Making Racial Beauty in the Nineteenth-Century United States

This paper analyzes the use of aesthetics in American racial science and explores the responses of free blacks to “ethnology.” It argues that in the United States, hegemonic beauty ideals have been inextricably shaped by the history of slavery, and that the crystallization of the white beauty ideal occurred in the shift from environmental to fixed biological notions of human racial difference. During the eighteenth century, and prior to it, most writers who addressed the question of human “variety” primarily attributed difference to the environment (to hot and cold climates, to dry or humid air) and to social and cultural practices—not to the body itself. Only from the late eighteenth century did racial writers, such as Thomas Jefferson, give increasing credit to the body as the source of the stark differences visible in the American South between (enslaved) black people and most (free) whites. By the early- and mid-nineteenth century, racial scientists measured and correlated the body’s beauty, or its ostensible lack thereof, with intelligence, character and general capacity. Beauty was a shorthand used to rank humankind, and the standard of beauty used to do the ranking was one which prized features ascribed to “Caucasians.” And black activists were not immune from the white supremacist standard of beauty. Frederick Douglass, for instance, argued for the beauty of black bodies, but mainly those that came closest to “the highest Hindoo Caucasian” and at the expense of disparaging “the lowest type of the negro.” The paper thus explores how both white racists and black targets of racism worked to crystallize what in the twentieth century came to be called a “white standard of beauty.”