Racist depiction of minorities as ugly and uncool shapes later self-conscious bodily practices

Evidence

Growing up in Britain through the 1970s and 1980s, I was painfully aware that Asians were beyond fashion. The endless reinforcement of racist depictions of Asian culture and people let me know that as well as being dirty, less than human, and outside of the loop allowing respect or desire, Asians were hopelessly uncool, no matter what they wore. This was before the recent exoticisms of Asian underground and, largely, before the preeminence of an African-Americanized global US culture had transformed black women into mainstream objects of glamor and desire. Now I wonder if the concentrated attention which many raised-in-Britain black women bring to body care is in part a response to this childhood experience of being made monstrous - always the witch and never the princess in playground games. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2833

Categorization

• QUESTION: Is there empirical work on the psychology of ‘being made monstrous’ in childhood and its relation to later body-care practices among diasporic women?
• XREF: connects to: The racial gaze subjects the observed to a humiliating double-consciousness — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 878; Body ideals are culturally manufactured through deliberate childhood practices — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 429