Coloured Ink: Is Body Art Just a “White Thing”?
But this weekend, when I went into Adorned, what could have been considered my second home during my latter years in college, the exchange I had with the piercer helped me put two and two together. We were talking about body art among indigenous groups of Africa and Asia when he mentioned the experience of a black woman who had been interviewed for the documentary film Afro-Punk. She had been ostracized by other black people in her community for her “punk” style, which including piercings and “unusual” hairstyles. In her response, she puts an anthropological spin on what some simply think of as a fad:
It’s not just a trend or a style. There is cultural validity in it for me. My choice the look the way I do is just based on me relating to traditionally African aesthetic.
Did others share this knowledge of body art as authentic cultural expression? Were fewer people of color opting to get tattoos and piercings because of a cultural disconnect?
It made sense in a way. If an art form once specifically associated with your racial, ethnic, or national group is suddenly co-opted by another group of people, especially if you fault that group for having exhibited behavior that runs counter to your group’s progress and growth, it may compel you to abandon the art form in exchange for something different. Body modification was once exclusively associated with indigenous groups in Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas. The practice was, in itself, something besides skin color that assisted in the “othering” of native peoples during their first encounters with Europeans. But over time, due to influences in music, art, and pop culture, the association shifted. Once considered museum-worthy cultural oddities, mohawks, wooden disks, nose rings, and creative scarring techniques, most of which had significant religious or social meaning within certain groups, had become a popular aesthetic among whites seeking to “other” themselves as members of the “alternative” community. Young whites made a conscious decision to appropriate what was seen as foreign/different, as an homage to other cultures, and assigned new meaning to everyday objects (like safety pins) in order to distance themselves from the establishment and the dominant culture. British sociologist Dick Hebdige discusses this phenomenon at great lengths in his 1979 book Subculture: The Meaning of Style:
The conflict between [hegemonic culture and subordinate culture] can be encapsulated in a single object, so the tensions between dominant and subordinate groups can be found reflected in the surfaces of subculture- in the styles made up of mundane objects [artifacts] which have a double meaning. On the one hand, they warn the ‘straight’ world of a sinister presence- the presence of difference… On the other hand, for those who erect them into icons… these objects become signs of forbidden identity, sources of value . . .
As a result, the meaning of certain body art is still associated with whites, in particular whites involved in alternative music or art scenes, and the people we see on the pages of National Geographic—both groups that are considered “foreign” in varying degrees by some people of color living in the United States. I wonder if this perception of foreign-ness greatly influences opinions regarding whether or not tattooing and other body modification is appropriate and/or attractive. Is it possible that the act of body modification is seen as a one-way ticket to group isolation from the mainstream and social acceptance?
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