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WHY I PROTESTED YEEZY:

This is an indictment of not just Yeezy but the entire fashion and beauty industry in which there is a racialized hierarchy of beauty which is a ubiquitous symptom of the legacy of colonialism. This is a protest of a pervasive and dangerously toxic Ideology not Individuals. Regardless of whether Yeezy does choose to include darkskinned women in the end, the coded language of the casting call was clear and a part of a broader problem of colorism in the fashion industry.
Beyond Yeezy’s casting there are hundreds of castings for this upcoming NYFW going on where thousands of models are all hoping for a chance to walk down a runaway and for Black girls, the chances of being one of these girls is alarmingly slim and those chances go down depending on the deepness of the color of your skin. This casting call for “Multiracial ONLY” (not MULTIETHNIC which would still be fetishization) asserts that Black can only be beautiful when “MIXED” with another RACE. There is a history of wanting to dilute the Blackness of one’s children because of the longstanding stigmatization of Blackness.
ADDITIONALLY–the fetishization of women who are more than one race is alarmingly similar to Hilter’s pseudoscience of eugenics; the desire to create human beings who have select features to create a particular IDEAL image. As our IDEALS of beauty, perfection, normality all come from mass media it follows that a European Ideals has become the norm. To understand how we come to frame beauty, studying history and the origins of media such as literature will lead you straight to the origins of conceiving of white as beautiful and dark as evil and ugly (for more info: Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism by Ania Loomba). It is clear that language is racialized and we can’t say it’s just words, or just write off the erasure and very targeted assault on Black women inside and outside of the fashion industry.
How often do you see a dark hued Black women on the cover or even inside a magazine, on television? This lack of representation is the reason the skin bleaching industry makes billions of dollars annually. The Dominicans will tell you, the Brazilians, Koreans, Filipinos, Jamaicans—the lighter you are the more beautiful you are considered. YET AT THE SAME TIME, now non-Black women are paying thousands to have full lips, hips, and asses like Black women in a brutal and corrupt form of irony. It’s just facts that Black women are constantly told they are too dark, lips too big, hair to ghetto for in all professions only to see these same features or styles on non-Black women receive praise-(braids, gap teeth)-obviously the problem isn’t the style but the color of the women wearing it.
I want a world where Black girls see themselves and their skin no matter how dark represented as beautiful so the entire skin bleaching industry goes up in flames, that women and men stop carving up their beautiful noses. The history of the world is written into Black features and we need to remind ourselves that beauty comes FROM our Blackness, NOT in spite of it.
To those who are saying that DISCUSSING the very REALITY that colorism in the community exists “divides” the Black community…the divisions are already there. I know this because I am a woman who gets those privileges of looking “mixed” “Exotic” and these privileges have meant a matter of life and death for some Black people. IT’s not just about fashion it’s about understanding how racism, and white supremacy dictates our understanding of reality. These are toxic ideologies need to be unlearned and #ITsAPROCESS
And as to why my titties were out–summer is ending and there aren’t going to be many more nice days like yesterday. That’s all.
X BABYSCUMBAG. IG: @365750 X
(link:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BJ_Px0EgyPr/?taken-by=365750
) instagram.com/p/BJ_Px0EgyPr/…
https://twitter.com/BBSCUMBAGNYC/status/772901429262610432

Colourism in South and South-East Asia

armedpublishing:

By Radha Wahyuwidayat
The first time I visited my family in Indonesia, I was 13, and I was told by an uncle that my skin was considered ‘traditional’. To clarify, this was meant as an insult. In my family’s house, whitening products sat tellingly on nearly every surface, and I struggled to find products that did not contain chemical-filled, carcinogenic bleach.
Once when I went into a store looking for moisturiser (“without whitening”, I stressed), the woman behind the counter proceeded to laugh at me. More pronounced than the amusement in her voice was the genuine confusion in her eyes: my request made no sense. The idea that I would actively choose not to whiten my skin was incomprehensible.
Whitening products constitute a multi-million dollar industry in Asian countries. Colourism, or social and economic discrimination based on skin tone, is entrenched in cultures across South and South-East Asia, with products to match. Colourism differs from racism in that it can fester among people of the same racial group, against those of certain ethnicities and castes. The woman who laughed at me from across the counter no doubt learnt from a young age that light skinned women married more easily, had better job prospects and generally fared better in society. Like my uncle, she was conditioned to view my skin as ugly. Like my female relatives, the social and economic burdens of dark skin led her to seek refuge in a tub of noxious bleaching cream.

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boystop:

Cooking for someone as a form of intimacy.

(Source: gaspack, via nickjonastillhasdiabetes)

Let’s pretend, for a moment, that you are a 22-year-old college student in Kampala, Uganda. You’re sitting in class and discreetly scrolling through Facebook on your phone. You see that there has been another mass shooting in America, this time in a place called San Bernardino. You’ve never heard of it. You’ve never been to America. But you’ve certainly heard a lot about gun violence in the U.S. It seems like a new mass shooting happens every week.
You wonder if you could go there and get stricter gun legislation passed. You’d be a hero to the American people, a problem-solver, a lifesaver. How hard could it be? Maybe there’s a fellowship for high-minded people like you to go to America after college and train as social entrepreneurs. You could start the nonprofit organization that ends mass shootings, maybe even win a humanitarian award by the time you are 30.
Sound hopelessly naïve? Maybe even a little deluded? It is. And yet, it’s not much different from how too many Americans think about social change in the “Global South.”
If you asked a 22-year-old American about gun control in this country, she would probably tell you that it’s a lot more complicated than taking some workshops on social entrepreneurship and starting a non-profit. She might tell her counterpart from Kampala about the intractable nature of our legislative branch, the long history of gun culture in this country and its passionate defenders, the complexity of mental illness and its treatment. She would perhaps mention the added complication of agitating for change as an outsider.
But if you ask that same 22-year-old American about some of the most pressing problems in a place like Uganda — rural hunger or girl’s secondary education or homophobia — she might see them as solvable. Maybe even easily solvable.
I’ve begun to think about this trend as the reductive seduction of other people’s problems. It’s not malicious. In many ways, it’s psychologically defensible; we don’t know what we don’t know.
If you’re young, privileged, and interested in creating a life of meaning, of course you’d be attracted to solving problems that seem urgent and readily solvable. Of course you’d want to apply for prestigious fellowships that mark you as an ambitious altruist among your peers. Of course you’d want to fly on planes to exotic locations with, importantly, exotic problems.
There is a whole “industry” set up to nurture these desires and delusions — most notably, the 1.5 million nonprofit organizations registered in the U.S., many of them focused on helping people abroad. In other words, the young American ego doesn’t appear in a vacuum. Its hubris is encouraged through job and internship opportunities, conferences galore, and cultural propaganda — encompassed so fully in the patronizing, dangerously simple phrase “save the world.

“The Reductive Seduction of Other People’s Problems” by Courtney Martin (via somecompany)

reposting to remember

(via cavaan)