Enough With The Blackface Othering Already!

*deep, frustrated sigh*

I've had up to here *pointing to hairline* with the blackface in modeling. Vogue France found itself in hot water for it earlier in the month, and here comes Tyra right behind them. It must have been a conspiracy of dimwits, I guess.

At least the Vogue spread possibly conveyed some kind of message (to some) about race, especially on the tail of the "revelation" about Michelle Obama's white ancestry. With that said, Tyra Banks with her race fetish ass, just had to come with her own twisted version.

See all the pictures here.

In tonight's episode of ANTM, Tyra experimented with mixed ancestry (or Hapa as it is known in Hawaii where the episode was filmed). She gave the girls such pairings as Russian and Moroccan, Botswana (how nice of them to misspell it with Batswana in the episode) and Polynesian, Malagasy and Japanese, and others. She gave the black girl Russian and Moroccan because she has those "high cheek bones" that Russians are famed for.

Ummm...Last time I checked, black peoples are known for their higher cheek bones, so I guess I don't see why she had to do Russian and Moroccan. I digress...

I watched the pictures in horror, not because of the blackface per se. It was tastefully done, at least in comparison to a minstrel show. What did bring the awful taste of bile to my mouth, was her "bloodlust" for putting these women, all of them white save an Asian and African-American model, in "traditional" garb and othering them.

Because putting white women in black face is SO much cooler than actually working with the girls' actual racial backgrounds.

To be more specific, it falls in the same box as "exotic" black women, who are only deemed to be attractive when they have a little less black in them (see any rap video these days).

Black models already don't get enough work, and everyone who knows anything about fashion knows this. I am tired of the "exotization" and "fethishization" of black women provided they are mixed with a little bit of this, and a little bit of that.

Not only that, the girls looked awful, as their features did not match their "skin tones." It's almost like she had the same lust that I witnessed growing up when the black girls in my elementary class would talk about our white classmates' hair and relaxing.

Then again, what can you expect from a woman who told Bianca that her features (with her HIGH CHEEK BONES) were too "strong," while praising the blonde haired and eyebrowed model for looking "angelic."

It's almost as if Black or Hispanic or Japanese, is new and refreshing, when white models don some dark makeup for Tyra. Otherwise they are just unremarkable.

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