{"id":1413,"date":"2016-10-04T13:15:51","date_gmt":"2016-10-04T13:15:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/families\/?p=646"},"modified":"2016-10-04T13:15:51","modified_gmt":"2016-10-04T13:15:51","slug":"why-the-ethnic-aisle-is-merging-with-the-beauty-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/2016\/10\/04\/why-the-ethnic-aisle-is-merging-with-the-beauty-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the “ethnic” aisle is merging with the “beauty” one"},"content":{"rendered":"

Re-posted from\u00a0The Washington Post<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>
photo credit: David Mark via pixabay<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

SheaMoisture hair products launched the second phase of its national #BreakTheWalls campaign<\/a> recently with 60-second commercials challenging what it sees as the beauty industry\u2019s outmoded labeling practices. The spots feature a dazzling array of women of all shades, with every imaginable hair texture, color and style asking the singular question, \u201cWhat is normal?\u201d Or en Espa\u00f1ol: \u201cSoy normal?\u201d\u00a0 The implication is that in today\u2019s multiracial United States, kinky, curly, wavy and nappy hair textures \u2014 rather than straight ones \u2014 are the new \u201cnormal.\u201d<\/p>\n

The spots follow the campaign\u2019s debut in April, which featured a brown-skinned woman staring\u00a0with\u00a0trepidation at gleaming rows of products in a drugstore aisle. \u201cThere is a section called ethnic. And there is an aisle called beauty,\u201d one of several narrators says. \u201cDo I feel like I\u2019m beautiful? Is \u2018ethnic\u2019 not beautiful? \u2026 How can I break down those walls?\u201d<\/p>\n

Fans responding to the first ad on YouTube described it as \u201cpowerful,\u201d \u201cbeautiful\u201d and \u201cgroundbreaking.\u201d Many expressed their gratitude to Shea simply for acknowledging black female consumers, and for affirming their natural hair-care needs with their chemical-free products. But others took issue with the premise, viewing it as a cynical play for white dollars.<\/p>\n

This \u201chas nothing to do with empowering women of color,\u201d MsBgood83 wrote. \u201cThey simply used black women to make their company pop and now they are moving on to \u2018others.\u2019 \u201d \u201cThis is them saying they dont want to be the \u201cblack hair care company,\u201d DAsiaW wrote. \u201cStop drinking the kool-aid guys.\u201d<\/p>\n

What the ads \u2014 and the reaction to them \u2014 speak to, though, is bigger than just hair care. The campaign is forcing Shea and its customers to think carefully about black ownership and expansion. What belongs to whom and who gets to take it away? It\u2019s understandable that black and brown people are quick to call foul whenever their latest dance move, musical innovation, slang \u2014 or in this case, hair product \u2014 is suddenly seen as being for \u201ceveryone.\u201d\u00a0\u201cCan\u2019t we just have this one thing?\u201d we seem to plead.\u00a0(As the enraged reaction<\/a> to Marc Jacobs\u2019s recent multicolored, dreadlocked, mostly white female models on the catwalk demonstrates.)<\/p>\n

And Shea\u2019s push to broaden its reach has had other awkward moments.<\/p>\n

In February 2015, the company posted several Twitter ads featuring white and Asian babies and children \u2014 a move that prompted black-oriented blogs such as MadameNoire<\/a> to take them to task for a marketing shift they called \u201cjarring.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last September, the company again faced backlash<\/a> after announcing its new \u201cstrategic partnership\u201d with Bain Capital Private Equity, a firm founded by former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Sundial\u2019s reassurances that it would remain \u201cmajority family-owned and operated\u201d weren\u2019t enough to escape accusations of \u201cselling out\u201d and abandoning black consumers.<\/p>\n

Again and again, black consumers reference<\/a> the fate of other black-owned hair-care companies such as Soft Sheen, founded in 1964 by Edward and Bettiann Gardner, who sold homemade products from their basement on the South Side of Chicago. Soft Sheen was purchased by L\u2019Oreal<\/a> in 1998, which two years later merged it with the Savannah, Ga.-based Carson family company, a white-owned leader in black hair products, to form SoftSheen-Carson<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The average Shea consumer is no doubt also keenly aware of the 2014 L\u2019Oreal purchase of Carol\u2019s Daughter<\/a>, a black-owned company with early investments from rapper Jay Z that markets itself as Brooklyn #BornAndMade. It, too, has been viewed with suspicion by readers of MadameNoire both when it attempted to diversify its advertising with \u201cracially ambiguous models\u201d rather than darker-skinned black women (a lesson Kanye West might have heeded before issuing his recent inflammatory casting call for \u201cmultiracial models<\/a>\u201d only), and after the announcement of the sale<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But this time the complaints feel just a bit off-base.<\/p>\n

