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Another day, another case of someone in a western country dressing up in Blackface. This culprit this time is a model in French Vogue:
Seeking ever edgier territory, having dispensed with motherhood and cannibalism as sources of controversy, Vogue Paris took pictures of Dutch supermodel Lara Stone in blackface. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before!
In the October issue of the magazine is a 14-page editorial featuring the Dutch beauty. Shot by Steven Klein and styled by editor-in-chief Carine Roitfeld, the piece starts off by praising Stone’s “sensual” body, her “uninhibited gappy teeth” and the “radical break with the wave of anorexic models” that she supposedly represents. Too bad they changed everything they claim to love about her for the shoot.
What Klein and Roitfeld should know — as the producers of the Australian program Hey, Hey, It’s Saturday also should have known — is that painting white people black for the entertainment of other white people is offensive in ways that stand entirely apart from cultural context. France and Australia may not have the United States’ particular history of minstrel shows as a form of popular entertainment going back to the 19th century, but something about the act of portraying a white woman as black ought to sound an alarm, somewhere.
The fact that the issue, dedicated to “Supermodels,” contains no black models, should also have been noticed, and corrected.
Given Klein is American, it would be nearly impossible to even argue that the magazine didn’t know what buttons it was pushing. It’s kind of sickening to think that minstrelsy has become just another “reference” for po-mo fashion editorials to “appropriate” to show how “edgy” they are, “conceptually.”
After painting Stone’s body brown, the makeup artist then apparently painted parts of her white again. Inexplicably, the editorial moves from the studio to a location. The token Lady Gaga picture at least clears up one troubling question: why it is that Stone spends the editorial wearing only a black thong on her lower half. I looked at this editorial, and I just thought, pathetic, pathetic, pathetic. When I got to this shot, I thought lame. Since when does Carine Roitfeld seem so out-of-date
The emphasis is mine.
So now the American photographer in French Vogue, a country notorious for the mistreatment and blatant racism against the black and brown folk in their own borders, thinks it’s “edgy” to paint a model black in an issue of the highest of high fashion magazines dedicated to non-black supermodels, during a time when the dearth of black and brown models is constantly being discussed and months after the historic “black” issue of Italian Vogue.
Am I the only who thinks the French are poking fun at the rest of us? Saying: See you wanted diverse, we’ll give you diverse, here’s your nigger model right here.
So this is what my post-racial America looks like.
There is never a time blackface is NOT offensive.
Never.
I’m incredibly tired of folk looking at blatantly racist events and then coming up with a myriad of reasons why said racist act isn’t racist:
Oh it’s edgy.
Oh it’s a discourse on the futility of racial classification, since anyone can be black?
Or my personal favorite: French Vogue didn’t mean to be racist, it was an unintentional consequence and since it wasn’t intended, it’s not racist.
In the end the intentions don’t matter. The inherent racism and the long and painful history of some acts mean they should rarely (I’d argue never) be undertaken to make any kind of statement.
Blackface is never okay or edgy or artsy or making a statement.
Or let me put it like this: If a fashion magazine decided to dress up a German model as Anne Frank would be still be talking about the edginess of the pictorial?
