blackface strikes again

As I mentioned two posts ago, there was a huge controversy over a French Vogue spread that featured a model in blackface. I mentioned a past cycle of America's Next Top Model where they "changed" each model's race through makeup. It's interesting that only a few weeks later, ANTM did it again with the current cycle. The models had just arrived at their "abroad" destination, Hawaii, and were told about hapa, which is the Hawaiian word for "half," meaning half one race and half another. Each of the six girls left were assigned two races that they would be transformed into for their photo shoot.

Brittany - Native American and East Indian

Erin - Tibetan and Egyptian

Jennifer - Botswanan and Polynesian

Laura - Mexican and Greek

Nicole - Malagasy (from Madagascar) and Japanese

Sundai - Moroccan and Russian

I have to say, I am extremely angry about this. The media needs to learn that people doing blackface to imitate and make fun of Michael Jackson on a gameshow in Australia is one thing, and models taking the beauty of one race (or two!) and turning it into high-quality fashion is something else entirely. I wish my blog had more readers so I could know that I had a shot at publicly disagreeing with this article. And I desperately hope that Tyra Banks does NOT apologize for doing this photo shoot. There is nothing to apologize for. One of the models was technically put in "traditional" blackface -- Jennifer, because she was Botswanan -- all of the others were completely different ethnicities, ones that have not historically been imitated through anything similar to "blackface" at all. God, this really pisses me off. The pictures are beautiful and none of the models objected whatsoever to the photo shoot; in fact, they found it interesting and challenging, as it was! The only issue any of the girls had was simply understanding what being of that race meant -- for example, Erin claimed to know nothing about Tibet other than it needed to be freed (sidenote: um, Erin, read the news or something). True fashion is edgy, true fashion is not comfortable, it is vitally important that Tyra did this photo shoot (in fact, she was the photographer herself). Hopefully one day people will realize that this is not offensive.