The Mandates of Magic: On Timeka N. Tounsel’s “Branding Black Womanhood”

LAST SPRING, the cover of Essence magazine featured a double portrait of Niecy Nash and Jessica Betts, two Black women, together. The image depicted them naked, with Nash looking straight out at the camera, and Betts closing her eyes as she leaned into her lover’s face. Her bare hand rests at the nape of Nash’s neck, both of them a voluptuous chocolate brown. The image astonished me — a portrayal of Black queer love — so prominently featured. Of course, previous Essence covers had spotlighted Black LGBTQ+ celebrities like Janelle Monáe, Tessa Thompson, and Amandla Stenberg, but the double portrait of Nash and Betts from the March/April 2022 issue captivated me in ways the other images hadn’t.

I grew up reading Essence. When I was a girl, I’d pick up a copy at my aunt’s house or at a hair salon and flip through the pages, thrilled by the sight of all the sophisticated clothes and hairstyles. I much preferred Essence to the staid Ebony or the old-fashioned Jet. Essence had flare. To my eyes, the fashion spreads were just as glamorous and alluring as anything I saw in Vogue or Elle, but there was a vital difference, because Essence was — and still is — a Black women’s magazine. In Essence, the chic outfits I loved nearly always adorned the bodies of Black women. Plus, those pages celebrated a range of light and dark skin tones. I could also find hairstyles that seemed within reach. No amount of perming was ever going to give the tight kinks of my 4C hair the airy bounce I obsessively sought after staring at pictures of Claudia Schiffer or Cindy Crawford. With Essence, I could at least aspire to find a hairstyle I liked so much that I’d rip out the page from the magazine and hand it to a hairstylist to recreate on my head (this was a fantasy dear to my heart when I was 13 years old). The magazine could not entirely stomp out the racism and colorism I internalized in part through the battery of commercials, television shows, and films that rammed picture-perfect whiteness and long, straight hair into my cultural and aesthetic consciousness. But it certainly helped me get by — its pages always sparked a sense of pride and belonging. Amidst all the beauty and fashion tips, there were articles about Black excellence and Black success.

For a Black girl growing up in the 1990s, Essence symbolized a safe space, even before I knew safe spaces were a thing. At the same time, I could sense, though I didn’t necessarily have the terminology, that this safe space came with parameters: it was, for the most part, heterosexual. This is why, when I saw that the married couple gracing the cover of “The Black Women in Hollywood Issue” were two Black women, I felt surprise. But I also felt something so familiar, as if it were a reflex: I felt joy and pride. A few months after seeing that cover, I read Timeka N. Tounsel’s Branding Black Womanhood: Media Citizenship from Black Power to Black Girl Magic. Tounsel gave me a language to explain why I found that image so striking. I realized that my response had a lot to do with my childhood feelings about Essence and the way the magazine still plays a role in how I conceive of my own femininity.

In the prologue to Branding Black Womanhood, Tounsel shares her own childhood memories of reading Essence and other African American magazines. She details the pleasurable routine of Fridays spent at the salon. While her mother was getting her hair done, the young girl would settle into a “sturdy, rust-colored sofa” and study the images and read the articles. She “returned to the same issues over and over again, never boring of them,” spending “hundreds of hours meditating on the women that lived on those pages.” She “began to think that the images circulating throughout the world of Black popular print culture were attached to [her] identity.” She desired the looks and objects those magazines were selling, implicitly or explicitly, through the editorial content and the advertisements. Her desire was tinged with a kind of religious intensity. “[E]ven before becoming a teenager,” Tounsel writes, “I had become a believer. I believed that the best version of what I could become rested somewhere in the glamour of those pages.” Black magazines like Essence offered the recognition she longed for. When Tounsel confides, “I just wanted to be acknowledged in the mediascape as easily and broadly as white women and girls,” I understand that yearning because I felt it myself. I suspect that I might not be too much older than her, perhaps a half decade or so. We are connected through this common experience, but that need to be seen and heard is essentially a collective desire, expressed by generations of Black women.

Over the last 50 years, Black women have become more visible in the media. In Branding Black Womanhood, Tounsel evaluates the crucial role of Essence — and its publisher Essence Communications, Inc. (ECI) — in that development. The magazine was founded in the late 1960s by four Black men — Jonathan Blount, Cecil Hollingsworth, Edward Lewis, and Clarence Smith — and the first issue appeared in May 1970. Its original title, Sapphire, suggested by the male cofounders, was problematic. The magazine’s first editor-in-chief Ruth Ross proposed Essence instead. Tounsel notes, “As an African American woman, Ross understood that the magazine’s potential readers associated ‘sapphire’ with an excessively angry character from the caricature-laden 1950s sitcom, Amos N’ Andy.” Even though Blount, Hollingsworth, Lewis, and Smith had initially misjudged their female audience, they did recognize the potential value of their venture. They had identified an unmet need in the market and attempted to meet that need by fashioning the periodical in the vein of mainstream women’s publications like Ladies’ Home Journal and Cosmopolitan. As a result, the founders “became default guardians managing how the commercial sphere interacted with Black women,” Tounsel observes. “In this paradigm, the reader was a consumer first and foremost. Her Blackness was a unique selling proposition.”

In the first half of her book, Tounsel explores how, from the early 1970s to the late 2010s, the magazine’s publishers and editors capitalized on this “unique selling proposition” through the construction of the Essence woman. She highlights the pivotal contributions of Susan L. Taylor, whose career at Essence spanned nearly four decades. Taylor started out in 1970 as a freelance beauty writer, but she soon became the magazine’s beauty and fashion editor. In that role, she “frame[d] personal upkeep as an obligation […] makeup rituals and products were conduits to a dignified Black womanhood available to any woman willing to commit to the proper disciplines.” For the Essence woman, self-discipline was self-expression. Beauty routines could be empowering, and consumption a form of racial uplift. If, for instance, “the modern Black woman wanted to sport an afro, she needed the right products to keep it well-coiffed for the office or church or both.”

By 1981, Taylor had risen to the position of editor-in-chief. After leaving the editorship in 2000, she was the publications director until 2007. During her tenure at Essence, Taylor “built an enterprise that taught other Black women how to tap into their own magic, which she often referred to as ‘inner beauty.’” In doing so, “she set a precedent for self-branding in the ‘live your best life’ arena that two other Black women — Iyanla Vanzant and Oprah Winfrey — have come to dominate.” Tounsel provides an important reassessment of Taylor’s legacy that demonstrates how significant aspects of the “commercial grammar of […] empowerment” that we see formulated in the marketplace today have their beginnings at Essence. For example, the corporations, like Coca-Cola, Walmart, and Disney, that “promote consumption as the solution to every kind of struggle” at the annual Essence Festival, a multiday cultural event held in New Orleans, are drawing from Taylor’s vision of “enlightened consumption.”

In the second half of the book, Tounsel examines how the ethos of enlightened consumption manifests in the marketing campaigns of Procter & Gamble and Ford. For example, she analyzes Ford’s 2019–20 campaign “Built Ford Proud,” which features the voice work of Angela Bassett, whose roles as “noble African American figures” such as “Betty Shabazz, Coretta Scott King, Rosa Parks, and Ramonda, Queen of Wakanda” unquestionably “mar[k] her as a magical Black woman.” In a commercial for the Ford Explorer, Kellee Edwards, a travel and adventure journalist, smiles as she drives through the city of Chicago, past a Black history museum named after the late-18th-century African-descended explorer Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. In the voiceover, Bassett intones, “When exploration is what you do, this is what you drive.” Tounsel comments that “Black Girl Magic advertisements,” like the Ford Explorer spot, “rely on a coding system that allows the texts to transcend the level of sales pitch and become an identity narrative. […] Each item is a building block to the ultimate object for sale: dignified and empowered womanhood.”

This commodification of Black Girl Magic substantially diverges from its earlier conceptions. In her 1999 book When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip-Hop Feminist, Joan Morgan wrote about “the fierceness of a black girl’s magic” as an empowering expression of vulnerability, an antidote to the Strong Black Woman stereotype. Then, in 2013, CaShawn Thompson tweeted “Black Girls are Magical” to highlight the beauty and boldness of Black womanhood and to combat harmful images. However, the Black Girl Magic marketed and monetized by companies — including ECI, which was involved in a trademark dispute over the tagline — is packaged within a “neoliberal framework” that propagates respectability politics. As a result, this brand of commercial empowerment produces a powerful obligation to perform “self-regulation” and respectability — to behave or to dress a certain way — to be subject to what Tounsel terms the “mandates of magic.”

