But was she looking beautiful tonight?

Beauty is a hollow cage every person of color is bludgeoned into believing is self-evident. 

I have spent the majority of my schooling in predominately white schools and I learned a few things about aesthetics: namely, North Face, L.L. Bean, Abercrombie & Fitch, and American Eagle. Other than my fixation on earning enough money to buy a real North Face fleece jacket in high school, the workings of rich and/or rich-aspiring/performing white people typically was not my business. The vast distance between the socioeconomic classes of me and my classmates meant, in addition to language, the dominant aesthetic culture of my school was a locked door. 

It was not a closure in a disappointing sense but a fact of reality. In a bizarre way, this period of youth when the pressures to fit in are high and success in that endeavour can appear world-making or world-shattering, I took a certain level of comfort in the incomprehensible nature of white aesthetic principles. It felt like watching a mating dance of birds; signals of beauty and sexual viability took on an anthropological tone rather than something that materially shaped my body or imagining. And perhaps this was my family’s goal all along, to protect my young self-esteem by repeatedly untying my worth from whiteness. (This documentary provides some interesting cultural context for the white beauty standards of the 2000s) 

It would not be until much later in my life, after completing multiple degrees and reaching a metric of success that the state (or at least previous ones) lauds as a step along the American dream, that I understood that my disinvestments in white standards of beauty were also informed by the level of poverty we lived and succumbed to. Where we lived, where we played, where we relaxed, where we loved, these were unmarked by the beauty I was taught at school. Here, whiteness was a rare sight, and taking the bus and the El back into the city from school was to watch whiteness shrink into a horizon behind me. Whiteness was not the world and thus its monopoly on beauty cracked at the seams. Here we had different standards, different ambitions, and different dreams. 

While that North Face jacket is still in my closet (and until arriving in New England continued to get plenty of use for most of the year) I haven’t thought much of the brands of my youth. So I was nothing if not surprised to suddenly be inundated with discussion of American Eagle jeans. Reels, TikToks, people on the street; it seemed the current cultural obsession was with Sydney and her blue jeans. The micro ad had taken the public by storm with some calling it a dogwhistle. The jeans/genes linguistic slide, especially when coming from the mouth of a blond, blue-eyed white woman, brings the double entendre to the fore. And it was then platformed by the literal government which latched on to the figure of the “beautiful” white woman as proof of a self-evident and desirable Americanness that so-called others or “aliens” simply did not qualify for. This was true Americana.

Compounding this media blitz was the recent hiring of federal officials without professional qualifications beyond embodying the cultural ideal of white beauty to become the face of politics. In some ways it reminds me of that brief period in the early 2000s when challenge winners on America’s Next Top Model would have minor one-episode spots in TV shows on networks like the WB: the belief that looking a certain way supersedes qualifications, skills, or experience has again infected our brains. 

It is not that Sydney is not beautiful but what’s interesting to me is how desperate the state is to prove that she is the apex of desirability. How odd it is to watch her also be turned into an artifice and an idea to be weaponized by men as a tool to control others. Her own politics (true or assumed) aside, what is peculiar to me is how much her beauty matters to a state clamoring for totalitarian control over our minds, bodies, and imaginations. We are expected to want to be like or to be with Sydney like we are supposed to know the sky is above our heads. The bodies of women are transformed into the landscape of political and cultural warfare yet again.   

We are in a pop culture moment where the turn toward Americana is everywhere. It has become a proxy for discussions of race and ownership and appropriation and even talent. Yet, even in this moment it is only a certain type of whiteness, Sydney but not Sabrina let’s say, that allows for the mobilization of beauty as a bludgeon against people of color (you are not us) and a test for white people to perform their own allegiance. (you should be us) Together these two lines of thinking produce beauty as a tool to sell us things and are driven by an irrational fear that whiteness is somehow on the decline. This decline can somehow be circumvented by buying more products or treatments to transform the world, or at least the nation, into a beautiful and “true” American one.

The obsession with demographics and aesthetics (how many Sydneys do we see) is part of a eugenics playbook. The notion of an ideal American body becomes a euphemism for an ideal white beautiful body and anyone who does not adhere to this becomes disposable. Disportionately this impacts people of color who, as my family taught me, are not actually in the realm of possibility for that reality but are fodder nonetheless. This still leads to markets (economic and cultural) for skin lightening, hair typing, paper bag tests, and a gambit of surgeries. It leads to the overemphasis of ability, be it physical, mental, or sexual prowess as proof of our humanity because our bodies can still be of use.

But it also generates a deep anxiety, I think, in whiteness itself because many of them too are not viable candidates. So white people dye their hair, buy the right hair straightener, the right clothing, and they double, triple down on their performance of the human in hopes they won’t be killed with the rest of us. Everywhere a fear of death and the hope that that terror can be offloaded onto a different, more vulnerable group. Even when whiteness reckons with this real fear of disposability and attempts to embrace a liberatory politics, freedom often becomes measured by whiteness’ ability to survive outside the ideal rather than a true coalitionary collective imagining. But the allure of minoritarian politics for liberal whiteness is perhaps a post for another day. 

Let’s return to beauty. 

I rewatched Paris is Burning recently in preparation for watching the Venus Xtravaganza documentary about her unsolved murder on Netflix. “If money wasn’t so important in the world today, to survive” Octavia St. Laurent says, “I guess I wouldn’t want anything more than what I have now. But since money does, I hope that the way I look puts money in my pocket.” We then see her in a studio, first close up and then against a backdrop in a bikini, the photographer finding his muse. “Is this endless? this catalogue of poses” the photograph exclaims, enraptured by her beauty. It seemed like an alignment with the universe to rewatch this moment with the parallel of Sydney laying supine against the minimalist backdrop as the camera pans up her body, decked out in denim, transformed into America’s muse.

Paris is Burning is a time capsule in many ways and yet seeing beauties speak on and of beauty, its whiteness and pointedly its otherwise, remains moving and a gift. This other world presented in the documentary, one that is and is not part of this dominant layer of reality we are currently forced to survive in, is a reminder that we and the world are malleable. That there are spaces disinterested in what America demands is beauty even as it informs our own world and self-making. 

Chandra Mohanty says the periphery defines the center and as we witness the violent foaming-at-the-mouth of a state desperate to prove that whiteness is the apex of humanity, we on the periphery can turn it into a farce, a meme, a tongue-in-cheek exaggeration, an otherworldly expression, and create something else.

Links and references below. As always, thank you for being here.

Crystal Labeija (1968) “That’s why all the true beauties didn’t come” 

Paris is Burning (1990)  dir. Jeannie Livingston

I’m Your Venus (2024) dir. Kimberly Reed

Alan Pelaez Lopeź (2020) – “On the occasion that i die before i’m thirty,”

Jazell Barbie Royale (2018?) - He Loves Me 2

Nguyen, Mimi Thi. The Promise of Beauty. Duke University Press, 2024.

Lee, Rachel C. The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies. NYU Press, 2014.