Friday, 4 September 2020
The Economic Freedom Fighters notes the disgusting racist advert put out by pharmaceutical outlet Clicks, which displays the hair of Black women as inferior to that of white women. The advert, asserts visually and descriptively the natural hair of black women is damaged and dull while depicting the hair of white women as normal, fine and flat. It is inexplicable that this imagery can be portrayed, one which reinforces the racist narrative of the abnormality of blackness as opposed to whiteness as a standard.
Anti-black racism through the use of the politics of hair has been a benchmark of discrimination against black people across society and through various oppressive histories. In apartheid South Africa, the infamous pencil test was used to classify races, and when the pencil did not slip through hair, in a manner that it does in what is defined as "normal" and "fine" hair, this was a measure of concluding that one was part of the inferior black race.
In many historically white primary and high schools today, children are suspended, expelled and barred from writing their examinations on the basis of having "untidy" and supposedly "unkempt" hair, these labels are ascribed to black children who have Afro's, braids and various hairstyles which are common to black communities.
The transgression that Clicks has made goes far beyond a simple advert; rather, it represents a cornerstone of anti-black racism which manifests itself through the disregarding of black identity. It is part of a long history of making the features of black people abnormal, insufficient and uncivilised while presenting the white identity and features of white people as the standard for humanness and humanity.