I have opened with this passage from Toni Morrison for a number of reasons. The passage reflects the long-standing preoccupation that African-American activists have had with standards of physical beauty, a preoccupation that I will soon call antiracist aestheticism. The passage also captures in singularly effective language the existential, social, and psychological conditions that motivate this preoccupation, and contributes the language of logical petitions that I will use to frame my discussion of aestheticism. Morrison's ugly little black girl, a character named Pecola, makes a request that would be ludicrous were it not for the nature of her circumstances. In this essay I want to consider how Pecola's circumstances motivate her petition and two others, after which I will offer my own petition concerning the practice of aesthetics. First, a few words about the social and intellectual conditions that make Pecola's petition "logical." One of the cornerstones of the modern West has been the hierarchical valuation of human types along racial lines. (Unless I say otherwise, I will be concerned throughout with the modern West, particularly with England and its former possessions in the Americas.) The most prominent type of racialized ranking represents blackness as a condition to be despised, and most tokens of this type extend this attitude to cover the physical features that are central to the ascription of black identity. So a central assumption has been that black folks-with our kinky hair, flat noses, thick lips, dark skin, prognathism, and steatopygia-are ugly. (I call to your attention the evaluative overtones of this standard descriptive language: imagine the difference if I had said broad noses, full lips, curly hair, and so on.) The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism