Just Us: An American Conversation

Rankine is at yet another dinner party when a woman, who is an instructor, asks what she ought to tell her Black women students who dye their hair blond. Everyone else at the table also waits for Rankine’s answer. Rankine wonders if dying their natural hair matters as much as “safeguarding […] their sense of agency and freedom” (254). The woman goes silent. Just when Rankine thinks that she wants to try to answer the question again, someone turns their gaze toward dessert.

Rankine knows that blond hair doesn’t really signify white purity, as anyone, including Black and Asian people, can adopt the hair color and still not become white. The hair color doesn’t even need to indicate a human being. She wonders if the students’ blond hair is a defiance of white supremacist beauty ideals. On the other hand, they may be playing “a zero-sum game” that makes them complicit with those standards by dyeing their hair (255). Rankine decides to ask the professor what Frantz Fanon would say about her students’ choice. The woman laughs. Is their hair coloring choice a form of “reverse appropriation with all its artificiality and performativity?” (256). Do Black women who dye their hair blond believe that this choice allows them to be seen for the first time as youthful and beautiful, even as human?

Rankine mentions Fanon to signal that she understands the professor’s concern that the hair color choice might be a manifestation of internalized racial hatred. She also tells the professor that it’s important for the students to do as they please until they are mature enough to develop standards for themselves. Another woman at the table says that she wears high heels, though they hurt her. If high heels are a sign of aspirational femininity, is blondness a form of aspirational whiteness, like skin bleaching?

Rankine is still thinking about the professor’s dinner party question while she is waiting for a friend in an art gallery. She counts numerous women around her who have various shades of blond hair. By the time her friend arrives, Rankine has counted a dozen blond women. Her companion tells her that his hair stylist once said that many of the stylist’s clients go blond for their weddings. They then return to their natural color after the wedding.

Blond hair has been associated with the apotheosis of female beauty and prostitution. It has always been regarded as a rare feature. The Black woman professor equates blondness with whiteness, but do white people?

According to a study, two percent of the world’s population and five percent of American white people have blond hair. However, 35 percent of American female senators and 48 percent of American CEOs at major companies are blond. University presidents who are women are also likelier to be blond. Another study found that male CEOs are likelier to be married to blondes. This latter study also determined that, because blond hair is “only natural to Whites and tends to go brown after childhood,” the preference for blond women in leadership is both racist and sexist (261). This preference suggests that these women’s blondness makes them seem less threatening to the predominant power.

Rankine enters the word “blonds” into a search engine. Marilyn Monroe, who personified “the empty-headed blond,” comes up (264). Outside, on the street, she sees a woman and her child. Neither the woman nor the child are blond, but the child holds a doll in her hand that “has long blond hair” (264). This doll, seemingly a Barbie, is based on the “Bild Lili” dolls, based on a popular bawdy cartoon, that were popular in West Germany. Mattel bought the reproduction rights to reproduce Bild Lili’s image.

Rankine wonders if white women who are bleaching their hair are “whitening their whiteness” and “erasing their ethnicity” (265). She also wonders if some women dye their hair blond to become more acceptable. Hillary Clinton was once a brunette. She became blond after becoming the first lady of Arkansas. She has kept the color, but she allowed her natural gray hair to grow out after she lost the 2016 election. Rankine suggests that Ellen DeGeneres needed to become blond for her queerness to become acceptable to mainstream Americans, who also tend to be very homophobic. DeGeneres’s wife had to be blond as well. Thus, the only difference between this woman and the white Americans watching her is her sexuality and her boyish look.

Blond hair seems to grant women access to something that they wouldn’t otherwise have. Either they are reaching for the unattainable or find themselves on a path that they cannot avoid anyway.

Rankine asks white women about their blondness. A cashier says that men treat her better. After a beat, she adds that women are also friendlier. A woman in a restaurant in New York says that she was blond as a child and shows Rankine a video of her younger blond self on her phone. Her hair darkened during puberty. In the video, Rankine sees that the woman’s siblings have dark hair. She wonders if the woman was treated as though she were special because she was blond. When Rankine asks why she bothered to bleach it as an adult, the woman finds it an odd question and doesn’t answer it. In another restaurant in which there are many blonds, Rankine asks a woman waiting for her companion. The woman says that “[b]lond hair makes [her] look brighter and lighter” (272). For similar reasons, she also likes to wear white. Rankine is struck by the woman’s juxtaposition of white with blondness. Shortly thereafter, Rankine asks another white woman about her blondness. The woman says that she feels younger as a blond, though she hadn’t been blond during childhood. Another white woman, who has tattoos and a “blond ombré hairstyle” says that being blond makes her feel “edgy” (273). Rankine appreciates her clarity, but she thinks that the woman misunderstands being blond as a means of challenging normality.

Still, dark-haired women are encouraged to go blond to liven up their lives. This is now ordinary. Thus, a white supremacist ideal seems like an ordinary ideal. The Aryan ideal of blondness was essential to the Nuremberg Race Laws. A friend of Rankine’s finds it absurd to attach blondness to white identity and white supremacy. The friend just says that blond hair looks better on most women.

Fashion and beauty writer Andrea Cheng relates “her earliest memory of feeling marginalized by her Asian identity within the white American suburban community” in which she grew up (277). She was five and asked her mother why she wasn’t blond. Belonging meant having blond hair. She writes that Asian women who dye their hair blond talk about feeling more confident, breaking with older generations, and experimenting with beauty ideals. It is also possible that they are trying to become more visible.

Rankine concludes that blondness might be a passive and easy method of complicity with white supremacy. Hearing women talk about blond hair lighting up their faces, making them more attractive to men, making them edgier, or giving women of color access to power they wouldn’t otherwise have, makes Rankine realize that the hair color still “points to white power and its values as desirable” (281). It, thus, becomes harder to behave as though our freedoms are not intertwined with some complicity with these values.

Rankine sees a college-aged Black woman standing on the street near Rankine’s apartment building. She tells the young woman that she looks incredible. The young woman smiles. Rankine then asks her why she bleached her hair. The woman answers, why not, but says it as though it isn’t a question. The young woman continues on, leaving Rankine to wonder if this isn’t the way in which Black people can free themselves from constantly confronting history.