In “Stamped,” Claudia Rankine and John Lucas Examine Blonde Hair in Terms of Race, Privilege, and Desire

What does it mean to go blonde? Does it stir up sidewalk catcalls that inspire a band name? Does it signal good-girl morals, like Sandra Dee in Grease, or Clueless ditz? Will it land you a date—or a gig in the White House? For poet and artist Claudia Rankine and photographer John Lucas, tugging at the thread of the blonde phenomenon has been a roving mission over the last couple years. In grocery stores and airports, at Brooklyn’s Afropunk festival and the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, the couple have sidled up to fair-headed strangers, asking them questions and taking close-cropped photos of their hair. “Most people aren’t aware that only 2 percent of the world’s population is naturally blonde,” Lucas says, marveling at the peroxide legions. If rarity has long sparked interest and copycat artists—what began as a Northern European genetic mutation has been around for 11,000 years, with lightening remedies dating back millennia—what else underpins that societal value?

Rankine, the author of the 2014 book Citizen: An American Lyric, has sparked a lot of conversations on whiteness lately. The Racial Imaginary Institute in New York, which she helped found using grant money from her MacArthur award, cosponsored a film series this summer at BAM, along with art shows at the Kitchen and Jack Shainman Gallery. Joining this landscape of reckoning is “Stamped,” Rankine and Lucas’s new exhibition at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works. The images of hair—straight, coiled, and buzz cut, in shades from platinum to golden to starkly two-tone—have been shrunk down to fit onto custom-made (and very much usable) postage stamps, in a nod to blonde’s currency in society and the layered messages it conveys. Audio from Rankine’s on-the-street interviews also fills the space, with questions about the impetus behind a dye job. The reasons are many: to stand out, to look younger, to turn heads. But where does race fit in, at a time of escalating tension? “One of the terms we’re using is complicit freedom,” Rankine explains. “We’re all capable of making this choice and doing what we want, but what happens when what we want matches up with a kind of complicity around what is valued?” Here, Rankine and Lucas discuss the ideas that underpin the show.

In “Stamped,” photographs of blonde hair are scaled down to literal postage stamps. Dyeing your hair, says Rankine, “is a kind of message that you want to send to the world.”Photo: Courtesy of John Lucas

Tell me about the arc of the project.
Claudia Rankine: Obviously, it ran in tandem with the run-up to the presidency, where so many women in the Republican Party and on the news suddenly seemed all to be blonde. Amy Larocca had written a piece [for The Cut] called “Political Peroxide, Blonde Privilege.” I think that was the originating impulse. At the same time, there was a sort of huge stylistic trend of women of color dyeing their hair blonde. We know Beyoncé, we know Jennifer Lopez, but on the streets as well; Andrea Cheng also wrote a piece in The New York Times about why so many Asian-American women are bleaching their hair. We are not the only ones who noticed it. It’s a sort of phenomenon right now.

John Lucas: Fox News is, almost to a T, all blonde.

What surprised you in your interviews with people?
Rankine: It was interesting: Many people said they didn’t really think about blonde-ness connected to whiteness, which is hard to believe. They are in dialogue with a hair color that has been used by the world to suggest whiteness, to suggest privilege, to suggest desirability, beauty. For them, the first thing that came to mind was this question of choice. Women over 50 say, “It covers my gray.” Younger women say, “It’s a form of expression,” but when you ask them what they’re expressing, it’s like they don’t want to arrive at the idea of conformity around beauty standards that have been presented—on television, in Barbie dolls—from the time they arrived out of the womb. I think people don’t even realize that the Barbie doll was based on the Lilli doll, which was a 1940s [pinup] doll in Germany. That’s why the Barbie doll is so buxom. And that just falls in with the Doris Days and Marilyn Monroes and the Hitchcock heroines that films have presented us all along.

