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Beauty Standards National Park Service. We Shall Overcome: Historic Places of the Civil Rights MovementDaisy Bates House. Available from http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/civilrights National Park Service. We Shall Overcome: Historic Places of the Civil Rights MovementLittle Rock Central High School National Historic Site. Available from http:// www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/civilrights/ Stockley, Grif. 2005. Daisy Bates: Civil Rights Crusader from Arkansas. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. University of Arkansas Libraries, Special Collections. Daisy Bates Papers. Available from http://libinfo.uark.edu/SpecialCollections Greg Johnson (2008)
Drexel University, PA

Daisy Bates in the Little Rock Municipal Court, 1958. Batess involvement with the Arkansas NAACP and the Little Rock Nine led to her arrest for violating the Bennett Ordinance, which required that various organizations submit membership and other information. She was convicted and paid a $25 fine. AP IMAGES.

BEAUTY STANDARDS
Beauty standards affect women differently than they do men because in gendered systems of representation, women are defined by beauty. Women who lack beauty are flawed as women (Leeds Craig 2006, p. 167). These beauty standards are locally specific and may shift based upon economic and political contexts. In a wide array of contexts, light skin operates as a form of social capital, one that is especially critical for women because of the connection between skin tone and attractiveness and desirability (Glenn 2008, p. 287). Light skin is interpreted as beautiful and often affects the quality of ones life. Darker-skinned individuals are viewed as less intelligent, trustworthy, and attractive (Glenn 2008, p. 281, citing Herring, Keith, and Horton 2004). The United States has a complicated history in terms of the relationship between skin shade, beauty standards, and black women. On the one hand, a preference for light skin exists that dates back to the preferential treatment given to mulatto slaves. As recently as 2002, women mentioned attributes of whiteness as important parts of the cultural standard of beauty, often mentioning blonde hair and blue eyes as beautiful even after the interviewer brought up race (Poran 2002, p. 74). These standards began and have been perpetuated by the medias glorification of white skin and, more recently, lighter brown skin, as beautiful. On the other hand, not all blacks internalize or accept these standards. There have been many voices of dissent praising all black womens beauty, regardless of their skin shade, notably from black nationalists during the black consciousness period from the late 1960s into the 1970s. For example, in 1966, Ebony magazine printed an article titled, Are Negro Girls Getting Prettier? with pictures of light-skinned black women underneath. In response, many black women protested outside Ebonys offices, one carrying a sign reading, Are Negro girls getting whiter? (Leeds Craig 2006, p. 173).

Committee, and President Lyndon Johnson appointed her to help administer his antipoverty programs. She revived the State Press in 1984, only to sell it three years later. After Daisy Bates passed away on November 4, 1999, the state of Arkansas permitted her body to lay in state in the rotunda of the capitol. The third Monday in February has been established as an official state holiday in her honor, the Daisy Gatson Bates Holiday, making Arkansas the first state to honor an African American woman with a named holiday.
SE E A LS O

Civil Rights Movement.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bates, Daisy. 1986 (1962). The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. Drew, Keith. 2004. Eckford: Central High in 1957 Was Not . . . a Normal Environment. CNN.com, May 17. Available from http:// www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/05/17/eckford.transcript/index.html Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and culture. Available from http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net Fradin, Dennis Brindell, and Judith Bloom Fradin. 2004. The Power of One: Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine. New York: Clarion. King, Martin Luther, Jr. 2001. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Edited by Clayborne Carson. New York: IPM/Warner Books. Library of Congress. 2004. With an Even Hand: Brown v. Board at Fifty. Available from http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/brown Little Rock Central High School. The Little Rock Nine. Available from http://www.centralhigh57.org Ordorica, Daniel. Women and Jim Crow: A Geographic Perspective. Available from http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/history/history.htm Philadelphia Tribune. 2006. Bates, an integration forerunner: Daisy Bates is often-forgotten hero of the Little Rock Nine. Jan. 16: 1H2H.

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The preference for light skin is also evident throughout Latin America. Marta Cruz-Janzen examines the issue as a Puerto Rican Latinegra: a Latina of visible African ancestry. Light skin often is valued because of superior opportunities granted to those with lighter skin; most dark-skinned Latinegras work in menial, low-paying jobs that do not require the euphemistic good appearance (Cruz-Janzen 2001, p. 178). Cruz-Janzen discusses how marrying a lighter-skinned person meant that one was mejorando la raza or improving the race. The authors own light-skinned mother married a black man. Growing up in Puerto Rico in the 1950s, Cruz-Janzen often heard that her mother had disgraced her family by marrying a black man, while her father had elevated himself and his family by marrying a white woman (Cruz-Janzen 2001, p. 169). Besides procreation with someone of lighter skin, some Latinas also take efforts to lighten their own skin. Sonia Alvarez observes that while growing up in the Dominican Republic, she was encouraged to stay out of the sun so that she would not look like she was a Haitian, an identity associated with dark skin and treated as a pejorative in the Dominican Republic. Alvarez recalls popular sayings such as, A rich Black is a mulatto, a rich mulatto is a white man (Alvarez 1993, p. 42). Alvarez points out the strange juxtaposition of lighter Dominican women lying out on the beach to get a little color indio (Indian color) (Alvarez 1993, p. 42), while the darker women stayed indoors rubbing Nivea cream on their skin to lighten.
THE SKIN BLEACHING AND TANNING INDUSTRIES

A trend among women across the global South from Ghana to Japan to Indonesia is skin bleaching. Advertising campaigns by corporations that produce these bleaching products propagate the idea of white as beautiful and modern, stressing how light skin is empowering and can dramatically improve ones life. Skin lighteners are dangerous because they often contain toxic materials. Hydroquinone is a common ingredient and is banned in several countries; it can be toxic even in lower concentrations. Gentler alternatives include plant extracts, such as kojic acid, which block the creation of melanin, the pigment that produces darker skin. These products are especially e Lauder popular in Asia, where, as the vice president of Este Daniel Maes said, the big chic . . . is to look white. The desire for white skin has been predominant . . . for a long time (Young 1998, p. 1). India and the Indian diaspora are the largest market for skin-lighteners (Glenn 2008, p. 289). The origin of Indias preference for light skin is unknown, with some researchers citing dark skin as a signal of class status as an outdoor laborer, while others point to the influence of

British colonial preferential treatment for light-skinned Indians (Glenn 2008, p. 289). Regardless, preference for light skin in India is near universal. The popularity of light skin is bolstered through Bollywood, the worlds largest film industry, which almost exclusively features lightskinned actresses. Furthermore, since 1970, international beauty pageants have become popular in India, producing a number of winners (Glenn 2008, p. 289). The winners, always fair-skinned, are a source of national pride. Family members usually arrange marriages, and the brides skin color is almost always a factor. One common advertisement a potential bridegrooms parents would put in the newspaper is a variant of: Looking for a slim, homely and fair girl for our son (Times of India 2009). Potential brides families do not express a similarly proportioned demand for fair-skinned grooms. The premium on fairness is reflected in cosmetics. Many Indian women prepare homemade products, such as a paste of turmeric and milk, to lighten their complexions. There are also a variety of Indian-manufactured whitening creams, such as Fair and Lovely, which use natural ingredients and UVA protection. However, after Indias economic liberalization in 1991, there are now available a multitude of whitening products produced by foreign companies (Glenn 2008, p. 289). Multinational corporations primarily target the growing urban middle class, often relying on regional subsidiaries to market their products. These companies have become a multibillion-dollar industry. The role of corporations in promoting the white ideal varies because the market is highly segmented across culture and class. However, there is evidence that corporations have changed the conversation about lightness. In India, where fairness has long been valued, corporations create a new reason to crave fairness: to be modern. Similarly, the market for skin-lightening creams in South Africa has shifted from rural, poor women to upwardly mobile, educated women (Glenn 2008, p. 286). Men of color have also felt the pressures of colorism, and are increasingly turning to fairness creams. In India, for example, the cream Fair and Handsome targets men who want to lighten their complexion, and its manufacturer says that sales have been surprisingly successful (Chadha 2005). Finally, the desire for lightness among so many women in the global South is especially striking when contrasted with the popularity of tanning among many American women. Thirty million Americans visit indoor tanning salons yearly, fueling a $5 billion industry (Levine et al. 2005, p. 1038). White women ages sixteen to forty-nine represent 70 percent of the tanning market (Kourosh, Harrington, and Adinoff 2010, p. 285). The popularity of tanning continues despite growing awareness of its risks. In the United States, the risk for

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Beauty Standard, Bangkok, Thailand, October 8, 1997. At a construction site in the Thai capital, a worker surveys his work while operating a crane bearing a picture of a western model. Caucasian features are considered by most Thai people to be a beauty standard as white skin and long noses are rare and widely appreciated physical attributes in Thai society. In a wide array of contexts, light skin is interpreted as beautiful and often affects the quality of ones life. GETTY IMAGES.

skin cancer is one in five, and indoor tanning beds may pose a greater risk than ultraviolet (UV) exposure from the sun (Kourosh, Harrington, and Adinoff 2010, p. 285). People who use tanning beds generally have a high awareness of the risks of UV exposure, often exhibiting more awareness than those who do not tan. Nevertheless, the knowledge of the risks does not decrease the desire to tan or alter tanning activity. Even seeing family members face a deadly cancer . . . [does] not sufficiently deter tanners from a habit they know to be self-destructive. In this glaring way, tanners resemble persons with substance dependence (Kourosh, Harrington, and Adinoff 2010, p. 285). However, the popularity of tanning does not represent a democratization of beauty standards. White womens new bronze skin remains in the white skin category. They are tanning, not blackening. Moreover, the darker skin is temporary; Dove and Jergens market their self-tanners as a way to achieve that summer glow (Saraswati 2010, p. 35).

Thus, tanning advertisements, like whitening advertisements, privilege whiteness. They allow women to bask in the postmodern desires of playful color transformation while freeing them from the accusation of emulating blackness (Saraswati 2010, p. 36).
HAIR

Hair is an important element of the Eurocentric standard of beauty in American society. While not uniformly internalized, there are certain ideals for womens hair. Chiefly, to be feminine and attractive, womens hair should be curly, wavy, and preferably blonde (Weitz 2001, p. 672). Since slavery, when female slaves with wavy or straight hair tended to be house slaves (Patton 2006, p. 26), black women in the United States have had to contend with these Eurocentric beauty standards pertaining to skin and hair. While skin tone is difficult to change, hair texture and style is more malleable to manipulate, and black women

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have turned to a variety of products to straighten their hair. These include the use of hot combs, Vaseline, oil, and chemical relaxers. Hair straightening has been a contested issue in the black community throughout history. During slavery, adopting straight hair could have been essential to surviving harsh fieldwork and passing as white after running away. As history progressed, many blacks opposed hair straightening. W. E. B. Du Bois (18681963) and Booker T. Washington (18561915), two light-skinned black males with wavy hair, used their significant influence over the black community to vocalize their opposition to hair straightening, which they saw as a shameful attempt to emulate whites. Marcus Garvey (18871940) proclaimed, Dont remove the kinks from your hair! Remove them from your brain! (Patton 2006, p. 29). This view was particularly salient after the Black Is Beautiful campaign of the 1960s and 1970s, evidenced by Malcolm Xs (19251965) outspoken belief that hair straightening caused blacks to feel self-hatred of their unique beauty (Patton 2006, p. 29). While there are certainly important socioeconomic pressures internalized in beauty standards for black womens hair, one must not discount the empowerment and agency in black womens hairstyling decisions. For example, Madame C. J. Walkers (18671919) hair softener, which was used with a hair-straightening comb, became a runaway hit when it was introduced in 1905, and some argue that it increased black womens belief that black was beautiful (Rooks 1996, p. 35). While these hairstyling preferences may be politicized, as they articulate responses to the panoply of historical forces which have invested this element of the ethnic signifier with both personal and political meaning and significance (Mercer 1990, p. 251), women make their choices under these constructs, fully recognizing that these choices can be politically co-opted. One can de-psychologize black womens hair styling choices and interpret them as reflecting a supposed ease and speed of maintenance, unrelenting social pressure from job and home, etc. (Jackson 2001, p. 136). One should not discount, either, that men have also internalized beauty standards that idealize straight and wavy hair, and some black women change their hair to attract men (Ashe 1995). Another important dynamic in American standards for hair is related to professionalism. As more women enter the work force, a traditionally masculine sphere of power, they must navigate how to self-regulate their femininity in workplaces that often find femininity and professionalism antithetical. Professional hair is seen as short and straight, and these standards are often at odds with the hair that many women of color have. Many Latin American communities value big, long, curly, and wavy hair, yet often college-educated Latinas adopt a shorter hairstyle to look more acceptably professional.

