When you were a kid, did your mom ever forbid you from wearing red nail polish? Maybe she said something like, “That color is a bit too grown.”  Perhaps she warned that red lipstick was for “fast” girls, or that a red dress would send the “wrong message.” These warnings didn’t emerge out of thin air. Generations of women were taught that red was dangerous — a color that could draw the wrong kind of attention, one that marked you as unruly, provocative, or “loose.” But why doe

Introduction Black women’s bodies have never simply existed in America—they’ve always been dissected, debated, labeled, and controlled. From the moment Saartjie Baartman was paraded through 19th-century Europe as a spectacle of anatomy rather than a human being, the world began its long obsession with turning Black femininity into public discourse. What should have been sacred and sovereign became public property. Our curves, our hair, our skin, our style—nothing was exempt