Saturday, February 02, 2008

The Unbearable Whiteness of Fashion

Thanks, Ann.

Each year, Black women contribute to fashion and beauty industries in the amount of 40 billion dollars. We go to malls outside our communities to buy the latest in fashion. Are we going to believe the oft-repeated lie in the fashion industry that they can't hire a Black model because we're not profitable to the world?

The fashion and beauty industries are 75 years behind when it comes to race. People of Color make up 33% of America's population. Yet the fashion industry's runway and ad campaigns remained lily-white.

What about modeling agencies? Most of the modeling agencies are located in relatively affluent white areas and often dispatch modeling scouts to mainly white shopping centers and malls instead of cities and neighborhoods of Color to recruit models. What the industry wants to project is a false lily-white image of America to the world and most people fall for it.

The faux idea that white women are the epitome of beauty, virtue, and affluence is being exported to the far corners of the earth along with hateful images of Black women. This racist/misogynistic duality of women has harmed women in America and the world. The fashion industry wants to project the image of white models so that brainwashed and gullible public buy into the peculiarly American notion of the cult of white womanhood.

This is what the industry wants and prefer and want it to continue because the industry, like everything else is soak completely in the oil of racism/classism.

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