The skepticism among some black consumers is complicated by the fact that Sundial Brands<\/a>, the company behind SheaMoisture, is actually owned by Africans, with products manufactured in Ghana. Can it really be white appropriation when it\u2019s black people defining the terms of the giveaway? And it\u2019s not at all clear that white women are <\/em>the primary target of their expansion.<\/p>\n

Instead, it seems to me that the #BreakTheWalls strategy is far more complicated, in a good way; in a way that other forward-thinking companies might emulate.<\/p>\n

Sundial chief executive Richelau Dennis talks often of growth and expansion into a \u201cgeneral market.\u201d If black businesses don\u2019t grow, he told MadameNoire<\/a>, \u201cthey die on the vine.\u201d But what he means by the \u201cgeneral market\u201d isn\u2019t necessarily what the word used to mean: It\u2019s no longer code for \u201cwhite.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead, the campaign is tapping into a submarket that, until recent years, has received little focused attention: multiracials, a population growing<\/a> at a rate three times faster than the general population. #BreakTheWalls is actually a small stroke of genius in that sense. It\u2019s no accident that both ads feature strategically placed white women, as well as light-skinned Latinas, some of them mothers with brown-skinned children.<\/p>\n

When I asked Dennis about the biracial children in the new ads, he explained that for him, they are the new \u201cgeneral\u201d market. \u201cMy mother is biracial. My grandfather was white, in a village in Sierra Leone in the 1940s,\u201d he said. \u201cJust because you see someone physically doesn\u2019t necessarily mean you know who they are. That\u2019s not where the world is headed.\u201d<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s target audience \u2014 young, and increasingly assertive about their complex racial and ethnic heritages \u2014 is part of a powerful new contingent of natural hair-care bloggers and vloggers (\u201cnaturalistas\u201d) who\u2019ve made it their mission to offer styling tips, advice and encouragement to women both celebrating, and at times wrestling with, their decision not to chemically straighten their hair. As Dennis put it to me, the naturalistas of today are \u201cyounger, larger, louder, more educated, and more affluent\u201d than customers of a generation ago.<\/p>\n

And now, he\u2019s got their attention.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Liberian-born Dennis and Nyema Tubman, Sundial\u2019s co-founders, came to this country in 1987 to attend Babson College, a private business school in Wellesley, Mass. Prevented from returning home after the outbreak of Liberia\u2019s second civil war in 1999, the roommates partnered with Dennis\u2019s mother, Mary Dennis, to create their company using recipes passed down from Richelau Dennis\u2019s grandmother Sofi Tucker, a natural healer who first sold soaps and salves in the village market of Bonthe, Sierra Leone, in 1912.<\/p>\n

The partners mixed and packaged their products in a two-bedroom apartment on 168th Street in Jamaica, Queens, a space they shared with 10 other people, and peddled their shampoos and styling products on 125th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem. After incorporating in 1992, Sundial moved to a manufacturing and distribution warehouse in Amityville, N.Y., where it remains today.<\/p>\n

The company employs several thousand workers<\/u><\/a> in its northern and southern cooperatives in Ghana, Dennis told me, where he said the highest quality of shea butter is found. Dennis said the firm reinvests<\/u><\/a> 10 percent of all revenue back into those local businesses \u2014 funding piping for water so that young girls can go to school, and constructing warehouses so that workers can sell at full price, year-round.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s painfully aware of the \u201cselling out\u201d question. When I asked him about that criticism, he acknowledged the trepidation among some consumers and said he understood it. They\u2019re saying, \u201c\u2018We\u2019ve seen that happen before, and we don\u2019t want it to happen again,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cSo our job is to reassure. To stand up a little more and speak to those who are concerned.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is normal? Soy normal?\u201d Shea asks.<\/p>\n

Despite the ad\u2019s sunny optimism as it envisions a multi-textured, rainbow world, the answer to that question remains highly contested in the here and now. It\u2019s just hair, some might say. But in fact, natural black and brown hair is never that simple. Despite Shea\u2019s best efforts to challenge \u201cnormal,\u201d its tenacious roots remain thickly locked. In the drugstore aisle, and beyond.<\/p>\n

Kristal Brent Zook is a Council on Contemporary Families board member, an award-winning journalist, author of “Black Women\u2019s Lives: Stories of Power and Pain,” and a professor at Hofstra University<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Re-posted from\u00a0The Washington Post. SheaMoisture hair products launched the second phase of its national #BreakTheWalls campaign recently with 60-second commercials challenging what it sees as the beauty industry\u2019s outmoded labeling practices. The spots feature a dazzling array of women of all shades, with every imaginable hair texture, color and style asking the singular question, \u201cWhat […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1903,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[8959],"class_list":["post-1413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-families"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1903"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1413\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}