shapes, sizes, hair colors, etc, which is great!
Same! I grew up in NorthWest Russia, in small town, and I had very dark hair and eyes, and almost everyone had much lighter hair and eyes. And the beauty standards of the time were very much blonde-thin-blue eyed girls, both due to western pop culture influence and Russian nationalism being at its peak back then. How many times I heard that "real Slavs" are supposed to have blonde or rather light hair and blue or grey eyes
"A brunette Barbie? Oh, you mean Skipper!" 🤦♀️
@@iloveprivacy8167 Everything about Skipper felt like a consolation prize.
@ There was no Skipper available in my area, genius.
I had passed-down, old-fashioned Barbie dolls with brunette hair and white skin and so, of course I dreamed of having Malibu Barbies.
Some of this is just human nature. I couldn't figure out why all my friends wanted to play with my dolls and I always wanted to play with theirs.
Was raised Mormon, so, SO much internalized racism growing up (family tree is 1/4 Puerto Rican, 1/4 Italian, the rest Irish/Scottish/Welsh) and long after I stopped going to church when I was 16, dyed my very dark brown hair blonde for over a decade and was praised endlessly for it. Never again! Stopped in 2019 and let it grow out. Will do whatever I can to tell my toddler every day as she grows up how beautiful her brown hair and brown eyes are. ❤❤❤
When you're Eastern European but the "short curvy Jewish kind with dark hair" 🤣🤣🤣 anyway, thank you for breaking this down. I think especially a lot of gentlemen don't understand about blondness, femininity, and white supremacy. (Most dark-haired girls know that they'll never be considered as "beautiful" as if they were blonde. It's preposterous.)
I have two tow headed kids and I’m never sure what to say when people get excited about how blonde they are. Like, it makes sense from the fact that it is more rare (just like how natural red hair can be exciting to see), and people tend to make small talk about whatever is unusual, but the fact that it’s so racially tied up makes it complicated.
I’ve also wondered if my kids are treated better and given more slack than brunette white kids. We associate blondeness with purity and innocence.
I wonder if I would feel more pressure to keep my kids’ hair super neat all the time if they were brunette (I let their hair be messy in public more than I would like). I know that if they were black then keeping their hair neat would be more of a survival/safety issue.
🤯 I was a tow-head kid and I’ve only ever dyed my hair for fun with Halloween-type intentions. I’m currently watching it turn gray with anticipation & curiosity. So I NEVER understood the bottle blonde thing until you added it to the list of other ways women try to be pre-pubescent for the male-phile gaze… it completely makes sense now…
Yeah, I've kind of felt this myself from a different angle. I've got white skin, but my hair was red when I was young and I have a relatively large nose so I never really felt like people saw me as fully "white" until it was convenient for them. When I started to deviate from white cultural norms, wypepo were quick to take ownership over me and remind me that I don't fit into any other race or culture either. When I tried to fit in with them they made it clear that I need to know my place in the white heirarchy and that it's below basically everyone else with white skin.
As I've gotten older I've learned that people hated my red hair because they associate it with the Irish people (I'm British for context and this country still maintains a colony in Northern Ireland to this day) and they hate my large nose because they associate it with Jewish people. I am neither Irish or Jewish, I got my red hair from the Scots on my mum's side of the family and the nose from the Italians on my dad's side of the family. None of that matters to prejudiced white people, it's all superficial to them so my actual heritage means less than nothing to them and besides the fact that it doesn't matter to them, they were never justified in their hatred towards Irish or Jewish people anyway.
Just being not white enough for white people has atleast given me some perspective, no matter how badly they treat me I know they treat black people even worse. People might mistake me for Jewish, but I've never had anyone vandalising my deceased relative's graves. Every time white people claim "it isn't that bad for x, y or z group" I know well enough that, yeah, it's not that bad- it's worse.
Having had every color hair possible, from technicolor pallette to all the so-called "natural" colors, I can confidently say that the 'blonde is best' whiteness mindset is glaringly true. Regardless of my body being thinner or overweight, I was blatantly treated the best as a blonde! The lines ALL ages, genders, and races of folks crossed to speak or treat me favorably was overwhelming. Especially when young black or brown girls did that. It broke my heart. It made me so angry. And I had no luck trying to point out these overt things you're saying here... people cannot really conceptualize that they're part of the problem, nonetheless how to look beyond simple terms which anchor them to it.
I'm a natural blonde and I had the opposite experience. I got labeled with the "dumb blonde" label and have been given crap about being a "dumb blonde" my whole life. When I was in my 30's I dyed my hair dark brown and it was LIFE CHANGING. People treated me like an adult for the first time in my life. Women, especially, were kinder and friendlier than I'd ever experienced. I told my hairdresser about this and she confirmed that she had other clients experience the same thing.
I’ve had that experience too. I grew up with brown hair, blue eyes and very fair skin. I grew to love my brown hair eventually. When I started to go grey in my late 30s, I started dying my hair different colours and had blonde highlights for a while. I remember being treated so differently when I was blonde, people would be so friendly and strangers would chat easily. But I got tired of constantly having to dye my hair to hide the grey. So now I have openly grey hair and am invisible. Honestly, sometimes I’m tempted to get blonde highlights again just so that I’m treated better again.
The other day I overheard a woman and her hair stylist discussing how grey hair ages a person by 10 to 15 years. I have spent a lot of time thinking about that. It’s not very nice out there in the world sometimes and I’m white. I can’t imagine what it’s like for non while folks.
Anyway, I think I’ll keep my grey hair as an act of rebellion.
I had made this connection years ago since it's uncommon for adults to have naturally blonde hair, but it's a lot more common in children. I've never dyed my hair blonde, though. I'm white (debatable), but "spicy white," thanks to my paternal grandparents being Ashkenazi and my maternal grandmother being Indigenous Australian. I would look terrible with blonde hair.
Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom has written insightfully about this. As a Black woman, she addresses the hierarchy of colorism even within 'white' culture. Definitely worth read.
ETA: I should have waited until the end! 😆 My bad.
This is really interesting. I grew up as the ultra white blonde curly haired kid, adopted by parents with ultra dark hair and eyes, and picked on and othered by all the kids in my class, and sometimes my brother, for having weird hair. When I was younger I always wanted super dark hair. I’ve coloured my hair pretty much everything, but the white blonde with a pop of unnatural colour is still always my favourite and actually feels like healing reclaiming that wounded part of my inner child
Another channel I watch Miss Moonshine Dance just uploaded a video yesterday. She tap dances, clog dances and travels around with her chihuahua, Mr B. She is middle aged and is very healthy and fit because she dances but because her hips are narrow, men keep commenting that she has a beer belly or she must be pregnant. The misogyny that men have for single by choice women, middle aged women, women who are not blonde, independent women is ubiquitous especially online where men can anonymously let their hatred of non-blonde, non-trad wives flourish.
I remember my father saying I looked like some Aryan ideal of being tall and handsome
Which was a really uncomfortable bit of praise to hear
I started out as a blonde kid with hazel eyes, turned brunette, but my hair goes golden in direct sunlight
A friend gave me praise and asked me if it was my natural hair colour, which stunned me and made me realise how cool my colour specifically is
When you're a blonde kid, you do feel special
I absolutely get what you mean about blonde being a racial category
I knew this mentally ill girl in highschool who was trying so hard to live up to beauty standards, and she was destroying her hair with bleach just trying to be blonde, destroying her hair and getting crazy split ends (that she wouldn't cut because her hair has to be long)
Being blonde carries so much more weight than just being a hair colour
You're a sub category, you're almost a shiny Pokemon or something, a rare colour of white other than brunette
Kinda like having red hair but without the bullying for being ginger
It's pretty shit to have colourism let alone racism infect our beauty standards
I still love that my hair changes colour in the sunlight, but I won't think about our cultures predisposition towards favouring blonde hair in the same way again
@@zaraizabella Super well said
Ooft, this hits in a couple of ways.
My grandmother is half Indian, born and raised in the UK, with a sister who was openly referred to as "the pretty one" because she was more yt passing. She calls me her "English rose" and says I'm a blue eyed blond. I'm olive skinned, brown haired and grey eyed. It's like she literally cannot see it because she doesn't want to.
I also remember at school in the early 2000s, everyone in my class used some combination of Sun-In and/or Frizz Ease. I have naturally wavy hair, and had a bottle of Frizz Ease passive-agressively left on my desk... so of course I used it to make my hair curlier 😂
When I went to my cousin's wedding in India, there are cultural expectations where straight hair is more highly valued, and in our region you have to wear it at least partially tied back - one of my cousins used to wear her natural curls loose, and would get shouted at and called a prostitute or a witch by older women in the street. There were ads on TV for skin lightening creams which were heartbreaking, and my uncle was approached at the wedding with matchmaking proposals for me simply because of my lighter skin 🤢
My cousins are beautiful, just not by a western standard. And I hate that the standards have spread like that.
I know that in life it’s never “just you”with any experience, but when you talked about the questioning of “how close” you got to using powers of persuasion for coercive control as an individual; I felt seen and understood about a thing that I didn’t even really put into words before this moment. Thank you again for what you do.
That one stuck out to me as well, which could be a whole separate topic.
The lightbulb turned on for me because I'm an artist, and have felt that same feeling; like I was some how helping Darth Vader build his brand...I knew in my heart that I shouldn't do that kind of art work.
@ This! Exactly the feeling I didn’t know I still needed to process 😂
That feeling that you dodged a bullet - but I think what is being described here is even beyond that.
That's so fascinating and I really want to look up the author you're mentionning now.
As a child I really wanted to be blonde and I only recently made the connection that I wanted to "look white" as someone who don't according to where I live's standards. But I never extended the thought about non-blonde white appearing people.
The part with "blonde children being praised for being blonde" reminds me of how my little brother was SO much as kid, it was quite infuriating to see for us "darker" kids. Even though it's not the only thing, (he's the only amab kid and the youngest) I may to this day downplay the role of his proximity to whiteness in how he was always precieved as cuter, more innocent and deserving of more than the rest of us. Also I never understood how people are still calling him blonde even though he hasn't been since he was 6, and why when I stated the fact he was not anymore people would react as if I was insulting him ? I feel like I should have caught up sooner on blondeness being more than a hair color
Fun fact about the wanting to be blonde thing : as a child I was really happy that my hair would lighten so much with the sun that the ends would end up kind of a dark, red blonde. I guess in my head it was closer to blonde but turns out that having hair that lighten that much (along with skin that tanned just as much) made me look even less white. Stuff I realized as an adult 😂
This was such an interesting perspective. Thank you so much for sharing. I find it so valuable to know that colorism also exists a in white people. I would have never guessed. I’m black on dad’s side and white Puerto Rican on moms side and she used to talk a lot about how she wish I had her hazel eyes and she also used to force me to cut my hair as a kid. Even as a teenager my family would say “well sometimes eyes get lighter with age too it may still happen”. It’s funny you mentioned a Dominican guy. I grew up with a lot of Dominicans in Connecticut and a lot of them are maga! Most of them are either mixed or just black Dominicans too! And they hated being called black
ayyye we match with pinkish-purple hair!
Yeah, I think it really is important to take a deep look into what we consider beautiful and why, but also to push back against those beliefs.
I wonder if you could talk a bit about the "Dumb blonde" stereotype, and how that also plays into white supremacy. I've seen it be used (and also used it myself, when I was younger) as a dismissive jibe against others, but also as a way to excuse my own actions. I would see my brother be a little shit to others, and then just be like "it's fine, I'm blonde too". Looking back that feels like both a thought stopping cliche and a responsibility diffusion tactic.
When i was a kid people would argue with me about whether i was blonde or brunette. They would say I'm dirty blonde, but looking back at older pics, i definitely wasnt. My hair would lighten at the top from being in the sun, but not to the point of blonde. It was so weird to me how invested other people were in what hair color category i fell under.
