French Vogue gets tres ignorant.
It was recently brought to my attention that there was some controversy over a spread in French Vogue featuring model Lara Stone modeling various outfits in full-on blackface. While I do not think the images were intended to be directly hurtful, the ignorance and the audacity are what get me. I understand that race relations in France and Europe as a whole are very different than they are here in America and that blackface has more of a negative connotation here than anywhere else, but as a fashion journalist, this represented poor judgment on the part of their editor. The spread is tasteful as far as how it was done, but were they so pressed to be shocking and avant garde that they decided to go ahead with the blackface idea despite people’s feelings or was it so difficult to find a Black woman worthy of their prestigious magazine that they had to use a white girl and just blacken her skin (this is sarcasm)? Did Alek Wek die? This is a cheap cry for attention because no publicity is bad publicity. Vogue will gloss over this and move on unscathed.
I don't even know who this is supposed to be but this dude must not live near any Black people. Try this sh*t in South Central LA and see what happens.
I didn’t hear a whole lot of controversy over Robert Downey Jr.’s performance in Tropic Thunder, but I understood thta there was some and people would not be totally off-base to take offense if they had not seen the movie, but I saw it and I thought it was great. In addition to showing that this was a white actor becoming Black in the movie and actually having a Black character there to point out the ignorance of it all was pure genius. And Downey’s portrayal of the character was comical, not hurtful. I couldn’t say I didn’t know people in my own family that acted and talked exactly like him. He wasn’t painted with charcoal body paint, it was a normal shade of brown and he wasn’t chowing down on chicken and watermelon in every scene.
Quite simply, if you are going to tread into blackface territory, do tread carefully. There is a fine line between satirical and offensive and crossing over to the wrong side of that line could very well get you hurt. Do the research and understand the struggle. That being said, we as a people cannot jump at every provocation. We have more important things to worry about. We’re playing into their hands, giving them just the publicity they clearly so desperately seek. But first and foremost, people have to be more responsible for what they put out there in the media. If you’re trying to be offensive, pat yourself on the back, because blackface will usually be that, but don’t feign ignorance when someone calls you out on it.
