Recently, I read the series of essays in Outlaw Culture by Bell Hooks. It astonished me. Opened my mind, so to speak.
My friend Joshua Hooper is a graphic artist. His work is pretty freaking sweet. But I noticed in one of his illustrations, that of a black girl (of if you prefer African American woman), was considerably lighter than her real pictures. When asked, he simply responded that it was the lighting. She’s glamorous and stunning in both depictions, but why is there a differential in terms of color?
I also noticed this throughout mainstream culture. Even when Tyra Banks was touting her involvement in an Ebony issue featuring the different shades of beautiful black women, the ‘lighting’ made all the models look well… light skinned. And the only lighting that seems to reflect the beautiful glow of a black woman were in stereotyped editorials and culture shots of traditional “African women.” Magazines or pictures depicting exoticism. Gorgeous? Yes. But fetishizing as well?
Hooks discusses race, sexuality and gender in her esssay “Power to the Pussy,” stating:
Madonna’s [the famouse artist] text constructs a narrative of pure white womanhood contaminated by contact with the colored ‘other.’ It would be easy to dismiss this construction as merely playful if it were not so consistedn through Sex… The structure of [the] narrative suggests that it… appeals directly to white supremacist sexual fantasies.”
Sure this essay was written in the 80s, and we’re fast approaching the second decade of the 3rd millenium. But is this professional ‘lighting’ suitable only for the portrayal of white women? Another piece of the underlying evidence of the dominant white patriarchy that we live in?
If so, why are we, as consumers, as people, and as conscious citizens, buying into it? How do we change this paradigm that exists in our subconscious? What are the consequences if we don’t?