Blonde blue- also Spanish Romani and Turkish / yup it’s not always just an English rose 😁love your educating of these issues
All I could think of was how this was recently called out about all the women on Fox News.
💯
After moving from the US to Europe in 2019, I've had a difficult time adjusting to the indoctrination I received as a US citizen. It's brutal. My husband is a veteran, and he has had more difficulty. We have days we both cry after reading a news story, watching a movie, and just observing the differences we now see. Thank you for sharing your knowledge!
Can you give an example about what you mean?
What ?
You're rocking the purple! The closest I ever got to blondness was something that affected my hair at birth: I had a chunk of bright golden blonde hair on the right side of my head (it faded over time). Other than that I am as I have always been, a curly brunette with green-hazel eyes and features not aligned with the so-called Western ideal. As a kid I always wondered why the blonde (straight-haired) girlies could get away with the wildest things while I got the shaft on the regular; it wasn't until a few years ago I learned how and why this sort of treatment had its roots in white supremacy. Then come to find out that my maternal grandfather's ancestors converged on Poland from places where the population was widely considered non-white. Thank you for this video!
So well said. There are striking similarities to colorism, as the idea of blonde is so tightly bound to white skin. I don't fault anybody that still wants to cling to something like blonde hair, because that can be so integral to identity, but it is so important to deconstruct why blonde is on a pedestal, to question its importance, to recognize if we are accidentally praising some people more than others due to unconscious cues like blonde hair as opposed to substance. I would love to see an Oscar Wilde play on blonde hair, I feel like he would perfectly encapsulate the absurdity of how blonde hair impacts our daily lives and interactions.
I have dark blonde hair and I was thinking, “Does this video mean I need to feel guilty about my natural hair?”
Then I realized, “Oh, it frees me from the anxiety of worrying about it continually getting darker as I age.”
And then I realized, “Oh, just like the more I deconstruct white supremacy the less I worry about aging in general.”
Then I realized, “Oh! Because not only does this blonde obsession have to do with pdf Ophelia, it also has to do with the ageism that is inherent in white supremacy.” We fear growing old. We don’t respect and care for our elders. Anyways, just a stream of consciousness
@TherealHRHMarissa the fear of aging, power, and money
Wait appearance control... so that means... all those cops with the blue line punisher gear... that's a cult? Hoooooboy we're in so much trouble.
Oh yeah for sure, theres cult behavior in the police. Even when they're wrong they'll protect their own & "good cops" who report things get driven out. Not in all places but in a lot of them
Can you tell us about red hair and green eyes next? 👩🏻🦰 🍀
My Sister from another mister!! I have had purple hair for 2 years now and I loveit!! I am a light skinned black woman and I swear, big blonde women almost always treat me some type of way. It's happened so many times that I just find it hilarious now. I am all out of F**KS to give😂
I'm in awe of your wisdom here and your willingness to be open and honest about this topic! I'm not even sure how you popped up on my feed, but as a woman of color, I've never heard such an honest and non judgemental individual view of the system created (those of us that know innerstands that none of it is personal) by a fellow sister a few shades lighter 😊. You rock! I will be looking into your books, I appreciate your truth so much...keep kicking a** and taking names!
The “almost prettiest” part is so real and heartbreaking. My stepson is white, blonde hair, hazel eyes. He didn’t inherit his mother’s blonde and blue. No one in his biological family talks about it, but it’s been a struggle for him in so many ways.❤
That's so sad. Hazel eyes look great in my opinion. I wish we could learn to look at different combinations and permutations of hair, skin and eye colour and see that they all can look good.
Imagine being born black like me
Thank you so much for helping me start deconstructing my internalised white supremacy. Its been quite a journey so far. 💜
Interesting that the next video is from Alyssa Grenfell talking about her "cult voice" from when she was a Mormon- the same breathy soft voice you mentioned. She also has a video pointing out the "sameness" in mormon women's appearance which I think ties into this as well, the ideal Mormon woman is heavily racialized as white, blonde, and blue eyed
@@Teajay21 she is great
Good food for thought.