There seems to be two types of purity here, though. The racialized one, and the one about virgin, untreated hair. That’s where the transgression seems to come in with bleached hair.
Rankine: Right. It moves out of the black-and-white conversation because people are stripping their hair down to the follicle. It’s a lot of work that they’re engaged in and committed to! So whether it feels to them like dissent, or whether they’re getting back at a sort of hair-is-beauty rhetoric that mothers communicate to their daughters, the question is: What exactly is motivating them? We have all these other models of beautiful women: Michelle Obama, Rachel Maddow, Solange. Solange is interesting because she is blonde, but she is, like, blonde on Thursday and natural on Friday. So when the Solanges of the world say, “It’s just a style that I put on and take off,” you believe them because they do put it on and take it off.

Lucas: It reminds me of Hillary Clinton. Through her pre-political years, she wasn’t blonde; her natural color was more brunette, and all through her political life her hair was mostly blonde. Then, the first image you see of her after the election, when she’s hiking in the woods and someone comes across her, she’s showing her gray, showing her natural color, and people rejoice. They were like, “Oh, the real Hillary Clinton.”

Rankine: I was at the Martin Luther King museum, where he was shot, and the woman at the front desk had her hair dyed blonde; she was a black woman. And I said to her, “Here’s a museum that’s interested in white supremacy and preserving the history of the killing of this amazing civil rights leader. How do you feel about being blonde?” And she said, “You know, actually, I’m going to take my hair back to its natural color because it feels a little weird to be in this space every day as a black blonde woman, when in fact, we’re talking about an insistence on the value of blackness.” It was an interesting conversation.

But in this era of “women can be anything,” there’s an impulse to stick up for personal agency. Tracing that line back in history is important, but you also want to give room for freedom of expression, no?
Rankine: It’s still a choice. One of the terms we’re using is complicit freedom. We’re all capable of making this choice and doing what we want, but what happens when what we want matches up with a kind of complicity around what is valued? We’re in a tug-of-war around whiteness in this country right now, with Make America Great Again being synonymous with Make America White Again. Then, on the other hand, you have the millennials, Generation Z—all these people who see blonde-ness as an act of rebellion and an act of dissent. What happens when the two things run in tandem and achieve the same thing? I find that fascinating.

A projection in the show compiles live iPhone images of blonde hair, “so they slightly move and vibrate and pulse,” says Lucas. The tight crops zero in on hair texture, by turns revealing and obscuring race. “How much is the hair communicating on its own?” asks Rankine.Photos: Courtesy of John Lucas

There’s also a male-female dynamic. Part of the attraction around blonde hair is tied up in youth. For women, like me, who were blonde as children, it seems to signal a nubile 15-year-old.
Rankine: You’re right that women think about blonde-ness as being youthful and desirable, but why is that youthful and desirable? Some of them were blonde when they were young. There were also brunette children when they were young, and nobody’s going back to that as a sign of their youthfulness. Across the board [in interviews], it seemed like people said that they were treated better once they were blonde. For many of the women, especially the white women, there was a real sense that men treated them better and that women also treated them better.

An editor once suggested I go blonde to raise my profile.
Rankine: A curator in an art museum once told me that she was a towhead as a child, and that her mother’s friend would say things to her—and this was to a child, now—“Oh, your hair’s not blonde enough. You won’t be blonde after puberty.” Like, You think you’re special now? It’s not going to last. And these were grown-ass women. So it clearly has value, you know?

You snuck an ad for Lady Clairol into the audio track: “It’s true, blondes have more fun.” Why did you want to include that?
Rankine: I think there’s no way outside of the marketing, you know? Even people who think that they are exhibiting a total freedom—“I can just do what I want, and so I’m doing this”—they have been inculcated with the rhetoric from marketing their entire lives. The ads are just ads to sell something, and so the question is: What is really being sold?

Have you ever dyed your hair anything other than what it is?
Rankine: No, but I really wanted to dye it, just as a performance, for the opening. Had I had more time, I would have done it! I think people will naturally move toward judgment [as a takeaway from the show], and it really isn’t about judgment. I think people should do whatever makes them comfortable, and so I thought if I dyed my hair, then it would take the judgment quotient away. It really is just a question.

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