There is a hierarchy of attractiveness and what constitutes as beauty here at the edge of the empire. What I am speaking of is not indicative of how people actually feel (nor their needs or desires) but what is portrayed by Momma White Bread nightly on the electric soma and daily in print magazines and newspapers. On the female side of the diapason one can clearly identify the winners and losers in this faux race of attraction.
Standing at the top of podium it is evident in the U.S. who is winning and even more evident who is terribly losing at the cruel caffeinated shaking hands of the masters. White women will always occupy the number one position of the beauty/power pageant. Hispanic and Asian women are now even ‘touchable’ by media standards but the love for black females remains paltry. In a society where money is wealth, and wealth is power and beauty, it will remain quite evident white women win and our ebony sisters lose.
Let’s collectively put down our bottles of prescribed psychoactive drugs and take a stroll down this month’s top women’s magazines. Adoring the cover of this month’s Allure is Blake Lively: a white woman. In fact she was AskMen.com’s #1 most desirable woman of 2011 (I obviously didn’t vote in this one). The magazine’s circulation is over one million subscribers so surely they must know what is desirable. The next shelf on the Isle over I notice a remarkably similar looking creature on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine. Don’t worry they won’t be making the mistake of putting ebony superstar Nicki Minaj on its cover again. In fact a more suitable nickname would be Miraj because it’s unlikely they will put any more soul-sisters to glamour their pages anytime soon. Luckily this month they came back to their senses, gobbled down the Paxil and plastered on pasty white translucent Zooey Deschanel. She’s not quite as Aryan as Blake Lively but still white enough to keep Goebbels happy rotting away in Berlin as well as the three million subscribers. I’m not going to drag on this humility for much longer as I’m starting to lose my personal attraction to women, but the big winner gracing the cover of the October edition of Redbook is none other than… Jillian Michaels! A white woman. That’s three for three from the big publications and a big indicator of what the publishing industry considers ‘attractive’ or wants us to consider attractive.
We are entering 2013 and it still seems almost unfeasible for a large print publication to plaster the picture of a black female on the cover of anything other than Jet or Ebony. Don’t expect to find a better representation on the electronic media as well. For a portion of the U.S. population that constitutes over 20 million people you would conceive that you’d find at least a few leading roles of black females in sitcoms/ dramas. Last time I checked I believe there was one. We all experienced the nauseating commentary that Gabrielle Douglas hair wasn’t as ‘nice’ as it should be at the London Olympics. Destroying sporting barriers and articulating yourself professionally and courteously isn’t enough in this virulent racist country. Apparently it’s more important that your hair is nice and straight like those who occupy the #1 position in our faux beauty pageant.
The masters will continue to make black females scapegoats (wealth fare queens will always be a big winner!) and exclude them from being in the mainstream media. Slavery, Jim Crow, and the incarceration of millions of black males was just not sufficient to ‘get the job done’. Now there is a subversive war being waged against the American black female to make them feel unattractive to themselves and others.
I am not calling for a revolution here in the media. Overnight millions won’t read CounterPunch and the the CEO of REDBOOK is not going to put a picture of a lovely black female on its next cover. However this is in fact a testament of one man’s passion and belief in a group of powerful and beautiful females that scatter from the edge of the empire here in Fairbanks to the boiling hot streets of Atlanta. I woke up last night from a vision where beautiful black women adorned the covers of magazines in street markets across the nation and there was a semblance of representation of what is fair. I’m damn sick and tired of being looked at as a miscreant and lunatic because I had the privilege of marrying a beautiful cappuccino # 8 goddess. Black women are beautiful, black women are strong, black women are independent, and most importantly black women won’t put up with your shit. This places them in the highest regards in my own personal faux beauty pageant.
Daniel Church is an activist writer residing in Fairbanks, Alaska and can be reached at lfsdan@hotmail.com