What is Black Girl Luxury? Is It Helpful or Harmful?
One day I was mindlessly scrolling through my TikTok for you page when I came across a video, I was finally recruited to join the Black girl luxury side of TikTok! A true honor indeed! As a child who grew up in a low-income household, I’ve always dreamt about being surrounded by designer items, going on lavish vacations and not having to worry about how much an item costs. As a young child, I was obsessed with watching designer handbag reviews on youtube as a form of escapism from my home situation, so it only makes sense for my metadata to indicate to TikTok that I am the perfect viewer for this kind of content. I enjoyed watching the unboxings, the vacations, the self-care, the luxury apartments, and the lavish maintenance routines these women shared on Tiktok. Seeing Black women in a place of abundance and luxury is a beautiful thing to see, watching Black women's luxury content almost feels like a form of corrective promotion. Being able to consume content of Black women in seemingly comfortable and lavish lifestyles. Especially after years of watching content riddled with Black women being seen as undesirable and the countless of racist and harmful depictions of Black women that riddle mainstream media.
When I first started watching these Black girl luxury videos, I thoroughly enjoyed them, however, just like every rabbit hole in the internet, it started getting weird. I would see videos of people describing how Black girl luxury requires a certain look, and often times this look tends to be rooted in white supremacy. The long straight hair, and thin physique, believing they have to speak and act a certain way, is rooted in respectability politics. As I further started watching more of these videos and steering less away from the hauls, vacations, and lavish lifestyles, and I started listening to the words that these influencers were saying, I became more conflicted. hearing the elitism and classism that flew out of some of these influencers’ mouths was shocking. Because while I believe that it is great to see Black women in positions of not having to struggle, I have to question what kind of message are they sending to the people who don’t and will never fit the narrow definition of Black girl luxury. How luxurious is it to live in a diamond-encrusted jail cell of your own creation? Unable to gain a single pound, wear your natural hair, or be allowed to look anything besides perfect. Is this what freedom looks like for Black women? Why must we adorn ourselves with designer labels made by designers who have either actively excluded black people from wearing their clothes, exploited black people in the making of their garments, or appropriated black culture while not giving credit to the people they stole from in order to be considered beautiful and worthy?
I don’t think the existence of Black girl luxury in and of itself is harmful. Well, I don’t believe it’s any more harmful than any other social media trend that is built on comparing your lifestyle to perfectly curated pictures and videos of an internet stranger. I think the marketing of Black girl luxury as a revolutionary movement is misguided. Black people wearing designer items will not save us, the same way Black billionaires will not save us either! I believe Black girl luxury is just like every other capitalist push to promote consumption, it’s no stranger that black women are some of the biggest spenders, so it only makes sense that there would be a push to promote the idea that Black women will be able to buy their way into being treated like human beings by wearing designer items and getting tape in hair extensions. In reality, as long as we [Black women] live under this system of white supremacy, any form of “luxury” that we acquire can easily be taken away, because, above all, we are seen as Black before we are seen as luxurious.
