The resulting photographs and interviews were curated for Stamped, a new exhibit at Pioneer Works, in Brooklyn, that is part of a series of events exploring whiteness led by the Racial Imaginary Institute. (Funded in part by the stipend Rankine received from her MacArthur Fellowship, the institute collaborates with artists, galleries, and organizations to host exhibits, lectures, and other conversations focused on race.)

Though the artists didn’t ask subjects to identify their race or ethnicity, Stamped features interviews with people from an array of backgrounds. Along with audio from on-the-ground conversations and ingredient lists for blond hair dye marking the gallery’s windows, the exhibit displays photographs, some shrunken to fit onto real postage stamps.These images offer close-ups of bleached-blond hair, often sharply contrasting with the wearer’s darker roots growing through.

But naturally fair hair is uncommon: An estimated 2 percent of the world’s population—and 5 percent of white Americans—is actually towheaded. Blond hair is the result of a genetic mutation typically associated with northern Europeans, but it has also been seen in a small percentage of Aboriginal Australians, northern Africans, and Asians.

Still, people across continents have been coloring their hair for centuries with products like lemon juice, hydrogen peroxide, and henna. The Golden Age actress Jean Harlow, the original “platinum blond” starlet of the ’30s, went so far as to use bleach, peroxide, ammonia, and Lux soap flakes to achieve her shade. And by 1956, when Clairol released its first at-home hair-coloring kit that could “lighten, tint, condition, and shampoo hair in one step,” blond hair became accessible to the American masses.

There are a multitude of reasons why someone might choose blond. For subjects featured in Stamped, it was a way to cover gray hair, to look younger, to be treated better, to look better, or to look more like themselves:

“It got to the point where dyeing my hair matched my personality more.” “I like myself better when it’s this color.” “My beautician told me I should try it. She was like, ‘It’s good for your skin tone.’” “I wanted to do something dramatic.”

But, for the most part, interviewees didn’t mention the connection between whiteness and blondness until Rankine prompted them. “I think part of our orientation as Americans has been to substitute the word white with people,” Rankine says. “Consequently, when they think of blondness, they’re thinking of the hair color of ‘people,’ people who are valued. But they don’t understand that that value attaches to whiteness.”

Blondness, then, exists as a complicated form of self-expression. It can signal youth, beauty, privilege, and conformity. But it can also represent rebellion, independence, and the demand to be looked at and respected. It’s a choice that’s both distinctly personal and deeply intertwined with what society has taught people to value. Rankine and Lucas have a term for that: complicit freedom.