Beauty has power. In America a woman's value, regardless of her race, lies largely in whether or not she is beautiful. This means that one of the most effective ways to strip a woman of power is to identify her as ugly, thus begins the long history of black women as ugly. Everything about black people have been identified as ugly. Black women have been shamed for being too dark, not being skinny enough, having excessive curves, lips being too big, nose being too wide, hair being too kinky etc.
This mentality continues well into today's society and have been internalized by many black people, perpetuating self hatred among black people. Throughout much of black music we hear praises of light skinned women. In black magazines the models are also often lighter with Eurocentric features, even more so in white magazines. Most of the prevelant black women in music are light skinned with straight hair. And black women spend exorbitant amounts of money on straightening products and extensions for hair. But what is interesting is that despite the internalized message that black women are ugly they are also incredibly objectified. Since black women were first brought to America as slaves they were raped by black men. The way that white men justified raping these women, even though they claimed they were akin to animals was that they were wily, animalistic, temptresses. This was the creation of the Jezebel stereotype and they were the antithesis to the white woman's purity.
Yet even though black women were supposedly too tempting to white men for them to control themselves, they maintained the idea of black women as ugly. They did this to maintain power over them as well as to appease their white wives. However, the fetishization of black women is older than the United States. Ultimately white men are attracted to black women but they project their attraction on a more suitable outlet, white women. Thus contemporary white men, who control most of the media, constantly tell white women to look more black, while devaluing black women for the same thing. Because of this fetishization, white women tan their skin, get Botox in their lips and their butts, get boob jobs, and wear cornrows, and are continually praised for that which black women are shamed for.
It is an interesting circle of oppression of women and at the root of it are old white men. By constantly forcing white women to strive to be more like black women and black women to be more like white women, white men are able to maintain their power over women.