the pretty year

Ummmm….

Yeaaaaaah.

There’s an elephant in the room, so let’s go ahead and address it. Masquerading as another race is generally a problematic exercise alone, but this is also a really poorly-timed episode, what with recent blackface appearances on the Daily Show and Mad Men and that ridiculous French Vogue layout. Browning people up for whatever result is unfortunately in, and as someone who finds that imagery pretty triggering, it’s made for an uncomfortable few months. But is it really offensive in this context, or is it about imitation as flattery? Let’s examine all this for a moment. Besides, it’s not like you have anything important to do.

Basically, I’ve seen three questions come up repeatedly post-episode:

01. Is it colorface?
02. Is it okay when a person of color does it?
03. Is this offensive?

Now, as the ultimate authority on all things, my answers are yes, no, and possibly… but not for the reasons you might think. First, what makes it “colorface”? I’ve seen people argue that it can’t be, since it wasn’t done in the interest of buffoonery. And while that might seem like a fair suggestion, it actually doesn’t account for the explicit exotification of the “biracial” as “Other”. It might be more homogenous in other regions, but in the US, you can’t throw a lacefront wig without hitting somebody that has a diverse racial makeup, even if they don’t identify as such. I’m not diminishing the experiences of biracial-identified people, but we can’t keep talking about mixed race people as the product of social taboos. To say that biracial people are the new face of our population is to deny that they were also, well, the old face of our population.

I don’t watch Top Model for historical accuracy, and thank goodness. I also don’t watch it for political accuracy, because there isn’t ever any. From what I understand, “hapa” specifically involves being half Asian or Pacific Islander. Which means that Greek/Mexican? Not “hapa”. In fact, were any of them Asian at all? I guess somebody was supposed to be Polynesian. Whatever. The point is that it’s a gross misuse of terminology at the least. Speaking of terms, it appears that Tyra doesn’t quite understand the differences between ethnicity, race and nationality. I know what the differences are because I took a class on it one time my freshman year of college, and our professor explained it in the beginning of the semester. I don’t really remember anything else from that class, except when we talked about Ocean Hill/Brownsville, but I have only a vague understanding of what happened there, too. I was… more interested in partying at the time.

Okay, so Tyra is black. Doesn’t mean she’s up on what’s acceptable, and you shouldn’t assume that she is. She’s been indoctrinated with the same crap as the rest of us, not to mention how she spent many of her formative years in an industry that’s generally pretty racist, misogynist, transphobic, ableist and classist. You can theoretically grow up in a field of land mines and come out unscathed, but what are the chances? So I wouldn’t look to Tyra for guidance to my own bathroom. People of color mess up, too, and this show has about a thousand messed up incidents an episode.

Was I offended? Not really. I was horrified at how piss-poor of a production it was, more than anything. But when am I not watching this show and experiencing some type of secondhand embarrassment? I guess those moments when it’s on and I’m not really watching. But I do know that some people were offended, and they’re entitled to that rage. So why don’t we all just make it easier for ourselves and everybody else and refrain from appropriation, particularly when it’s reducing people’s backgrounds and histories to articles for our fashion consumption? No matter how chic Tyra might think it is, it’s not a good look.

Related posts:

1. ANTM: Go See About Me
2. ANTM: Who’s Bad?
3. ANTM: And… Scene
4. ANTM: Fierce Goddesses Need Not Apply
5. ANTM: America’s Best Dance Crew