This phenomenon is also seen among black women, some of whom relax their hair primarily to look more professional.
SEE ALSO

Blackness in Latin America; Colorism; Skin Color; Whiteness and White Privilege.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alvarez, Julia. 1993. Black Behind the Ears. Essence 23 (10): 42, 129, 132. Ashe, Bertram D. 1995. Why Dont He Like My Hair?: Constructing African-American Standards of Beauty in Toni Morrisons Song of Solomon and Zora Neale Hurstons Their Eyes Were Watching God. African American Review 29 (4): 579592. Chadha, Monica. 2005. Indian Men Go Tall, Fair, and Handsome. BBC News: One Minute World News, November 2. Accessed May 14, 2012. Available from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ south_asia/4396122.stm Cruz-Janzen, Marta I. 2001. Latinegras. Frontiers 22 (3): 168184. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 2008. Yearning for Lightness: Transnational Circuits in the Marketing and Consumption of Skin Lighteners. Gender and Society 22 (3): 281302. Hernandez, Tanya Kateri. 2002. Multiracial Matrix: The Role of Race Ideology in the Enforcement of Antidiscrimination Laws, a United StatesLatin America Comparison. Cornell Law Review 87 (1093): 188. Herring, Cedric; Verna Keith; and Hayward Derrick Horton. 2004. Skin Deep: How Race and Complexion Matter in the Color-blind Era. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Jackson, John L., Jr. 2001. Review of Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Womens Consciousness by Ingrid Banks. Sex Roles 45 (1/2): 135137. Kourosh, Arianne S.; Cynthia R. Harrington; and Bryon Adinoff. 2010. Tanning as a Behavioral Addiction. American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse 36 (5): 284290. Leeds Craig, Maxine. 2006. Race, Beauty, and the Tangled Knot of a Guilty Pleasure. Feminist Theory 7 (2): 159177. Levine, Jody A.; Michael Sorace; James Spencer; and Daniel M. Siegel. 2005. The Indoor UV Tanning Industry: A Review of Skin Cancer Risk, Health Benefit Claims, and Regulation. Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology 53 (6): 10381044. Mercer, Kobena. 1990. Black Hair/Style Politics. In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, edited by Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West, 247264. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Patton, Tracy Owens. 2006. Hey Girl, Am I More than My Hair? African American Women and Their Struggles with Beauty, Body Image, and Hair. NWSA Journal 18 (2): 2451. Poran, Maya A. 2002. Denying Diversity: Perceptions of Beauty and Social Comparison Processes among Latina, Black, and White Women. Sex Roles 47 (1/2): 6581. Rooks, Noliwe. 1996. Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Saraswati, L. Ayu. 2010. Cosmopolitan Whiteness: The Effects and Affects of Skin-whitening Advertisements in a Transnational Womens Magazine in Indonesia. Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 10 (2): 1541.