There's this song I like from the 90's with the refrain "I will not be afraid of women," that has lines at the end I really like:
"You look out of the kitchen window and you shake your head and say low
'If I could believe that stuff, I'd say that woman has a halo.'
And I look out and say, 'Yeah, she's really blonde.'"
This hits me a lot like that. Looking it up, it's "Cool As I Am" by Dar Williams.
Omg, so much of your content makes so many pieces in my life that I understood at the time were 'off' in some way but couldn't quite pinpoint *why*... it's *all* WS 😅🥴
I have blue eyes, very pale skin, a was a blonde with some strawberry growing up; in college, I started playing with bringing out the red. My mom lost her entire 💩 about it the first time I came with a temporary chestnut color. I attributed her ire to the dyeing itself; it wasn't a 'fake' color - most people who didn't already know me thought it was natural. I'd even had highlights before, but never a 'no hair left behind' situation.
In a similar vein, my pin-straight blonde hair started growing in curly when I hit puberty. To my mom's credit, she did find me a stylist to help figure out what to do with it, but I struggled to recreate those results myself. Plus, the additional products I glopped on to help the taming made my hair stay looking a bit wet, and therefore darker.
Both my parents and only sibling have medium to dark brown hair. Sib and dad have blue eyes, mom has green/hazel, but in retrospect, I hit the WS lottery in my combination of appearance genes, and have spent most of my adult life playing with red hair and embracing my curls. It's only listening to this now that the pieces of my mom's issue with my coloring my hair even more so than the curls (I caught on to the racism there pretty quick when I tried working with them again as an adult), is WS in play.
Tangential, but related: my BIL is German-born. I grew up hearing my mom rail against her dad's yahtzee sympathies and talking 💩 on Germans, which seemed like guilt by association rather than generalized xenophobia. My mom is barely civil to him, despite him being, overall, a great partner and father.
In recent years, I've come to understand it more that, down in the brass tacks level, he's the ~wrong kind~ of German - egalitarian with socialist leanings.
Thanks for the education and work you're sharing. The purple looks fantastic!
Happy holidays 💚
Ooooo i love the purple
Me too, I really love purple, pink, Red, blue, etc... hair
Thank you for speaking out on these very serious important social issues. It’s not easy to face reality but it sure feels good to explain how not to let these constructed believes control our lives ! 🦋
Fascinating how WS needs one to reject themselves to not get punished. Thank you for the spotlight ❤
This is amazing & thorough analysis. Thank you for sharing your journey, even when it is unflattering to yourself. ❤
Tangential question: I watched "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" not long ago, because it was talked about so much after Maggie Smith passed, and it was quite different than I expected from the lore I had heard about it growing up. I was expecting a kind of highbrow Auntie Mame, or a girl's school version of Dead Poet Society, but it's a lot more complicated than either.
I wonder if you have seen it, and if so, whether you could speak to the cultish themes it explores (including beauty and fascism).
Beauty and fascism and a large side of classism.
Excellent points you've revealed here...lots to think about from this short video..incredibly deep, and sad..yet leaves me hopeful that as we begin to recognize these deep rooted problems we can work toward a better world for every child.
Is it just me or when we (millennials) were kids did the news seem to report blond kids getting kidnapped way more than other hair colors? I noticed (maybe perceived is a better word) this when I was young and figured that I was safe because I wasn't blond.
Not quite the same thing, but I grew up watching true crime (my dad saw how excited I was about carbon 14 dating during my mummy hyperfixation phase and was like “this kid is going to love forensic science” and he was right), and if you didn’t have any other frame of reference, you’d think the average unalive victim was a young blonde angel loved by everyone from her wholesome small town where this never happens.
Thank you for outlining this. My hair is now white and I don't know what you'd call that color - ash blonde? Yes, it darkens as you get older until it stops producing mealanin altogether. So, in a way, lucky me; the effect is good; it looks like Barbie's. But all that is to lead up to this: I had a stroke a couple years ago and ever since, I'm slightly unsteady. So I joke that I give literal meaning to the term dizzy blonde. Um... I'd *thought* I was joking, reversing "blonde jokes" as a funny irony. However, the stereotye blonde jokes are based on is that they're all looks and if they look good, they're dumb (because women can't be both). It never occurred to me that yes, there is a racist root in those blonde-to-the-scalp roots. Why would blonde hair be considered prettier? I used to likewhen I sat behind a certain woman at a regular gathering we both attended so I could see her PERFECTLY black, thick, textured hair! It's never made sense to me.
When I started going gray I stopped coloring my dirty-blonde hair the color of golden blonde. I took an honest look in the mirror in natural lighting and I like my natural hair color. I don't think I'll like it going gray but maybe at some point I will. I think in most cases, Mother Nature really does know what's best for each of us.
You are the most brilliant woman I've discovered online in a long time. As a little girl who grew up not being "white enough" for my father's side of the family, you've helped me put a lot more pieces into place. I can't wait to read your books! ❤
@@jamieellohengee2667 thank you this is so kind. Helping people find language in context to tell their own stories is exactly what I hope to be able to do. ❤️
Agree on all points here, and really excited to read Blonde when it is published; hair color is always more than just a color.
5:06 I dated a guy who was in the Navy. I wear wigs for medical reasons and he bought me a $300 blonde wig once after one month of dating. When I didn't wear it he'd ask where it was. He told me he didn't like"tattoos" after I said I wanted one. He told me to shave more, and after reasoning I realized he wanted me waxed. One thing he liked was my facial features. The guy wasn't even white... it permeates everywhere. He thought I looked somewhat like Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bepop.
Get this. I was 21 and he was 30. What makes it worse is he said girls who are 18-19 are easier to mold. It made me feel dirty and I don't have much control over the face I was born with.
I’m a Brazilian of Central and Southern European descent. My hair is the same color as yours nowadays and also used to be lighter (mostly because of sunbathing/playing at the beach), but still tending towards brown for white supremacy standards. Still, I was always “the blonde one” growing up. I live in Germany now and some people still read me as “blonde” because of my facial features, I suppose. Funny how these categories work.
Oh, and I have blue eyes but I have much much more than one drop of Mediterranean/ probably Middle Eastern “blood” from my mom’s side
@@tangerine966 Categories of what being blonde or white is definitely depend of the context. I grew up in France and would not be considered white but when in South America I totally was. My best friend who's half Brazilian has "white" as the race on their birth certificate but for sure isn't treated as such here either. Now I'm revisiting the blondness concept whithin the context of race and many things are making way more sense, like how people with blue eyes are much more likely to be considered blonde than others with the same hair color but hazel eyes, or on the other hand how people with hair too curly to seem white are not really considered blonde even when they truly are.
@@melissel5648Yes, and colorism is real even across contexts. I'm read as white even in Germany (and the USA for that matter)
Crazy. Growing up, I always wanted to b brunette. Or red. Blonde washes out my face. Thankfully, as u pointed out, my tow head turned brown as I got older. How we identify with ourselves can b weird but always an interesting journey through out our lives.
I know how you feel about “how close did you come “ it took me a long time to be able to realize fully and come to terms with my family’s racism…. Now I am so triggered by anything that I fear could bring that crap back into my home and life on a personal level…
The summer i was dating my ex, he would insist by the fall my hair would be blonde 😂 lol i remember telling my hair doesn't do that anymore even if i go in the ocean everyday. if that isn't the biggest admission that he wasn't that into me idk what is. Glad he's my ex
Thank you for engaging in this process and for sharing it. One thing we can do to help thwart this worldwide misunderstanding is better question the use of "Aryan" as a tool for the WS system. When I learned of its arbitrary, absolutely whackadoodle origins being ascribed to whiteness (you say pa and ma and so do I = you, Sanskrit speakers, must be white = we, much fairer skinned people from somewhere entirely else, must be Aryan/the so-called scholar wanted the social status of the term and not the obvious brown-ness of the people who actually spoke the word, much like the swastika), I was baffled as to why this hasn't been further exposed and already discarded. Along the same lines of logic, the Caucasus mountains being attributed to whiteness also makes any literate adult question reality. When I sing mantras of the Hindu/Buddhist.deity Arya Tara, I don't sing of the purity of her genetic lube and blonde hair/blue eyes.
