“So, I have a responsibility not only to myself but to my people to look a particular way because when you see me—and I don’t look a particular way—you’re going to project that onto everybody,” Blay explains. “So, my responsibility is to rep my people,” meaning one’s immediate family, community, or ancestral lines.That care isn’t specifically gendered, my anecdotal experiment notwithstanding. Black men, be they cisgender, transgender, or nonbinary, may get a pass regarding their dry skin in some way, Blay says. Still, quite a few of us in the community would look at him askance and question if and why he didn’t, or doesn’t, have someone in his life taking care of him.
When Vaughan Graves, a Philadelphia dermatologist, started his medical training back in the ’70s, the term ashy in reference to dry skin and Black people “wasn’t used very much—or at all.” During that time, Graves explains, “we’d always say Vaseline and cocoa butter—some people would even say Crisco as a good moisturizer and emollient for the skin. Those would be the go-to items [we] would recommend, not really knowing what the cause was back then.” The dermatology profession understood xerosis—the medical term for dry skin—but didn’t quite grasp the concern beyond “that it just needed moisture,” Graves continues. “They knew it was a form of dryness, of dehydration of the skin, but back then they said to treat it with appropriate emollients.”
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However, Graves says he used the term ashy long before the rest of the medical profession, as a form of mutual cultural understanding about the skin condition: “It became prevalent as we became more culturally conscious and people felt free to discuss their issue. So I saw it more and more in the ’90s and 2000s.” That extends to the products that specifically address the common skin condition, he notes. Even medical journals adapted the term in discussing research about Black people and dry skin around that time.
The earliest nonmedical mention for ashy in the Urban Dictionary is 2002. And a few white people have taken their turns at explaining the term to their skinfolk in the last few years in media outlets like GQ, more in a role of a translator than an anthropologist. Quite a few white people learn this through their partners of color or children. (Perhaps the most remembered example is a white-presenting mother’s video in which she playfully chastises the community for not telling her about “the butters.”)Mollena Lee Williams-Haas, an African American woman who is a renowned BDSM teacher and artist, called upon her online community to educate her white Austrian husband, celebrated composer Georg Friedrich Haas, on the necessity of the “ashiness check.”
Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHY