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Belgian Congo Times of India. 2009. The Indian Obsession with Fair Skin. October 1. Accessed May 14, 2012. Available from http:// articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2009-10-01/beauty/ 28105867_1_skin-colour-fair-skin-obsession Weitz, Rose. 2001. Women and Their Hair: Seeking Power through Resistance and Accommodation. Gender and Society 15 (5): 667686. Young, Wes. 1998. Beyond the Pale. a_Magazine, July 31. Priyanka Chaurasia (2013)
Columbia University, NY

first decades of colonial rule in the Congo. This estimate also includes deaths due to epidemic diseases, hunger, and ordinary military campaigns. The appalling situation in the Congo Free State soon gained attention from the outside world. Foreign missionaries, such as the Reverend William Sheppard (1865 1927), an African American, witnessed the horrors of the Leopoldian regime and protested publicly against them. The campaign against red rubber (a name given to reflect all the bloodshed) gained momentum with the creation, in early 1904, of the Congo Reform Association. This association was founded by Edmund D. Morel (18731924), a journalist and former employee of a shipping company, and Roger Casement (18641916), a former British consul in the Congo who had written an explosive eyewitness report denouncing the inhuman treatment of the Congolese population. Diplomatic pressure mounted against the Congo Free State, especially from the United Kingdom. In 1904, King Leopold appointed an enquiry commission to refute what he described as false accusations. Against all odds, this commission confirmed the existence of grave abuses in the Congo Free State, a development that further strengthened Belgian opposition to the kings Congolese policy. A combination of internal and external pressures finally led to the takeover of the Congo as a Belgian colony in 1908. Although large-scale massacres took place in many other European colonies, and although the Congolese work regime was by no means unique (just a few years later, for example, Casement also denounced atrocities committed in Colombia by the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company, whose practices were very similar to the Leopoldian activities), the Congo Free State became a wellknown symboleven the paradigmatic exampleof the ruthless exploitation of native populations by rapacious Europeans. It was largely due to the successful campaigns of the Congo Reform Association that this image of the Congo Free State as representative of the worst evils of colonialism was created. This image still lingers today, and is often extended to the colonial activity of the Belgians in general. This generalization is, however, incorrect.
THE WORK REGIME AND SOCIAL POLICY IN THE BELGIAN CONGO (19081960)

BELGIAN CONGO
Colonialism has played a key role in contemporary developments of racism. Yet a striking aspect of the colonial empires was their diversity. It would therefore be wrong to overlook the record of minor imperial powers such as Belgium. A latecomer in the history of European overseas expansion, this small country nevertheless developed a particular attitude toward race relations.
THE WORK REGIME IN THE CONGO FREE STATE (18851908)

In the Congo, relations between the black and white populations began violently. In 1885, Leopold II, king of the Belgians (r. 18651909), had succeeded in creating a gigantic, personal estate in the heart of Africa. He called it the Congo Free State and ruled it autocratically. Leopolds many expansionist initiatives (of which the Congo was only one example) were essentially inspired by material motivations: He wanted to secure a source of enrichment for himself and his realm. The financial viability of his colony (originally funded, in large part, by his private fortune) was therefore of crucial importance. To balance the huge expenses of incipient colonial rule, Leopold decreed that the so-called vacant groundsthose territories not directly cultivated by the Congolesewould henceforth be the property of the state. All the corresponding natural resources also belonged to the authorities though, in fact, parts of this public domain couldand wouldbe conceded to private companies. Since rubber was in high demand on world markets in the 1890s, many Congolese were forced to collect as much of this product as possible. Violence in many forms was used to achieve this goal, either by the states representatives or by the agents of the private concessionary companies. Corporal punishment, hostage taking, the burning of villages, individual murder, or even large-scale massacres were common practices in large areas of the Congo. It is impossible to establish the exact number who fell victim to this harsh regime, but according to some estimates, several million lives were lost during the

After taking over the Congo, the Belgian authorities abolished the harsh Leopoldian labor regime. The excesses, such as widespread massacres and arbitrary killings, came to an end, but violence and coercion remained a part of this colonial systemas they did in all the others. The recurrent protests and, eventually, revolts of the native population (such as the Pende rising of 1931) were bloodily suppressed. The population was also subjected to forced labor to build or maintain infrastructures. Obligatory crops were

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