Body, Beauty and Self

How Black women navigate the rejection of Black bodies in predominantly white spaces.

“As a Black woman, you’ll never be a white girl.” That’s what Communication second-year Solome Bezuneh says about being held to a Eurocentric beauty standard as a Black woman at a predominantly white institution, or PWI, like Northwestern. It’s a freeing sentiment for her, one she says allows her to create and live in her own standard of body, beauty and self. 

This reckoning doesn’t come without struggle. The constant barrage of “being looked at, being seen, being under a magnifying glass,” Bezuneh says, is one of the most frustrating parts of the Black experience on campus. The constant comparison to white women, both internal and external, is, put simply, “fucked up.”

I have lived in predominantly white spaces my entire life. Even so, the transition to Northwestern was a jarring one for me and many of my Black peers, particularly for those identifying as women. The Black student experience has historically been one of struggle. From the Bursar’s Office Takeover of 1968 to the push for Black affinity spaces today, Black students are continually fighting for space to exist and thrive within a restrictive and homogeneous society. 

Bezuneh, a Chicago native, also grew up in predominantly white spaces. She initially made the decision to come to this PWI because she thought she could find her own diverse community, even within the confines of white-dominated spaces. Now, over a year into her university experience, she says she didn’t realize what the true day-to-day experience would be like. If Bezuneh were to do the college process all over again, she said she would prefer to have looked into campuses with more ethnically diverse populations. This is in part due to the constant “otherization” that occurs everywhere at Northwestern: in class, in party settings and in most campus spaces. The realization that she’s one of very few people of color in a room at any given time is an incredibly jarring one. This realization comes often, she says, and she just has to continue with her day.

Weinberg second-year Maia Smith has also had her fair share of difficulties excelling at Northwestern. Specifically, both of her majors, history and economics, are fields dominated by cisgender white men, and Smith has found it “very difficult to find a community that looks like me.” But she takes solace in the community that she has found. Smith’s overall Black experience at this university has been a positive one; the minority spaces here, though small, are much larger than the Black community in Smith’s hometown of Tampa, Fla. Though the Black experience can often be difficult in predominantly white spaces, Smith says she has learned to go against this grain and lean into her Blackness, feeling more comfortable in her body and presenting in an “authentic and unapologetic” way to the world around her. 

Specifically for those identifying as Black women on campus, our bodies are societally deemed as “other” than the standard, while our culture is simultaneously appropriated and co-opted by that same standard. It’s a duality that Black women must confront every day. Especially within a university setting, this reality is one faced on all fronts — social life, love life, sense of self and body image. Despite the difficulties, Black women on this campus are continually subverting these ideals, redefining these standards for themselves and finding solace in communities they have forged.