#commodification of blackness

[dmcreativestudio]

“Love is the message, the message is death” by Arthur Jafa

“One of the greatest things that cinema (me: also photography) can do is to put you in another subject position for a certain amount of time”

[xicanaresistente]

The Kylie Challenge and Viola Davis

The Kylie Challenge: it’s the next big internet challenge that has got millenials across the country riled up and ready to accept.  The premise? You get a shot class or empty bottle and suck all of the air to create a vacuum that will pull on your lips as you struggle to get them out of the vessel.  The results that most teens are expecting is to have a magical lip transformation like Kylie Jenner’s below:

The reality?  Teens are going to the hospital in droves to get treated for burns, disfigurement and other unforeseen complications (such as the pressure created by the vacuum shattering glass bottles that are attached to one’s face). 

http://wdtn.com/2015/04/21/kylie-jenner-challenge-leaving-teens-with-disfigured-bruised-lips/

While my first reaction is to laugh at the participants for their continued stupidity, when you look at this challenge closer, it is anything but a laughing matter.  First of all, the overwhelming majority of the participant are white kids.  And the effect that they are seeking?  Full, plump lips - yes that same feature that people of color are continuously denigrated for having.  Yes, those same lips that are a defining feature in the practice of blackface, a practice amongst white performers of painting their faces black and drawing on large, exaggerated red lips - a practice that has continued to be part of the dehumanization of African Americans in our country.  Those same lips that were part of the hypersexualization of black women and the devaluation of black womanhood - the devaluation of black womanhood that bell hooks points out as “central to the maintenance of white supremacist patriarchy” (hooks, 1995).

This devaluation of black womanhood and of black feminine features is still central in our contemporary conversations of beauty and particularly of the type of blackness that is acceptable in white society.  In a piece published shortly after the premiere of Shonda Rhimes’ new hit series “How to Get Away with Murder” which stars Viola Davis, white journalist Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times wrote: “Ignoring the narrow beauty standards some African-American women are held to, Ms. Rhimes chose a performer who is older, darker-skinned, and less classically beautiful than Ms. (Kerri) Washington, or for that matter, Halle Berry”. 

Not only does Stanley reinforce that “narrow beauty standard that African American women are held to”, but her comments make it clear that Davis’ black skin and non-European features make her indeed “less classically beautiful”.  Stanley’s racist comments merely emphasize bell hooks’ point that “light skin and long straight hair continue to be traits that define a female as beautiful and desirable in the racist white imagination and in the colonized black mindset” (hooks, 1995). 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/arts/television/viola-davis-plays-shonda-rhimess-latest-tough-heroine.html?_r=0

And what about the fact that these “less classically beautiful” traits are traits that Kylie Jenner has copied off of a black woman - becoming an almost identical white version of black entrepreneur Heather Sanders.  Again, it’s not on Heather Sanders where these features are appreciated, exemplified, and glorified, but rather through the white-washed lens from which Kylie interprets and sells (hair extensions) features of blackness. http://www.buzzfeed.com/elliewoodward/is-kylie-jenner-modelling-her-entire-look-on-this-woman#.uh4Ag7qA4 Source:  bell hooks, 1995 “Killing Rage: Ending Racism”