I wish you all the best in your effort and personal exploration. Stay beautiful! 💐🙏🏾
Please, more videos on beauty! also, just curious, what are you knitting?
Ooh interesting! My mind immediately went to youthfulness as you were talking- that nostalgia for our blonde childhood, but I hadn't fully put it together with WS until you made the connection. I always wished I'd either stayed blonde or had my hair darken to my mom's dark brunette instead of the plain light brown I have. In grad school I dyed my hair unnatural colors- bright red and purple but since then, I've had my natural color but with blonde highlights to kind of set off my haircut. More recently, I've gone natural red something I've loved since I was a kid (probably influenced by Harry Potter and Anne of Green Gables) but its definitely something to sit with as that color is also associated primarily with a specific subset of white people. In my ideal world I'd have fun colors like yours but I'm not allowed to by work. Thanks for giving me something to chew on!
Fire!! Love the hair.... 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
Love your content!! So excited for this to come out. As one who has side shave and changing colors for fun for years.... feral 40's❤❤❤
I’ve been dying my hair whenever I have the inspiration but I do understand the urge to go blonde. I did that during my most ED time of my life and I sympathize with that stage of creative identity sacrifice.
So fascinating. Thank you so much for diving into this!!
Thank you so much for this.
I’ve been watching you on TikTok previously, and now on TH-cam, and I am a fan and appreciate your content. Your ability to communicate and educate is wonderful.
You may have covered this before and I missed it, but…
How are you doing? You’ve had quite a journey. Do you feel like you are in a good place now? Are you are at peace?
In any case, thanks for your contributions and I wish you the best.
Have u seen outside? All kinds of crazy. How could we ever be ok? Denial of the world doenst make it go away. U reminded me of a scene in tv.. "why the only time we ask - 'are you ok?'. Is when we know the answer is no"
Clarify i wanna believe u came at this with good intent and im not answering for OP. I'm just ranting a tad at your sentence structure.
May we all find what we are looking for. 💫
When my son started 1st grade in a new school, the Indian teacher gave him an actual place of honor in front of the class. My son was the only blond/blue-eyed child in the class and one of only two in the school (We lived in a majority Hispanic area of Cali). I was blown away at how blatant it was. BTW, it also set my son up for severe bullying. Because the teacher was so obviously racist.
Ive always hated my blonde hair i wanted dark hair. And even now as an adult my mom will comment about how i should just let my hair go back to being natural (i do fashion colors). I am her only child who stayed blonde (my sister grew out of it and ny brother had dark hair) Her sisters kids both stayed blonde.
My husband who is the father of my kids has natural white blond hair, even in adulthood, my oldest son is the only one whose hair is as bold as his and it all fell out in his early 20s, my other kids have my strawberry blonde hair…. I never thought about all this with hair color, interesting…
Speaking from a bald black guy guy point of view: Fascinating! I just happened to get this video in my feed and was interested in the topic. I like knowing others POV. Very helpful to learn! ✌️
@@ibrocpcanman5342 hey thanks for watching! ❤️❤️❤️
@KnittingCultLady Fascinating topic from you! Something that I've never heard before on WS, the blonde hair and blue eyes thing that gives ppl the sense of purity, if you will. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised by it thinking about what happened in Germany, but you seem to give it a more modern look! I watched the historian Nell Painter on the 'History of White People' and I think she dealt with a part of it, historically, but in a different way also, I think! Anyways, the more people know maybe the more we get better in the treatment of humankind, hopefully! ✌️
I was under the impression the red lipstick was part of that tall, thin, blonde beauty ideal.
@@camlam5269 actually, very often controlling men, hate red lipstick, Hitler and Hugh Hefner being two prime examples
@KnittingCultLady a lot of celebrities fit the mold in every way except for the red lipstick. Are they making a statement under the radar?