Today’s modern Black woman, for example, might want to sport a teeny-weeny Afro or Bantu knots or goddess locs. The market seeks to exploit those desires. What beauty companies “once defined as unassailable deficiencies,” like nappy hair, have now been transformed into “magical properties” — the “kinks, coils, and curves once in need of taming now occupy center stage as symbols of unique, natural beauty” and strength. In this sense, “commercial campaigns offer Black women figurative crowns that have long been withheld.” But one can’t help but consider the costs of all those figurative crowns. There are the immediate expenses: the money spent on shampoos and conditioners; on moisturizers and hot oil treatments; on gels, butters, and sprays; on satin bonnets and silk pillowcases. But the price we pay is ultimately much more extensive. Tounsel tells us that the “cost of that recognition […] is our agreement to deploy that capital in prescribed ways […] that bolster profits for Black media and their corporate sponsors […] leav[ing] little room to critique the institutions that structure that world.” Beauty companies want us to believe that those natural hair care products are signs of racial pride and progress. But there is a mismatch between that message of liberation and the list of social injustices we encounter every day,

[because] endorsing the notion that being presented as beautiful, or magical, is synonymous with being powerful, is detrimental if it supersedes the other things that matter, such as access to adequate healthcare, political representation, and knowing that one’s life and well-being have value.

Tounsel reminds us that Black Girl Magic “will not save us from the forces that are sustained through our oppression.”

But the capitalistic fantasy — that magical beauty can upend oppressive social structures — is still alluring. While reading Branding Black Womanhood, I often found myself thinking of the television series Bridgerton. Since its debut in December 2020, the show has been praised for its “color-conscious” casting — for instance, an article on Essence’s website, headlined “‘Bridgerton’s’ Black Girl Magic Is Absolutely Royal,” celebrates the performances of Golda Rosheuvel as Queen Charlotte and Adjoa Andoh as Lady Danbury, among other Black women cast members. But Bridgerton has also been critiqued for its “surface-level representation” or “plastic representation” of race. Somehow, in the world of Bridgerton, true love can overcome racism, but not class barriers or gender hierarchies. I confess that I am a conflicted fan of the show. I’m delighted by its visual brilliance and bling — and by all those dazzling Afrocentric wigs donned by Rosheuvel’s Queen Charlotte. But at other times, I am dismayed by the show’s racial politics, which might best be understood as respectability politics, as Patricia A. Matthew has noted. Aristocrats of color, like Lady Danbury, seemingly maintain their elevation in society by strictly following the rules of the ton. Consequently, the work of combating racism falls primarily, if not solely, on the shoulders of people of color, and the magic of restructuring race relations lies in the hands of a Black woman, Queen Charlotte. This is problematic — as in Strong Black Woman stereotype or Black Girl Magic ableist trope problematic.

Tounsel does not discuss Bridgerton in her book, though in other research she focuses on another Shondaland series, Scandal. Kerry Washington’s Olivia Pope represents the tensions of the “ratchet-respectable binary.” On one hand, Olivia is the Black Jezebel sleeping with a married white man, who happens to be the 44th president of the United States. On the other hand, she is the Talented Tenth poster girl, a highly successful, well-dressed, professional woman, who must be, her father tells her, “twice as good as them to get half of what they have.” Variations on the theme “twice as good” also appear in Bridgerton. Scandal and Bridgerton both demonstrate the double standards inherent in maintaining magical beauty status, and both shows ultimately suggest that the system, far from needing to be restructured, might be redeemed by recognizing the Talented Tenth. But in Branding Black Womanhood, Tounsel suggests that other television show creators can more fully disentangle their characters from the respectability politics double bind.

In the fourth chapter, Tounsel looks at Mara Brock Akil’s Being Mary Jane, Issa Rae’s Insecure, and Lena Waithe’s Twenties. The respective (anti)heroines — Mary Jane, Issa, and Hattie — are “beautifully flawed” representations of Black womanhood. They lie, they cheat, they steal. As characters designed to puncture the myth of the Strong Black Woman and trouble the notion of respectability, they are “intentionally messy.” Their “vulnerability” is, Tounsel writes, a “fundamental quality of [their] humanness.” Akil, Rae, and Waithe succeed in crafting multidimensional characters by “strategically deploy[ing] vulnerability” in ways that “emphasize […] a form of personhood beyond magic” and its mandates. In the section on Insecure, Tounsel stresses this point by quoting from a 2016 statement Rae gave about her show:

There’s this like narrative that’s going around […] that Black women are fierce; they’re strong, they’re flawless. And I don’t know that life. And my friends definitely don’t know that life. So, I wanted to center a show around like weak Black women and the uncertainty that they feel on that journey to get to greatness. It’s like the prequel to Black Girl Magic.

