Race in Fashion

I read a blog posting that made me wince--writer/commentator Michaela Angela Davis decried Essence Magazine's choice of a white fashion director on her Facebook page. An article about her posting is here.

The fallout from her public lament is everywhere and it throws more salt in the already open wound of black to white 'reverse' racism.

I don't fault Davis for wondering aloud why out of all the fashion director jobs available, the position at Essence was offered to a woman whose background is not African American. It is a valid question since the fashion industry is not known for its embrace of diversity of late. The last black supermodel is Naomi Campbell and the only black woman to regularly make the cover of any magazine these days is Oprah Winfrey (although FLOTUS Michelle Obama has done pretty well). Remember when Italian Vogue used all black models to point out their relative absence on the catwalk and other mainstream fashion magazines? That only happened once...

So, it is not racism to question the decision when all indications are that black women and fashion generally do not get mentioned in the same sentence. However, it is racially insensitive to suggest that the job of a fashion editor is somehow informed by one's skin color.

Now I am not an expert, but I am going to go out on a limb and describe the job of fashion editor as that of the person who picks the clothes for the photo shoots. Correct me if I am wrong...

Because if that is all the job entails, then having a white woman in that job isn't a slap in the face or any other major catastrophe. Black women's style choices have been dictated by white women in the fashion industry for years. I saw "The Devil Wears Prada" and if Miranda Priestly/Anna Wintour is really as powerful as the film suggests, then for years, every woman in America from Naomi and Tyra on the runway to Cousin Rita in the hood owes some aspect of her fashion choices to a bunch of gay men and a very shewd woman in an office building in New York City.

I want to put all of this in perspective--I want us to be outraged over racial indifference that reinforces barriers and obstacles in career fields where black and brown women have struggled to gain recognition. It bothers me that for the most part, blacks are still rare in the fashion industry as designers, models, photographers and merchants. But thanks in part to reality shows like Project Runway and America's Next Top Model, we know that the talent is out there. So my hope is that the new fashion director at Essence will make it her business to showcase that talent in its pages...otherwise, Essence will continue to simply be the black version of Glamour or Cosmopolitan.

Zero Sum

I am so disheartened by the state of discourse in this country. I want to take a vacation that allows me to spend at least three days in a spin-free zone (except I can't because I am an admitted news junkie).

So, I watch, cringe, sigh and generally wonder where the hell am I?

I do not recall that politics was this brutal twenty + years ago when my addiction first started. I was a kid in high school and the issue was abortion. The position of my school was that abortion was morally wrong, and until a bomb went off near the bus stop not too far from where I stood every morning to take the bus to that school, my position was the same--abortion was wrong. But after that clinic was bombed and I just happened to have been standing there a few hours earlier before it went off, my opinion changed. I was politicized.

Back then, I did not think poorly of my classmates who fervently believed the total opposite--I accepted that we had different points of view and carried on as girls in high school around that time did. I watched and sang along to raunchy Madonna videos just like they did, played Prince records backwards in search of the demonic under-currents just like they did, and I went to church every Sunday (me Baptist, they Catholic) as well. We all continued with our lives.

When some of my classmates and teachers expressed their affinity for President Reagan, I trumpeted my support of Jesse Jackson. They weren't racists--they were just Republicans and I was a Democrat...that was that. Again, we continued to eat lunch in the cafeteria, take classes together and plan our class activities without any drama. When we disagreed about the need for a Black History program during school hours, we debated the topic and at the end of the day, the school administration made the final decision. When it came time for me to participate in an essay contest about what it meant to be an American, I won an honorable mention.

Fast forward and now I worry if my liberal views will lead some of my former classmates to de-friend me on Facebook. And I wonder if their political opposition to the President is based on some deep-yet-undiscovered lack of confidence in his intellect because he is black. How did I become so cynical?

I went to an HBCU and joined a black sorority. Does this make me anti-white or anti-male? I taught African American history, but I also taught American Government so do I get extra credit? I live in the city and hate the suburbs because I think living out in the middle of nowhere isn't idyllic, it is scary. My husband works for the government because he is a true believer in the power of the government to provide a fair process for everyone--he is neither a redistributionist or a socialist. If my mother in law doesn't speak English fluently after living here for more than 50 years, what harm is she doing to anyone but herself?

Isn't the beauty of this country our ability to be 300 million different individual kings, queens, queers, studs, mammas, poppas, patriots, vegans, carnivores, entrpreneurs, entertainers, ball-players, ball-makers, haters, lovers, friends or foes all inhabiting the same land mass from sea to shining sea?

The "GOP Can't All Be Crazy" List

I am not a fan of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), but as of today, I may be warming to the idea of admiring him. His rationale for voting in favor of Elena Kagan added another check mark in my mental checklist of reasons why the GOP Can't All Be Crazy.

Other people are on the same list--former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson is still on the list. Scott Brown (R-MA), Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Susan Collins (R-ME) are still on the list for the obvious reasons. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) comes and goes depending on my mood, and of course Colin Powell's place is permanent. Condoleezza Rice's position is pretty solid as well, as are the Bush women and the McCain women (yes, there are some women in the GOP that I respect--even if they don't always appear to think for themselves).

But in recent years, some folks are being dropped like bad habits. John McCain's stock plummeted in 2008--not for being Barack Obama's opponent--but for being so transparent and gutless about his positions. After the election, I expected to secretly reinstall him somewhere near the bottom, but then he got back into campaign mode and has proved that he will say almost anything to stay in office. He is now permanently banned. Joe Scarborough used to be on the list, but he had to come off as his show began to harp on the permanent Obama-is-an-abject-failure narrative. I can accept criticism of the President, and I get that Scarborough is the only Republican with a talk show on MSNBC, but he has become essentially a broken record.

Pat Buchanan comes and goes on the list because while he tends to parrot the Obama-should-fail mantra too, he has moments of lucidity that suggest he knows this is all just political theatre. The same is true for Ben Stein and Michael Steele...I know that Mike is a tricky one to justify, but I honestly think Steele knows what he is doing when he dances with the devil in the pale moonlight and spouts off nonsense about Obama. That is his job.

Of course, there are a lot of folks whose names take up permanent residence on my other more populous the GOP Is Totally Ridiculous list:

Dick, Lynn and Liz Cheney
Karl "MC" Rove, Andrew Breitbart and others of their ilk

Rush Limbaugh-Sean Hannity-Glenn Beck and the rest of the Faux Noise echo chamber
Bobby Jindal-Tim Pawlenty (and other governors with ambitions that shape-shift like John McCain)
Mitch McConnell-John Cornyn-Tom Coburn et. al
John Boehner-Eric Cantor-Mike Pence et al. in the GOP House leadership
Tom Tancredo, the one-note blunder
Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, ΣΣΣ (the sorority sisters of stupidity)
Ann Coulter-Michelle Malkin-Laura Ingraham, the BOOBs (bloggers of obnoxious bunk)
and others too numerous to name

But back to Sen. Graham. His vote in favor of Elena Kagan reminds us that while there are differing points of view in American politics, the fundamental principles of what we are supposed to espouse as a nation of, by and for the People need to reflect those differences. Liberals are not pacifist flag-burners who hate the Constitution--they just regard this country as ever evolving and its founding document as an open-ended contract. Conservatives are not all gun-toting Bible freaks who whistle Dixie--they are just very proud of this country the way it is, warts and all.

Lindsey Graham knows that he might disagree with every constitutional position soon-to-be Justice Kagan will take, but our country is stronger than the opinion of any one justice or even four with a left-leaning judicial philosophy. Our institutions were built to withstand the winds of change--even if it isn't the change that half of us believe in. If only there were more members of his party who had more faith...

The Sweetest Things

The other day I caught a scene from the Terrell Owens reality show where he hosted a princess party for his two daughters.

Awwwww...

Ewwww!

It was the cutest thing to see T.O. dressed up in the Mickey Mouse Wizard costume from Fantasia. And the girls were so cute in their princess garb. It was the awwww moment...

But, these girls just met each other for the first time, and they are about the same age (5-6), with two different mothers. That was the ewww part!

I am mad that these sisters had never met until the filming of this episode. I am mad at T.O. for getting two women pregnant at essentially the same time and having ghetto twins. And I am just mad that this is essentially the modern family nowadays.

I get that I came along in a different era. I get that athletes tend to have many children with many different women. I get that my old Baptist church/Catholic school morality is out-dated in the 21st Century. But dang...

I want T.O. to be the loving dad he portrayed on screen because those girls need him to be that and more. Despite the circumstances of their meeting and the situation overall, I want these girls to grow up to be loving sisters. And I want the mothers of these precious children to see them as children and not as golden tickets.

Lately, I've been seeing a lot of quotes about fathers and daughters and as I reflect on my relationship with my own father, I hope that these little girls will get a taste of how wonderful it has been to have a loving and supportive man consistently in my life. Support is not just in the money he spent on me, but it was in his very presence: my Daddy stayed up with me the night before a major assignment was due and helped me finish it; he drove me back and forth 600+ miles to my college; and he took my husband home from the hospital when I had to go to work.

I love my father and I want more girls to feel that same love for the first man in their lives too. I don't know T.O. beyond what I read in the sports pages, but I hope he is a better father than he is a teammate...

Time for a Time-Out!

This has been bugging me for months, but I need to say this: the NAACP is not a racist organization! And I also need to say this: the Tea Party Movement is not racist! Although it has become quite fashionable in this post-racial America to throw that accusation around, in fact it is inapplicable in both cases.

At the core, these are patriotic organizations. The difference between them is quite simply a difference of opinion about the proper role of government. On the one hand, the NAACP believes that government is a force for good in our lives whereas the Tea Party Movement believes that too much government is a bad thing.

See, very simple. So can we stop all of the name-calling please?

But as racism is the fly in the ointment, people are always going to see it. Tea Partyers look to the racial makeup of the NAACP and suggest that it is a racist organization because its members are mostly black and NAACPers look at the racial makeup of the Tea Party and come to the same conclusion because of its overwhelming whiteness. Clearly, this is one of those forest but for the trees conundrums for if one does not look closely enough, one tends to miss the full picture.

Thus, a brief history lesson is in order here. Let's start with the NAACP. This is an organization started 101 years ago by a interracial group of activists to fight for racial justice in a very segregated America. That is the short version.

The long version is a bit more involved, including a personality conflict between two very prominent black men, but let's skip over all of that and highlight a key fact of NAACP activism over the years--the NAACP sought to change American within the confines of the law. Challenges to lynching, school segregation, voting rights infringements, and public accommodations were all made by advocates who happened to believe that this was their country too.

Now to the Tea Party. The Tea (Taxed Enough Already) Party can be traced to two key points in American history. The first is the protest by a group of disgruntled Americans who dumped tea into the Boston Harbor in defiance of a tax levied by the British crown an ocean away. This led to the American Revolution which led to us becoming a sovereign nation. Then fast forward a couple hundred years to the point when another disgruntled group of Americans began to protest what they deemed was more taxes levied by a distant and imperial government in Washington.

There might be a lot more to it than that, but I would argue that the current manifestation of the Tea Party is based on a philosophical disagreement with government bailouts of the banking and automobile industries (at taxpayer expense) coupled with the potential of a government takeover of the health care system led many of the Tea Partyers to take to the streets. And at some point in the future, their arguments about less government intrusion into the private market might be proven correct. The jury is still out.

The fact that the Tea Party rose to prominence at the same time we were patting ourselves on the back for electing the nation's first black president is coincidental...only because I am convinced that when the most powerful black folks were Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, none of these folks had anything to say. But they cannot deny the fact that his election and their anger over his liberal agenda may have given cover to all of the racists who intermingle with them now.

Conversely, because the aforementioned black power couple of Powell & Rice associated with the likes of George W. Bush and Co., the NAACP criticized them along with their boss. Yet despite the fact that the president is black and more ideologically in line with their agenda, the organization still struggles to remain relevant in the 21st Century, especially among blacks. Who could forget the tongue-lashing they got from none other than Bill Cosby (who is still black, last time I checked)?

So back to my original point, let's not obsess about the cosmetic differences between these two groups because it does nothing to advance the positions of either. The NAACP efforts to achieve and maintain racial equality are no more racist than the Tea Party protests against the policies of the black president with whom they happen to disagree. America is great because we can belong to both the Tea Party and the NAACP with no inherent conflicts of conscience; furthermore, this country is diverse enough to accommodate the viewpoints of both groups and then some.