Our Obsession With Cleanliness Is Kind Of Racist

Every other month sees another debate on social media about our hygiene habits, but this obsession in black communities stems from racist, colonial ideas.

I think I could pinpoint the exact moment I went from being a child to being ‘a young lady’, as my grandmother called it. While boys get to have their childhoods slowly fizzle away, mine was yanked away in a single event: my period.

From then on it was a slurry of womanly duties and responsibilities, but the most important one was looking and smelling like a lady. I know that this experience is not limited to my personal experience.

In fact, I would argue that we’ve all been initiated into womanhood through the act of taking care of ourselves and constantly keeping fresh and clean. While it’s true that a little soap and deodorant never hurt anyone, we can’t deny that there has always been a magnifying glass on the hygiene practices of women, particularly black women’s hygiene.

With our hygiene being in the spotlight our penchant for self-care can quickly and discreetly turn into one of unintentional self-harm, in various forms. Let me explain: because black women have been led to care more about personal hygiene and physical appearance as a historically disenfranchised group, they are almost always more likely to spend more money on personal appearance than their white counterparts.

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