If Insecure was the prequel to Black Girl Magic, Rae’s Rap Sh!t, her new comedy series set in Miami about an aspiring female rap group, which premiered on HBO Max in late July, might be the ratchet spin-off — more hustle, less magic — and another illustration of her creative deviancy, her desire to subvert familiar narratives of Black femininity.

The show’s protagonists, Shawna (Aida Osman) and Mia (KaMillion), rap about seducing and scheming, and twerk to lyrics about Bad Bitches. The sexually explicit tenor of their songs displays a defiant rejection of respectability. Shawna and Mia are not so much hung up on the moralistic pressures to be “twice as good.” Instead, they’re preoccupied with the social media gaze. They each have an unrelenting need to Instagram every waking moment. Self-branding, rather than self-regulation, is their form of self-expression. Through their music, they construct and control the market for their bodies. That sense of control is empowering, but it also feels illusory. The heart icons go away when they are targeted by an irate influencer, or worse, their audience moves on to the next viral video. Rae’s brazen representation of Black femininity contrasts with the “dignified Black womanhood” of the classic Essence woman. But both depictions underscore how economic power is wielded through the commercialization of Black women’s bodies.

In the epilogue to Branding Black Womanhood, Tounsel considers the contentious legacy of Essence magazine. In June 2020, soon after the release of the 50th anniversary issue, allegations of “gross mistreatment and abuse of its Black female employees” appeared. In an open letter, the collective Black Female Anonymous claimed that “Essence aggressively monetizes #BlackGirlMagic but the company does not internally practice #BlackGirlMagic.” The bold promise of the magazine’s storied past was contrasted with accusations of its present-day problems, such as “pay inequity, sexual harassment, corporate bullying, intimidation, colorism and classism.” According to Black Female Anonymous, this injustice was far-reaching. By betraying its promises to Black female employees and deceptively capitalizing on the mantra of Black Girl Magic, Essence was “failing Black America.”

In press releases, the company refuted the charges and reminded readers of its long commitment to “advocating for, investing in, elevating and celebrating Black women.” In many ways, the 50-year-old business has been good for Black women in the United States. After all, don’t we see reflected in its pages the uplift of the race — all those “firsts”? For example, in 1972, Shirley Chisholm, the first Black Congresswoman, became the first Black woman to run for the Democratic presidential nomination. In November of that year, Essence ran a story about the politician with the spirited coverline “The Unsinkable Shirley Chisholm Blasts Black Politicians.” A half century later, we have even more firsts: our first Black first lady, our first Black and Asian female vice president, our first Black female Supreme Court justice. And that stunning cover that featured the actress Niecy Nash and the musician Jessica Betts, who married in August 2020, is another one of those “firsts” — first same-sex couple on the cover of Essence magazine.

I’ll admit that, growing up, one of my favorite things about Essence was those covers and pages showcasing “firsts” because they were so reassuringly aspirational. If that Black woman can be it and do it and make it, maybe I can too. Seeing that Nash-Betts Essence cover was also reassuring. In the midst of headlines about “Don’t Say Gay,” I could believe that Black America was progressing, even if other parts of the nation seemed to be regressing. But my optimism about Black women’s sexual rights was quickly diminished by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. I didn’t want to read all those news stories about how the decision disproportionally impacts Black women. It was too demoralizing.

Acknowledging Black women’s vulnerability — that is, our beautifully flawed humanity alongside the systemic racism we face in health and legal systems — in a social media era of commodified #BlackGirlMagic is essential. And after reading Tounsel’s critiques, I find myself more skeptical of the hashtag. Yet, despite all her cautionary remarks, Tounsel does not call for us to boycott the brand or to reject the “pleasures of the marketplace.” “Representation matters, and it always will,” she informs us. But the real power of this “image economy” lies in transforming visibility and “media citizenship” into structural change. Today, we have more spaces and platforms to assert our own narratives of Black femininity. In Branding Black Womanhood, Tounsel calls for us to seize that power: “[T]he better we understand affirmative visibility and how it becomes commodified, the better our chance, as Black women, of reclaiming the authority to decide when and how we intend to be seen.”

¤

Leigh-Michil George has a PhD in English from UCLA and an MFA in screenwriting from American Film Institute. She teaches in the English department at Geffen Academy at UCLA, and her writing has been published or is forthcoming in The Rambling, Fine Books & Collections, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction.