Racial capitalism mediates violence and misogynoir by creating images of black women’s bodies as “monstrous” figures.

In the Black Atlantic diaspora Black women’s bodies are always already marked as ugly, especially if dark skinned. This is a North Atlantic universal (Truillot 1995) which travelled around the routes of racial capitalism-settler colonialism, empire and enslavement - and still resonates in the diaspora today. In the Global Northwest the construction of dark African-descent skin as antithetical to whiteness and ugly already existed in the Middle Ages which supports Robinson’s (1983) claim that race thinking began within Europe itself. Religious scholar, Peter Abelard (1119-1142), wrote to Hèlöise about the Song of Songs and the Queen of Sheba being desired by and sexually intimate with King Solomon, “it so happens that the skin of black women, less agreeable to the gaze, is softer to touch and the pleasures one derives from their love are more delicious and delightful” (Sharpley-Whiting 1999, 1). Black women’s skin, although softer, was already constructed as ugly in the Middle Ages, whilst paradoxically, they were seen as offering intense sexual pleasure. Skin and hyper-sexuality already marked Sheba and, therefore, all Black women as racialized “others”, desirable but contemptible. Constructing the gendered and “raced” boundaries of European national identities and white supremacy continued with early European travel writers who represented African women as monstrous bodies, “desirable and repulsive, available and untouchable, productive and reproductive, beautiful and Black” (Morgan in Hall 2000, 39). These discourses emerged centuries before the European colonies in North and Latin America and the Caribbean were established (Gilman 1992). Skin shades and dark African-descent skin have had resonance within the Black Atlantic world for centuries. For example, in El Archivo de Indias in Seville it is possible to see requests for licences to travel to Latin America from Spanish families which list household members, both free and enslaved, in terms of the constructed caste-shade categories generated from “race mixing” and blood quantum, for example, mulata/o, zambo, morisco. In the Mexican Las Castas classification mulata/o had white and Black parents, morisco had mulata/o and white parents and zambo had Indigenous and Black parents. Needless to say each blood quantum category had different discursive constructions attributed to skin and through that to people, which enabled Spanish whiteness to have boundaries setting it apart from those who were “mixed race”, Black or Indigenous. According to Hilary Beckles (1999), during enslavement in the Caribbean the Black woman was ideologically constructed as essentially “nonfeminine” in so far as primacy was placed upon her alleged muscular capabilities, physical strength, aggressive carriage, and sturdiness (10). Proslavery writers presented her as devoid of the feminine tenderness and graciousness in which the white woman was tightly wrapped. The history of the Black woman’s body in the European-North/Latin American imagination is imbricated within racial capitalism, its racialization regimes and technologies of governance based on skin shade further developed during Western Hemispheric colonialism and enslavement. These regimes and technologies still remain active today both in metropoles and former/present colonies. Indeed, for Hortense Spillers (1987) the Black woman’s body has provided and continues to provide an essential other for the construction of white US American/European women’s bodies. The dark skinned Black woman continues to be a marginalized corporeality in white and light skinned US-UK/ European-Latin American-Caribbean cultural consciousness and representation. Drawing on the earlier work of Charles Parrish, Jeffrianne Wilder (2010) asserts that there has been no change in colourist ideology among African Americans. The attitudes and names associated with light skin tones tended to be negative whilst those related to dark skin tones were derogatory, but medium skin tones were viewed most positively. For Wilder (2010), colourism in the USA seemed not to operate in the traditional binary logic of racialized skin politics but was within a three-tier system with brown at the top of the hierarchy. This preference for brownness and orientation away from dark skin also maps onto Jamaica’s “browning” (Mohammed 2000; Tate 2009), Brazil’s “mulata” (Caldwell 2007; Pinho 2010), Cuba’s “mulata” (Arrizon 2006) and the Dominican Republic’s denial of African descent but embrace of indigeneity and Spanish descent brownness (Candelario 2000). In the Global North/South West, dark skin colour continues to speak racialized otherness and ugliness in post-settler, post-plantation and post-colonial societies. Indeed, it is through skin shade that we still intuit who can be human even in those societies which appear to be racially homogeneous (Pierre 2013; Tate 2016; Wynter 2003, 2001). As Kobena Mercer (1994) reminded us, skin is not just organic but highly politicized as a hyper-visible signifier of racial difference. Our racialized and gendered identifications emerge in the flow between skin shades as meaning-filled and affective body surfacings. Skin shade continues to be the building block of national politics, aesthetic hierarchies, transracial intimacies/ dislocations and structural inequality within the USA, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean and the African continent (Pierre 2013; 2008; Fokuo 2009; Hope 2009; Brown-Glaude 2007; Tate 2016). It is from within the historical and contemporary aesthetic matrix of racial capitalism that we see discourses of dark skin on women’s bodies as ugly, backward, masculine, desirable, repulsive, and contemptible, spreading out as a “second skin” (Cheng 2011) to impact Black women through misogynoir.