Dear Black People:

 

Just in case you were starting to get excited about Vogue putting two black women in a row on their cover, pump your breaks. Can’t you see that the April issue with Beyonce on the cover is ultra racist? Wake the hell up people! Like Laurence Fishburne yelled in School Daze “WAAAAAAAKEEE UUUUUPPP!!”

 

Or maybe you should take your behind back to sleep. If this cover makes you upset then you must be a victim of what G.D. over at PostBourgie calls An Overly Close Reading.

 

No disrespect to Lisa from Sociological Images, but this my friends, is an example of an overly close reading:

Women of color rarely grace the covers of fashion magazines like Vogue.  And yet, for the second time this year, the Vogue cover features a woman of color, Beyonce.  Unfortunately, in line with cultural stereotypes, the issue is the “Shape Issue,” contributing to the stereotype of Black women, and Latina women too, as especially “curvy.”  [SNIP]

 

The magazine sets up, essentially, an impossibility:  ”Have curves, but by curves we mean something very specific: boobs and an ass.  You know, like Black women’ve got.  See Beyonce? She’s Black. So she’s got curves.  No matter that she’s extremely thin.  You should be extremely thin, too (’WORK IT!’); eh em, we mean, ‘conquer your demons,’ we love you ‘from size zero to size 20.’  Just kidding!  We totally don’t.  Design ‘your perfect body’ with cosmetic surgery!  Then you’ll really love yourself… and we will find you acceptable… it’s win win!!!!”

 

Check a blogger from Jezebel co-signing Lisa here.

 

Maybe I’m getting soft but I just don’t see how we can whip out the race-card over this cover. The sexist card, sure. Vogue is in the business of exploiting the female body so that’s nothing new, but racist this time around, meh. That sucks because this is the second year in a row I’ve had to defend Vogue’s “Shape Issue” and I don’t really like to defend Vogue.

 

I’m the girl who tries to predict the number of black people I will spot in the latest issue of the magazine just so I can convince people “Vogue” is French for KKK when I don’t spot any (lol…okay, I just made that up). Seriously though, the most black people I ever counted was ten, and two of them shouldn’t have counted because they were in the background of an advertisement.

 

So I relish the opportunity to call Vogue out for being a part of the problem, rather than the solution, to America’s warped beauty standards, but I can’t jump on the bandwagon this time.

 

Quite frankly, if I was in the business of trying to convince people that once a year I believe that anything other than a size zero could actually be beautiful, Beyonce is who I would want on my cover.  Even the woman’s name sounds curvy: Be-yon-ce. The only thing straight about Beyonce is her lace front weave, occasionally.

 

If Lisa wanted to explore how Beyonce uses her body and her stereotypical alter-ego to get little girls to demand that a ring be put on it, whilst they back it up and “oh oh oh oh” all over the place, then I’d be down for the revolution.

 

But to the contrary, Beyonce seems very Vogue-ish here.  This is about as dull and plain I’ve ever seen B on the cover of a magazine, and besides the tag “Real Women Have Curves” there are no signs of  hottentot here.

Tags: Beyonce, Ghetto Beyonce, Race and Gender, Vogue, Vogue Magazine, Vogue Shape Issue