I have natural blonde hair, not platinum, more like a dirty blonde. As I've aged it's darkened to a golden/dirty brown w/some gray. I always marvel at older women who dye their hair blonde because to me, it's just fake. And it doesn't mean anything to me. I always loved women with lush, thick, dark hair, or fiery redheads. However, growing up in the 80s and 90s, the #1 popular girl was a beautiful blonde, blue-eyed ballerina. It was definitely a Barbie stereotype.
Fascinating ❤
This makes me feel gross about the praise I got as a child when I had blonde hair.
I am a natural blonde and I want to dye my hair a beautiful chestnut brown....
Do it! I'm also a natural blonde who is sporting a chestnut brown color. People are nicer to me now that I have dark hair. Seriously.
Leggings and crop tops are definitely part of the cult!!!
"White kid blonde" and "white kid brown" is what my mom used to call it lol. My mom was a white blonde who's hair went black (amber eyes), had 2 black haired brothers (one dark blue eyes, one nearly black) a white kid blonde brother (Hazel eyes), and a white kid brown sister (green eyes) (dirty blonde and dirty brown). Funny enough, she was in beauty pageants and has the eastern European bone structure.
I used to ask her what color the kids had in school because I didn't have that color. I went from strawberry blonde to nearly black auburn (my sister and i have dark amber eyes, our brother has Hazel), my brother went from white kid blonde to brown, and my sister always had black.
The black haired, blue eyes brother married a half black foot native, half scotch-irish woman and their 2 daughters are our only blonde hair blue eyed relatives. So yeah, being blonde with blue eyes doesn't mean you're the whitest lol.
Makes me think of Sabrina Carpenter. She's been primed for the male gaze.
@@nonamepainter I think she also plays into that and then flips it a little bit, I find her fascinating
@@nonamepainter I think when she’s 32 she’s gonna be powerful AF
What a great video. I was entertained and also informed.
Really enlightening
Interesting. Thank you for your work.Shameful admission: I went blond after reading that blonds make more money.
❤
I am black with dyed blonde locs lol
I love every single video of yours. I heard this stuff already and I don't care, say it again!
🌬️🧠
Sorry but the USSR beat the US in EVERY WAY!😂
I’m a natural blonde but dye my hair red, because it’s fun. But I have no shame in being blonde. I think it’s odd to try and mark it as a negative. You definitely did here. I’m sure you have good intentions, but sometimes you can have good intentions, but it’s still not a good thing.
She didn't make it negative, she pointed out that in a culture affected by white supremacy blonde hair is held as superior and that impacts what we see as beautiful & we should be aware of that especially if we are changing our appearance to fit that beauty standard. It's about how blonde hair intersects with the construct of race & not saying that having naturally blonde hair is bad.
Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? for the LORD hath created a new thing in the earth, A woman shall compass a man.
Authorized (King James) Version, Ecclesiastes 1:10 & Jeremiah 31:22
What about the rainbow cult?
Are you mad!?
When you say "Eastern European," surely you know that Slavs, which are a large part of Eastern Europe, weren't considered white people (many are VERY white physically, so don't ask me the stupid logic) and that "Aryan Beauty" is more to do with Anglo-Saxon looks. The features you described are actually Anglo-Saxon looks. That said, Eastern Europeans definitely are close behind and drowning in white supremacy, but there are many of us from that part of the world that are mixed with different cultures/races and races that do not fit the Aryan standard of beauty and we are a large part of the Eastern European population so to say it's an "Eastern European beauty standard" is a bit misleading. And not to mention, at one point the white supremacists didn't even consider the whitey whitest of the Slavs, white. It's the Germanic people they felt were superior.
@@honeybeeart9382 this is my favorite part of this fact. That the “Aryans” were so bad at their own racism they accidentally promoted Slavic features above their own. 🫡 (and this always happens every time, because racism is not logical.)
I don't think hatred of one's traits and lineage is the way to go either. Spreading knowledge is. Living as though beauty comes in all shapes, sizes, colors, races, cultures is.
Fascinating how WS needs one to reject themselves to not get punished. Thank you for the spotlight ❤