The water
washed over me as I stood in the shower and flashbacked to my childhood. I
remember being bathed, greased down and shined up like a new penny before
making any public appearances. Like many Black mothers, my mother was obsessed
with cleanliness. Everything had to be in
order—hair, face, clothes. We learned young that the holiness of hygiene reflected
our humanity.
The prickle
from the hot water reminded me of why the Dove debacle enraged so many. It
was not so much anger as it was pain from
being burned--again. This age-old wound that has never fully healed has been sliced
wide open with a salted knife, and we are wincing from the pulsing pain of our
wounded self.
As Black
women we carry this pain and pass it off to our children as pride. We admonish
them for being less than clean in any way. We warn our daughters that they’ll
never get a man if they keep a nasty house. We warn our sons against having a
dirty car. We shower at night before going to bed and in the morning before going to work. We do everything we can to
keep the dirt at bay. After sex, we wash the sin away. We clean the house before the house keeper
arrives. We believe those who say we can never be clean enough, but can we ever really be clean enough?
This is not about
Dove;
it’s about what Dove represents; it’s about racism and the history of an
industry that uses stereotypes of African-Americans to sell an array of
products. The idea of cleanliness and
Black people speaks to who we are in this country especially as Black women
because we are never expected to measure
up to white women.
We’re not
simply trying to meet the purity
of whiteness we’re trying to exceed it. We turn our noses up at white women in
the restroom who simply run their hands under the running water or don’t wash
their hands at all. We like having the upper hand in something as benign as
hygiene. Our dignity hangs on it. Our lives depend on it.
The
situation with Dove is two-fold for me: it’s about America’s continued fetish
of blackness and the consequences for us which can sometime be deadly. The
Parent company for Dove is Unilever. Unilver makes Pear
soap which has a history of some of the most racist soap ads ever made. Ads
that equate whiteness with goodness. Ads that say their soap can wash away
blackness.
“I’ll knock the black off you,” was uttered by
people who looked like me. As I think
back now, that reference alluded to dirt. I never heard anyone say they’d knock
the brown or the white off anyone. Our obsession with cleanliness goes beyond
simply soap. We want to make sure that we smell “fresh” at all times. The idea
of being a smelly Black woman brings a sense of shame and embarrassment.
We spend billions
of dollars spend on products that make us look good, smell good and feel good,
but some of these products are also harmful to our health. Even when doctors
advised women to stop douching, I know women who felt that there weren’t clean
if they didn’t. We have sprayed, squirted, and sprinkled our way into harm’s
way. Products like baby powder have cost some of us our lives.
In an
article, Profiting From the Myths About
Black Women’s Bodies, on time.com Omise’eke
Natasha Tinsley, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin
writes, about Black women’s hygiene. She explains our need to douche and
deodorize and the deadly consequences associated with cultural norms around
cleanliness.
It was discovered
through internal documents at the trial of a woman who died from ovarian
cancer, that Johnson & Johnson continued to market its product to women of
color after white women stopped using their baby powder because of its possible
connection to ovarian cancer. Though a direct correlation between talc and
cancer is mixed some reports say there’s a direction connection between talc
and cancer, some say there is not, there are juries ruling in favor of women
who claim to have contracted cancer from using these products.
The family
of Jacqueline Fox won a $72 million dollar lawsuit against Johnson &
Johnson after Fox died from advanced ovarian cancer after being diagnosed in
2013. Fox, like countless other Black women sprinkled baby power containing
talcum in her panties to stay “fresh.” Fox used baby powder and Shower to Shower as part of her feminine
hygiene routine for 35 years according to an article in the Washington
Post.
In August of
this year, a Los Angeles jury awarded 63
year-old Eva Echeverria, of East Los Angeles
417 million dollars in damages according to an article by Roni Caryn Robin in The
New York, These women are only two of 1,200 women suing Johnson &
Johnson for failing to warn them of the cancer risk associated with talcum-based
products.
Black women
are dying to be seen as clean in a society that sees us as nasty, dirty and
worthless. Dove reminded of us how hard it is to wash away those feelings
of inferiority. I reached for my towel, stepped out of the shower and wondered
what it takes to be clean enough to be worthy.
