It seems like every day the media is pushing the narrative that something else is now considered "white supremacy." Individualism, meritocracy, punctuality, proper grammar, hard work, competition, standardized tests, the nuclear family, private property, scientific objectivity — even expecting people to speak proper English is considered “evidence” of white supremacy.
And the list will keep growing. Now, the BBC recently published an absurd article claiming that the trend of leaving fingernails unpainted pushes "white supremacist standards of beauty."
Yes, you read that correctly. Women who skip the nail polish are now apparently upholding systemic racism.
The piece started as a harmless trend story. The BBC talked to Paloma Buddemeier, who owns a nail salon in London, and she said more of her customers are getting manicures and then passing on the polish, a look people now tie to "quiet luxury."
Naturally, the BBC went looking for a race angle and found one.
In recent months, artsy shots of glossy naked nails have been flooding social media and taking over fashion runways and red carpets, which some are viewing as the latest symbol of "quiet luxury".
But critics argue the bare nails trend actually says something about class, the hamster wheel of beauty standards, and who gets to define what is considered tasteful.
Nail art's historical and creative roots are linked back to black, Latino, and Asian communities and the suggestion that bare nails are now a sign of high status could stigmatise bold manicures, they say.
"That trend really promotes blankness and this kind of sameness and erasure of culture and identity that is so important to black and brown communities," beauty journalist Kristina Rodulfo tells the BBC.
"They are often called elegant or tasteful, and these are often usually euphemisms that perpetuate white supremacist standards of beauty."
Seriously? Erasure of culture? Nobody's identity gets erased when a woman decides she'd rather not pay extra for gel. And the idea that "elegant" and "tasteful" are secret code words for white supremacy is the kind of ridiculous claim that only survives in newsrooms where nobody is allowed to laugh at it.
The BBC went even further. The article gave women of color credit for turning manicures into "an accessible and fashionable form of self-expression, historians say," and then rattled off a list of famous examples.
Entertainer Josephine Baker, disco icons Dianna Ross and Donna Summer, and Olympic gold-medal-winning sprinter Florence Griffith-Joyner - whose dramatic acrylic sets often distracted headline writers from her record-setting performances - have all pioneered nail art.
"These were times that it was hard for black women to be able to express themselves," says celebrity nail artist Celeste Hampton.
"[Nail art] allowed black women to express our form of softness, our form of femininity, our form of beauty," Hampton added. Fine. Nobody is stopping anyone from getting the most elaborate acrylic set on the market. But the BBC treats one group's preference for bare nails as if it were an attack on everyone else's preference for bold ones.
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Then the article turns to the history lesson that undercuts its own argument. According to the BBC, when waves of Vietnamese refugees opened nail bars in the 1970s, professional manicures stopped being a luxury for the rich. That's a genuine American success story about immigrants building businesses and bringing prices down for regular people. So how does Rodulfo spin it? Once manicures went mainstream, she claims, the wealthy started pivoting away from them in a textbook case of "counter signalling."
Then she pointed a finger at exactly who you'd expect.
"The same way that logo bags are considered gauche or quiet luxury is more aspirational, bare nails are considered the trend now. The examples are almost always white women or celebrities… [and] they'll often conflate class and taste with that bareness," Rodulfo said.
There it is: White women are to blame. Again.
Don’t get me wrong, I have my issues with liberal white women (I’m looking at you, Lindsay Clancy jurors), but you know what? They’re not to blame for everything.
It's all very confusing. I figured that, based on this history, white women getting fancy manicures would be deemed cultural appropriation. And sure enough, I found several articles making such a claim. So, of course, going the opposite direction is also bad. In fact, it’s “white supremacy.” You literally can’t please the woke left. Everything white people do is problematic by default.
That's the exhausting reality of this worldview. Paint your nails, and you're stealing someone else's culture. Leave them bare, and you're enforcing racial hierarchies. There's no correct answer, because the only thing that matters is painting white people as inherently evil.
The BBC eventually removed the article after significant backlash.
