Why? Because comments about how it's not just black people who are not represented by Barbie, but Asians, Greeks, Irish, Russians, brown-eyed girls, brunettes, the near-sighted, etc. are not the point. In fact, comments like these miss the point entirely. These experiences/issues are, of course, valid, and have a place in the world, but not on a post about black issues. Comments like, "Where is the freckled Barbie?" have nothing to do with the issue at hand, which is the historic and systemic racism against a specific ethnic group in this country. The marginalization of African-American people from the mainstream culture. We have seen lots of these kind of comments persist on stories about race — and race as it pertains to hair — and not only are they off-topic, they're insulting, insensitive and dismissive. Why? Because what they do is:

— Insinuate that it's a personal issue, when, in fact, it is cultural, societal and global.
— Diminish racism to lookism or oversight
— Undermine the original post
— Degrade and disrespect the struggle of black Americans

We have a strong commenting community, but many of the comments on posts about race are, quite frankly, embarrassing. In a post I wrote about the politics of Michelle Obama's hair, there were many comments along the lines of "I'm [not black], but my hair is curly, and I wear it straight because I like to." Again: The topic is not so much a personal issue as it is one with cultural and racial implications. The politics surrounding a black woman who is also the First Lady straightening her hair and a some other woman straightening her hair are very different, as are the intricacies of Mattel creating and designing a black Barbie, as opposed to one who looks Irish.

The writers on this site have a job to do, which is post commentary on stories in the media, and, where appropriate, insert opinion/personal experiences. Though these posts welcome comments, commenters should realize that inserting their opinions or experiences is not always furthering the discussion. A post about the issues with the black Barbie is not a call for everyone to write about how Barbie makes them feel. And as Latoya wrote in long, thoughtful and yes, frustrated comment on her own post late last night, "People keep deliberately inserting their experiences into a narrative that does not fit. It's not the same experience." Please keep this in mind.

Earlier: Keeping Michelle's Hair In Perspective
Black Barbies: A Question Of Representation

The buzz surrounding the movie has been building for months. Not only is this the first hand-drawn Disney movie in five years, it's also the debut of the entertainment behemoth's very first African-American heroine. Long before the movie hit theaters, there was already a good deal of criticism circulating, which centered on the possibility that P&F would feature some familiar and none-too-progressive stereotypes, including a potentially Mammy-ish character. Both Dodai and Latoya (writing for Racialicious) took on the task of exploring the potential for racism in the film, which is set in the 1920s in New Orleans, and includes a voodoo princess and a (sadly) light-skinned prince. Probably the most bothersome part is the fact that the two main characters - Tiana and Prince Naveen - spend a good portion of the movie as frogs. When Disney has waited this long to introduce a Black princess, couldn't they give her a little more screen time?

However, it seems that critics are, at least for the most part, still charmed by Tiana (feelings for Naveen are a little more divided). Unlike some of Disney's other princesses, Tiana (voiced by Anika Noni Rose) isn't a passive damsel in distress, relying on fairy godmothers and magical kisses to do all the hard work for her. Instead, she's a 19-year-old hardworking waitress, with dreams to own a restaurant of her own. Things are going well until she meets the racially-ambiguous Prince Naveen (Nip/Tuck's Bruno Campos), who comes from some fictional country and is looking for a wealthy southern gal to pay for his lavish lifestyle. A local voodoo-peddler turns Naveen into a frog, and through a complicated-sounding plot twist, convinces Tiana to kiss him. Since she's not a princess, she turns into a frog, and the two spend the rest of the film trying to figure out how to change back. Their frog-status allows them to get to know each other without looks playing a factor, which apparently helps ground the whole "skin-deep" message. However, race seems to play a very minor role - which is either fitting for a children's film, or a real shame, depending on who you ask. While it sounds like there are still some issues with the film (Naveen's one-dimensionality being a frequently mentioned problem), most critics enjoyed the music and magic. There is some disagreement as to whether it measures up to Aladdin or The Little Mermaid, but it sounds like The Princess and the Frog could become a Disney classic.

Salon

Fairy-tale princesses, especially those in the Disney pantheon, have always been a product of their times. Generations ago, it was enough for them to be hardworking and docile, to accept suffering with grace and fall into deep sleeps when the plot required it. It was revolutionary when "Beauty and the Beast's" Belle came along in 1991, with her love of books and her disdain for the handsomest guy in town. Tiana takes the princess role a step further — she's not just Disney's first African-American to wear the crown, she's the first one with a regular job. (Unless you count Mulan's gig as a warrior.) She also, like "Ratatouille's" Remy, makes the case for great food as a social leveler and the cornerstone of a good life. Tiana knows that food "brings people together" with more reliable results than even voodoo.

Time

Every Disney princess has to find two things: independence and love. Tiana, a culinary prodigy, dreams of turning an abandoned building into her own restaurant. Tiana entertains the attentions of the dashing playboy Naveen, but he's fallen under the spell of the black-magical Dr. Facilier (Keith David). The fateful kiss sends Tiana and Naveen, now frogs, into the bayou for refuge and retransformation. Among the Jungle Book-type denizens they meet there are Louis (Michael-Leon Wooley), a friendly, trumpet-playing alligator; Ray (Jim Cummings), a Cajun firefly; and the 197-year-old blind seer Mama Odie (Jenifer Lewis), among whose gifts may be the power to restore Tiana and Naveen to humanity.

And we're just short-listing the creatures that Musker and Clements toss into this savory gumbo. It's as if, in the dozen years since Hercules, their last comedy feature, the pair had stockpiled so many funny characters that a few drop in, get their laughs and are whisked off-stage. You'll be tickled by Charlotte (Breanna Brooke as a child, Jennifer Cody as an adult), the adorably addled rich girl whom Eudora babysits, and by her father Big Daddy La Bouff (John Goodman in full bluster mode), who certifies his connection to Tennessee Williams's riper alpha-males with a booming, "Hey, Stella!" In any animated comedy, the funny supporting figures threaten to overwhelm the leads; but Tiana has the class and grit, and Naveen the immature charm, to carry the story. Their cozying up while mincing mushroom for a bayou stew is one of the film's emotional highlights.

New York Post

The songs by Randy Newman — working in the jazz, blues, gospel, zydeco, Dixieland and Broadway idioms — are very catchy, belted out in style by a great voice cast. I especially liked Dr. Facilier's big spooky number "Friends on the Other Side" and Mama Odie's showstopper, "Dig a Little Deeper."

Overall, the film is not quite up to "Aladdin" and "The Little Mermaid" from the same directing team of Ron Clements and John Musker, not to mention the recent string of masterpieces from Pixar.

New York Times

The prince, disappointingly if not surprisingly, becomes not only Tiana's salvation but also that of the movie, largely by bringing some slapstick comedy and a touch of suspense into the proceedings, along with the expected romance. Though he catches Tiana's eye (and she his), Naveen is soon set upon by both Charlotte, who's angling for a match, and Dr. Facilier (a terrific Keith David), a villain who, as is true of many movies, easily steals the show. As thin as an exclamation mark and just as excited, Dr. Facilier wears spats and a top hat emblazoned with a skull and bones. Long, inky shadows follow his every step, sprouting around him like dark thoughts, as in the bravura musical number "Friends on the Other Side."

LA Times

The filmmakers have brewed up a delicious roots story in every sense of the word. "The Princess and the Frog" is set in the 1920s jazz age in the New Orleans heart of it all.It's the studio's return to the lush, fluid beauty of hand-drawn animation. It's an old-fashioned fairy tale, even though they've had some fun with the story. And it's set to music in the grand tradition of "Beauty and the Beast," which is to say the neoclassic '90s brand of Disney animation.

That might make "The Princess and the Frog" seem like a creature of ancient times, particularly since kids these days are raised on 3-D flash. The effect, though, is the opposite. After being bombarded by so much computer-generated, motion-captured high-and-higher jinks, the film feels fresh — a discovery, or a rediscovery, depending on your age.

MSNBC

"Princess and the Frog" mostly ignores the racial divides of the times. Tiana's a poor black girl, her best friend's a rich, spoiled white girl. How often did that happen in 1920s New Orleans?

But this isn't "Roots," it's a Disney family affair. In her favor, Tiana joins a list of ethnically diverse Disney heroines - Pocahantas, Mulan, Lilo - that show how far things have come from the days when a pasty-faced princess hung out with seven little white dudes.

Variety

Unlike most tales of its type, in which the heroine spends the whole movie in pursuit of Prince Charming, "The Princess and the Frog" follows the modern romantic-comedy template, granting its amphibious duo plenty of shared screen time and making them polar opposites — he's cocky and lazy, she's uptight and bossy — who initially can't stand each other... All of this is delivered in the usual riotous explosion of color and song. From the mansions of the city's upscale Garden District and the cast-iron balcony railings of the French Quarter, New Orleans clearly offered the animators no shortage of visual inspiration and architectural variety.

New York Daily News

Part of the problem with "P&F" is that Tiana and Naveen's connection feels superficial. Plus, unlike some of his modern princess-courting brethren - the Beast, Aladdin, even John Smith in "Pocahontas" - Naveen's inner change from shallow to decent seems as perfunctory as his physical one from man to amphibian.

Other elements work better, including the jazz-age setting and Randy Newman's zydeco-tinged music. And while Dr. Facilier's scary shadow monsters may be too intense for young kids, they're effective nightmare-makers in the classic Disney tradition.

Village Voice

They say it ain't easy bein' green, but it's certainly a hell of a lot easier than being black. So writer-directors Ron Clements and John Musker (whose 1992 Aladdin proffered a sinister, ear-cutting Middle East) send newly anthropomorphic Tiana and Naveen hopping off into the bayou rather than continuing to dodge ol' Jim Crow on the streets of the Big Easy. There, Princess's rampant a-historicism gives way to a veritable Mardi Gras parade of risible stereotypes: an Acadian firefly with the most exaggerated Cajun dialect this side of celebrity chef Justin Wilson, I gua-ran-tee; a 197-year-old voodoo priestess named Mama Odie; and, lest no Deep South caricature remain unturned, a trio of toothless hillbillies.

USA Today

The movie captures the traditional Disney aesthetic, with some up-to-date spins. Tiana is African-American, while Naveen's ethnic origins are less evident. The film embraces diversity in a natural way. The film's ethos is summed up by voodoo priestess Mama Odie (Jenifer Lewis) in her native patois: "Only thing important is what's under the skin."

Where Pinocchio was about wishing on a star, The Princess and the Frog emphasizes backing up wishes with hard work. That proviso is a thoughtful message for young moviegoers.

The Star-Ledger

So Disney has, naturally, been nervous, wanting to serve a broader audience but knowing that no good deed goes unpunished - or, at least, goes without being heavily, politically analyzed.

"The Princess and the Frog" will be, too - and there are things here to annoy all sorts of people. The white characters are all, at best, buffoons; rural whites are portrayed as vicious and deformed; and even in the depths of the bayou, every African-American character has "good" hair.

Entertainment Weekly

But while little kids laugh at the froggy humor (summed up in the excellent, repeated punchline ''that's not slime you are secreting - it's mucus!''), the firefly antics, and the cute sight of a fat alligator wailing on his trumpet like Louis Armstrong, adult viewers are rewarded with something more moving - a Proustian remembrance of the durable 
 power of Disney at its old-school best. The filmmakers trust in story over special effects, and character over celebrity voices (there are almost none here, save for a brief cameo by queen-of-all-she-surveys Oprah Winfrey as Tiana's saintly mother, Eudora). They steep the movie in colloquial American culture. They offer a sophisticated musical experience (ragtime, zydeco, gospel, Tin Pan Alley) 
 accessible even to the youngest ears. And in doing so, the creative team behind The Princess and the Frog upholds the great tradition of classic Disney animation.

The study abstract states:

Participants whose partisanship matched that of the candidate they were evaluating consistently rated the lightened photographs as more representative of the candidate than the darkened photographs, whereas participants whose partisanship did not match that of the candidate showed the opposite pattern. For evaluations of Barack Obama, the extent to which people rated lightened photographs as representative of him was positively correlated with their stated voting intentions and reported voting behavior in the 2008 Presidential election. This effect persisted when controlling for political ideology and racial attitudes. These results suggest that people's visual representations of others are related to their own preexisting beliefs and to the decisions they make in a consequential context.

Ben Smith at the Politico isn't entirely sold on the study's conclusion, noting:

The study seems to indicate in passing that the race of the participants doesn't affect the outcome, though it isn't totally clear on that point. It also seems to buy in to the claim that Hillary Clinton artificially darkened an image of Obama, which wasn't terribly widely believed.

Anyway, the research's most practical finding seems to be that devious political hacks don't need to play games with candidates' pictures because the voters are doing it themselves:

Although the number of Blacks holding public office has increased dramatically over the years, light-skinned Blacks have consistently been over-represented, and dark-skinned Blacks consistently under-represented, as elected officials (26). Some have even suggested that a successful strategy for Black candidates who are running for office would be to look ‘‘more white'' in appearance... Our results suggest that voters themselves may alter how they see a racially ambiguous candidate, depending on their own level of support and their corresponding desire to see the candidate favorably.

Smith seems to leave off two other large instances of darkening that occurred in the past 15 years. The first, one that made political headlines, was the darkening of Harold Ford, Jr. in the 2006 Senate race in Tennessee. As Time magazine reported:

[A]s the race has heated up, the issue of race itself has become an ugly part of the campaign. Over the last few weeks, Republicans have aired three questionable ads against Ford, the latest so blatant that Corker condemned it and asked WHIN radio in Gallatin, Tennessee, to stop airing it. In the first 24 seconds, the one-minute ad attacking Ford and his father, and paid for by Tennesseans for Truth, uses the word "black" six times and accuses Ford of favoring African-American issues above others. "His daddy handed him his seat in Congress and his seat in the Congressional Black Caucus, an all-black group of congressmen who represent the interests of black people above all others," the narrator says. Station manager Jack Williams says he pulled the spot hours before Corker's staff contacted him and that it aired just once.

While the ad was not sanctioned by the Republican Party, it came on the heels of two that were: an RNC television commercial that concludes with a backlit figure of Ford striding into a dark hallway and towards the screen in a manner reminiscent of Willie Horton, and a fund-raising mailer designed by the state Republican Party bearing black-and-white photos of Ford that make him look much darker-skinned than he is and uses phrases including "purports," "pretends," and "passes himself off as" - all terms once used for light-skinned blacks who pretended to be white.

State Republican party Chairman Bob Davis has called the allegations of racism ludicrous, but whether the photos were intentionally darkened does not matter, says Robert Parham, executive director of the Baptist Center for Ethics. "The only plausible reason to use such a picture is to play the race card - in an effort to frighten and fire up white voters in a key senatorial race," Parham wrote in an editorial on the Center's website. "Whether they acted with malice or moral callousness doesn't really matter, the end result is race as a wedge issue."

Time magazine also covered the PNAS study, but also added an interesting twist:

While other factors may not have had much influence, when it came to biracial candidates at least, political views were strongly correlated with bias. In one study, participants were also shown photographs of John McCain. No bias toward lighter or darker skin tone in images of the former presidential candidate was evident, regardless of participants' politics. Yet when examining images of candidates of mixed ethnic backgrounds, bias was plain. "Across the three studies reported here," the researchers write, "we found that partisans not only 'darken' those with whom they disagree, but also 'lighten' those with whom they agree." The findings suggest that race bias is very much alive and well in the U.S., and more insidious than we might like to believe. The researchers highlight several examples in which race, or more specifically "blackness" was emphasized to a public figure's detriment-the scandal over whether the Hillary Clinton campaign had deliberately darkened Obama's complexion in a video ad or, alas, when TIME ran a deliberately darkened photograph of O.J. Simpson on the cover following his arrest in 1994.

Yet while such examples speak to the ongoing problem of racial bias-and how it can be exploited in politics or in the media-the study's authors suggest that these findings, (and perhaps Sammy Sosa's recent effort to lighten his skin), point to a more insidious problem. "Our results suggest that voters themselves may alter how they see a racially ambiguous candidate, depending on their own level of support and their corresponding desire to see the candidate favorably."

The second issue of darkening was done by Time magazine, during the OJ Simpson trial. In Time's review of the PNAS study, it refesr to its own misstep of darkening Simpson's features during the height of the trial. Because of its choice, Time magazine issued a major apology to their readers. The Museum of Hoaxes explains:

Time magazine decided to use this mug shot on its June 27th cover (top), but first they asked photo-illustrator Matt Mahurin to artistically interpret it. Mahurin darkened the photo and reduced the size of the prisoner ID number. Time managing editor James Gaines offered this description of the resulting cover:

The harshness of the mug shot — the merciless bright light, the stubble on Simpson's face, the cold specificity of the picture — had been subtly smoothed and shaped into an icon of tragedy. The expression on his face was not merely blank now; it was bottomless.

However, many people responded to the cover far less charitably. Critics charged Time with racism, claiming that by darkening Simpson's features the magazine had emphasized his skin color and gave him a more "menacing" appearance. Benjamin Chavis of the N.A.A.C.P. argued that the cover made Simpson seem like "some kind of animal." Journalists suggested that, since the mug shot was a news photo, it should never have been altered at all.

Unfortunately for Time, its rival Newsweek ran the same mug shot on its cover (bottom) that week, without altering it. The two covers appeared side-by-side on newsstands, making Time's decision to darken the photo far more visible. Time later issued an apology to its readers.

From a purely visual standpoint, darkening someone's features is a standard way to make them look more sinister. If we are presented with a face cloaked in shadow, it's an indication that this is not a person we should trust. However, because race is entangled into so many parts of American life, and so much of American racial history has been based in denigrating those who are dark, and exalting those who are light, actions like darkening a person can be read in many different ways.

Political Partisanship Influences Perception Of Biracial Candidates' Skin Tone [PNAS]
The Politics Of Skin Color[Politico]

Related: Campaign '06: The G.O.P. Gets Nervous In Tennessee [Time]
The Politics Of Perceiving Skin Color [Time]
O.J.‘s Darkened Mug Shot [Museum of Hoaxes]

"[If anyone was offended], I apologize because that was not my intent… It's my number one passion in my life to stretch the definition of beauty. I listen to many heartbreaking stories of women who thought they would be happier if they looked different. I want every girl to appreciate the skin she's in."

It's clear that Tyra had good intentions and meant to celebrate diversity, Hawaii and hapa people. And it's true that the photoshoot did not involve blackface in yhe historical sense of the word — as a minstrel-type of impersonation.

The fact remains: Race is a construct, and Tyra and her team acted as though it has a rigid structure. She used certain signifiers — hair, skin — to indicate a model's racial makeup. If you have brown skin, does that mean you are black? Tell it to all the light-skinned black people out there, or to someone from Fiji or South America. Does wearing something made of grass make you Polynesian? If you wear feathers on your head, are you Native American?

Also, how can you look at this and think that it's okay?

But It's just fashion, right? It's just about an interesting picture. Mixed people are cool, looking mixed is cool. As one blogger noted, "it's not like the girls were made to pull their eyes back while standing in the middle of a rice paddy or wearing blackface while eating watermelon." But as I wrote in October, race is not silver eyeshadow, a bubble skirt or couture gown. It's not something you put on for a photo shoot to seem "edgy." Race is not trendy; you can't take off when you feel like it. Tyra apologized to those offended, but not for the concept… Does that mean we'll see her do it again?

Tyra Banks Apologizes Over Bi-Racial Episode of 'ANTM' [StyleList]
'America's Next Top Model' biracial photo shoot: Uh, been there, done that [Zap2It]
Today on 'The Tyra Show': Tyra Addresses Biracial Controversy... And MY Headline! [BuddyTV]

Earlier:

ANTM: Biracial Is The New Black (Face)
ANTM Models In Oh-So-Trendy Blackface Shoot
ANTM: A Mildly Autistic Girl In Mildly Offensive Blackface
Oh No They Didn't: French Vogue Does Blackface

For the sake of brevity, let's simply focus on the "WTF Moments."

Outlet: New York Magazine
Article: "When Push Comes to Shove"
Speaker: David Edelstein, author of the piece
Quote:

I'm not judging girls who look like Sidibe in life, but her image onscreen is jarring to the point of being transgressive, its only equivalent to be seen in John Waters's pointedly outrageous carnivals. Her head is a balloon on the body of a zeppelin, her cheeks so inflated they squash her eyes into slits. Her expression is either surly or unreadable. Even with her voice-over narration, you're meant to stare at her ebony face and see nothing.

Sidibe does look like this in real life - what, has he never seen a big girl before? I suppose not - watching the movie, many different emotions flicker across Precious' face, but these are easily missed if one is gawking rather than watching.

But the woman who drops a TV onto Precious as she hurries down the stairs with her infant is a sociopath, too singularly garish to be universal.

Spoken like someone who has never watched one of their parents lose their mind over something you did and prepare to commit homicide. There's a reason Precious was running so fucking fast. Did he just miss that part in the opening where her mother Mary promises to whoop her ass for being uppity? That wasn't hyperbole.

Edelstein must have also missed some of Lee Daniels' memories from growing up. As he explains to the Daily Beast:

"It brought back a feeling I had when I was 11 years old and living in the projects in Philly. I answered the door one day, and a neighbor of ours, a light-skinned black girl who was about five years old, was standing there naked and bleeding. She'd been beaten with an electrical cord. I looked in my mom's eyes, and it was the first time I ever saw fear in her eyes. When I read Sapphire's book, those memories came back, and I felt I have to deal with this."

I get the impression from Edelstein's review that the book and the movie were simply too much dysfunction for him to stomach. And that's fine, I can understand that instinct - but why does he feel the need to dismiss brutal shows of force as "too singularly garish to be universal?" Please keep in mind that just because an experience is out of your ken, it may be heartbreakingly common to someone else.

Outlet: New York Post
Article: "Harlem Scuffle"
Speaker: Lee Daniels, director of Precious
Quote:

What separated Gabby from the others," Daniels says, "was she starts talking like this, ‘Oh, my God! I love your films so much. Oh, my God!' She talks like a white girl from the Valley."

Daniels, and his ideas of blackness, grate on me a bit . Ever since I read the NYT piece where he made a lot of references bowing to a monolithic view of what it means to be black, I've been slightly salty. Especially when one considers that many African-Americans feel rejected because they don't "fit" a certain paradigm of what is authentically black. I will forever call bullshit on this idea because it flattens the actual black experience.

Outlet: The Daily Beast
Article: "The Powerful Force at the Center of Precious"
Speaker: Gabourey "Gaby" Sidibe, lead actress and title character in Precious
Quote:

"For most of my life, my friends would ask me, ‘Were you adopted by white people?' And I'd say, ‘No, my parents went to college.'

What? Hold the phone. Having a certain type of speech pattern does not indicate your parents' education levels. It may indicate the region where you grew up, or your parents' vigilance to ensure you didn't have a lazy tongue, but "talking like a white girl" isn't some special collegiate exclusive. However, Sibide adds:

"My voice is different because my dad's Senegalese and my mom is from the South, so they both have accents. The mix of their accents created mine; I have little sisters who sound like me, too. And we are certainly black!"

When Push Comes to Shove [NY Mag]
Lee Daniels Reveals His Gritty Vision [Daily Beast]
Harlem Scuffle [New York Post]
The Powerful Force At The Center Of Precious [The Daily Beast]

Earlier:
What We Talk About When We Talk About Precious

Many of Ostlie's creations feature shorter hair, textured hair, or curly hair - a hard thing to get right, but the effect comes through beautifully.

The features and styles used on some of the dolls defy easy racial categorization.

Some of the dolls look like they are modeled on women from the real world.

Am I the only one that thinks this doll looks like Brandy?

Oh wait a sec - there was a Brandy doll! And it looks true to life! What did Mattel do, say "fuck this mold" when they were done and lock it away somewhere?

I used to wear a very similar style when I was a child - big, thick braids, though I am sure if I had this doll, I would have begged my mother for this twist style.

This pixie-esque curly do is really cute!

Loving the highly textured hair as well as the skin tone.

Could this be the first genderqueer doll? It's certainly the first one I've seen - and I have a friend I'd love to gift it to.

Okay, that's a trick question. It's hard to make an adequate representation of anything, and have it appeal to a mass market. Interestingly, creator Stacy McBride-Irby came up with the doll redesign out of a desire to have a doll that reflected what her daughter looks like

"They mean so much to me because they did come from a positive place," McBride-Irby said. "My daughter loves the dolls. I've had dads thank me for creating this line of dolls that represent their little girls. These dolls are for girls all over the world."

Over at Racialicious, I had two separate submissions, begging to disagree.

Seattle Slim wrote:

Mattel, you disappoint me. What was wrong with giving these dolls from your S.I.S line natural hair, dark brown eyes, and features that fit with most of the particular demographic, black girls, that you are looking to cater to?

If you guys think that these dolls don't mean shit, might I kindly ask you to check out the Doll test?

You should not be lauded for this, Mattel. I appreciate you thinking of us and all, but you dropped the ball on this.

Even if you wanted to keep these dolls, that's fine. I've already described my grandfather and family history here. Where is MY doll? Where is the doll with the Afro? Where is the doll with twists? Where's the doll with the lowboy? Where's the doll with the dark brown eyes, and the flatter nose, and the voluptuous lips? Where's the doll that has all of those things, not just some? Where's the doll for little girls that look like me?

Let me be more clear, these dolls (except for Kara's crazy lace front) are not terrible. I think they are actually perfect for little girls who have a mixed background. These pretty much cover a broad aesthetic and look like plausibly like someone with mixed heritage. In that respect, these dolls are perfect!

However, for the little black girls that look just like ME with unmistakably Afrocentric features, these dolls appeal to the tried and totally untrue, but respected, hip-hop beauty ideal that has become an "exotic girls only" industrial complex. So not only are young girls bombarded with those images on television, if their parents aren't careful, they are basically kicked while they're down walking through the toy store.

Tami, the editor of Love Isn't Enough, opened by explaining what she likes about the dolls. However, she still had heavy reservations:

Like a lot of women, I am uncomfortable with Barbie and her role in the development of young girls. It's not all Barbie's fault. It is the space she occupies in the universe of things that influence how girls grow up to be women: what goals they ultimately have, how they see themselves, how they judge their self worth and how they define womanhood.

I also have a beef with the word "authentic" to describe the three acceptably "blackified" dolls. Let's face it, these dolls don't represent any sort of break-through in representation of black faces. The skin tones and facial features fall within a narrow range that is acceptable within Eurocentric beauty standards. And to say that their hair is "curly" like that of most black women (as McBride-Irby does in this video on the consumer page for the new dolls) is being a wee bit disingenuous. Most black women have hair that is more kinky than curly in its natural state. (These dolls ain't no nappy heads.) Of course, most black women chemically straighten or weave up, which makes the dolls an accurate representation. Fine, but don't try to market them as some representation of "authentic" black physicality.

I also note, in the linked Mattel page above, the use of vaguely "urban" music, a gold, blingy necklace and a backstory that involves Barbie's friend Grace moving from California to Chicago, where she hooks up with Kara and Trishelle. The story and associated imagery is relatable for many black girls, but not all. What about the many, little black girls who live in the burbs? Of course, these dolls can't be everything to every child. But again, the use of "authentic" is a marketing fail. The urban experience is no more "authentic" to black folks than the rural experience.

This idea of authenticity permeates the whole line - each of the dolls has an optional hair styling kit, which includes a curl spray, clip in extensions, and a curling iron.

(Pause here for a second. The dolls come with activator and a weave. Both! Even Régine on Living Single didn't go this deep and she was checking for a Chocolate Ken!)

The reactions to both the pieces raged back and forth - some people thought we should appreciate the effort, the steps taken, and the fact that a black designer created and conceived the S.I.S. project. Others thought that anything that reinforces eurocentric beauty standards is still damaging, even if it is created by another women of color.

But the strength of the reactions - both for and against the dolls - showed what's really at stake here. While some people might say that all of this attention toward Barbie is silly and misplaced, the fact is Barbie still occupies a certain, exalted place in the cultural consciousness. Even as the Barbie brand is falling out of favor, she remains a symbol of (white) femininity and desirably, and unreachable ideal that far too many girls still find imprinted on their psyches.

The truth is, we don't want to change Barbie, or Trichelle, Kara, and Grace. We want to change the culture that says we must look a certain way in order to be beautiful.

But changing a culture is difficult. And even as we grow up, and leave our Barbies behind (or decided we never liked them in the first place), the painful truth remains: we all want our beauty to be validated.

And in our own, individual way, we're trying to influence the world to do just that.

New Black Barbies Get Mixed Reviews [CNN]
Mattel Falls Short With S.I.S (So In Style) Line Black Barbies [Happy Nappy Head]
I'm Saving My Cheers For New, "Authentic" Black Barbie [Love Isn't Enough]
Barbie So In Style Stylin Hair Grace Doll [Amazon]

I want to be clear about some things up front. While I am familiar with the plot and premise of the book, I have not read Sapphire's Push, the book the film is based on, and I have not yet seen Precious. By next week, I will have done both.

However, I have been following the coverage of the film since Sundance, ever since Postbourgie contributor SLB wrote a post called "Reveling in Bleakness" detailing her personal feelings about the novel. Following the conversation on Postbourgie, and our conversation on Racialicious, I realized that a lot of what has been written isn't so much about the issues discussed in the film, but our perceptions of race, class, pathology, and stereotypes.

Claudia, a commenter at PostBourgie, neatly summarized quite a few of the reactions:

Has anyone else here read Percival Everett's Erasure?

If not, I highly recommend it. My understanding is that some of the satire and criticism in Everett's book were inspired by Push. I am as undecided as many of the previous comments on the wisdom of bringing this work to the big screen. Generally, though, I tend to side with Everett's view in questioning who exactly benefits from such deeply painful cautionary tales of black life. We most definitely shouldn't shy away from black hardship and the real-life stories of suffering. But I wonder if novels like Push, that offer an almost hyper-real simulation of reality – what do they ultimately achieve?

Ironically, I remember back when folks had some of the same issues with the film version of The Color Purple, and I am a huge admirer of the book and the movie. So I probably need to think this through a little more (smile).

Lola, commenting at Racialicious, simply wrote:

I can't read things like this. They hurt to much, it is too personal.

The conversation, however, quickly took a familiar turn. How do we articulate our personal truth if our words and lives are filtered, pushed through a majority lens, and regurgitated as stereotypes?

cocomala:

yes, but why it then that our media is so obsessed with the negative portrayals of black women and men? why should this story get the greenlight?

where are the counterbalancing roles in movies starring black women who achieve success and satisfaction due to community/ parental guidance, love and care? where are any movies starring black women in positive roles this year? Okay, Cadillac Records, um Good Hair is coming out… oh, The Secret Life of Bees…anything else? …maybe The Family that Preys…

atlasien:

In a lot of movies, I think black women's suffering is pushed off to the sidelines or used just to underline the experience of a white heroine. So I can see how a movie where that suffering is made absolutely central and really extreme could possibly represent a welcome break from a stereotype… even if it's also incredibly depressing.

yesand...:

I don't know if I'm as worried about it being sanitized as I am about it black suffering being fetishized by a white audience, due to this "white guilt" that is (apparently) providing all the "hope" (money) to get these stories to the mainstream. [...]

For the black community, these kinds of narratives are for feeling a sense of collective struggle, a sense of identification in a world that seems hopeless. For (privileged) whites, it's about living the fantasy of a "just world" that is independent of their behavior, which alleviates their guilt and justifies passivity and the status quo. This is why I am not so happy about all of this paternalistic coziness with the "black" struggle all of a sudden. It reeks of fetish, it reeks of self-serving smugness. It doesn't really look like understanding to me.

Rchoudh:

While it's good to show both negative and positive descriptions of life within all communities, American films have a tendency to show both positive and negative descriptions of white American life. For every depressing story about white America you have in films like Revolutionary Road, you get many more fun-filled humorous stories in rom-coms like He's just not that into you and so forth. There's no such balance like this when it comes to stories depicting POC characters. While you have an overwhelming number of negative descriptions you have a dearth of positive descriptions where POC's play the main characters and where their positive stories become crossover successes with all audiences, whites included. I think that's why I'm reluctant to see yet another depressing movie starring POC's.

Browne:

Of course this is going to get funded. It's poverty, racially charged porn.

People watch these movies and it makes it seem that everyone who is poor has these insanely horrible lives and the poverty is owing only to these horrible parents and a horrible unsupportive community.

It's too damn easy.

I would like to see the character who plays Precious being cast as a normal teenager. That would be ground breaking, this is not groundbreaking from what I've seen. I know what's it is going to be and I don't look forward to it.

It's not about me wanting something to be positive, but I don't want my race to be used to make a point. While this is a movie about class, no one is going to see it that way it's going to be seen as a slice of black life and that's why I don' t like it.

Ultimately, there were some 130 comments debating the film.

I'll be curious to see what people say in the comments on the NY Times' website. Reading through the paper's new Sunday Magazine cover story, "The Audacity of Precious," my feeling of discomfort grew and grew. By the end of the six page feature, I started to feel that the writer, Lynn Hirschberg, was less interested in talking about a movie and more interested in observing the interesting "other." How did I know that this sentence...

He was dressed unremarkably in a loose, untucked shirt and slouchy khaki pants, but his hair, an electric corona of six-inch fusilli-like spirals, demanded notice.

...would lead to this one?

"I decided I should cut my hair," Daniels said, running his hand over his closely cropped head. The dreadlocks were gone. Daniels no longer looks like a wild child, but older, more sober.

Or phrases like:

Yet the movie is not neutral on the subject of race and the prejudices that swirl around it, even in the supposedly postracial age of Obama.

And:

Like the Jewish immigrants who created the movie business in Hollywood, Daniels has the will and the perspective of an outsider.

This one was particularly interesting, as Lee Daniel's isn't quite an outsider. He's been working in the business since 1983, and his former partner and father of his children is Billy Hopkins, an A-list casting director. Perhaps Daniels still feels like an outsider, but from reading the full piece, I feel like the writer was trying to play up as many differences as she could, providing a voyeuristic view of Daniels and the film's other main players.

Both Daniels and actress/comedian Mo'Nique say that part of them gravitated to the film because of their own histories with abuse by family members. (Also, despite prominently displaying the other lead actress, Gabourey Sidibe, on the cover, the article barely mentions her.) When the NYT's Hirshberg asks Mo'Nique to discuss the part, she responds:

In part, Mo'Nique was intrigued by the role of Mary Jones because, she says, she was abused by a brother when she was a young girl. The abuse supposedly began when Mo'Nique was 7 and continued for four years. "We wanted people to see the illness," Mo'Nique explained. "Lee said, be a monster. And my brother was that monster to me. When Lee said, ‘Action,' that's who I became."

However, there isn't much discussion about the issues of literacy, obesity, incest, HIV/AIDS or Down's Syndrome in the article. Abuse only merits three small paragraphs. While Precious puts forth an array of issues, these are not engaged with by the reviewers. Is it because of the heaviness of the subject matter? Perhaps. But I find it interesting that I have seen more discussion of Mariah Carey appearing without make-up than any discussion of the underlying issues in the film. However, in the NYT piece, the director, Lee Daniels, makes a lot of interesting admissions:

"As African-Americans, we are in an interesting place," Daniels said. "Obama's the president, and we want to aspire to that. But part of aspiring is disassociating from the face of Precious. To be honest, I was embarrassed to show this movie at Cannes. I didn't want to exploit black people. And I wasn't sure I wanted white French people to see our world." He paused. "But because of Obama, it's now O.K. to be black. I can share that voice. I don't have to lie. I'm proud of where I come from. And I wear it like a shield. ‘Precious' is part of that."

"I am so used to having two faces," he said, as if to explain his theatrical shifts in mood. "A face that I had for black America and a face for white America. When Obama became president, I lost both faces. Now I only have one face. But old habits die hard, and sometimes I can't remember who I'm supposed to be."

"I knew killers. My uncle, who took care of me, murdered people, and yet he took care of me too. People who have gone to jail for murder are also human. Black people are not all saints."

"My sister was an obese crack addict," Daniels said. "She had a chicken wing in one hand and a crack pipe in the other, and yet she had a line of white men waiting for her.

"Even the most evil person was somebody's baby at one time. And that's where life is lived. I've never been that comfortable with black and white."

To be honest, I'm not quite sure what to make of Lee Daniels, with the multiple references to Obama and the chicken/crack pipe comment. I started to get the impression from the article that he believes he is representing blackness - and from the readers comments at Racialicious and Postbourgie, this is the epitome of what many do not want the audience to walk away with. Also, Daniels comments seem to reveal a lot of personal shame and struggle wrapped up in race, so much so that discussions of class or cycles of poverty and abuse were completely overshadowed.

Is the goal here to tell a story? To illuminate systemic issues? Or to put forth a new view on blackness?

I am not sure, and I don't think I will ever be. Movies are subjective things, and are highly subject to the viewers interpretation. So even if Daniels' intended the movie to be a portrait of black like that isn't part of the "Huxtable/Cosby world," is that how the audience will interpret it?

Still, I look forward to seeing the film, and this statement, also from Daniels, explains why:

People read so much into ‘Precious.' But at the end, it's just this girl, and she's trying to live. I know this chick. You know her. But we just choose not to know her."

Precious [Official Site]
The Audacity Of Precious [NY Times]
Reveling In Bleakness. [Postbourgie]
Reveling In Bleakness [Racialicious]

After all, look at how bad it used to be!

Now, I have to admit, the piece gave me a bit of pause. In the intro article, the writers explain:

So it's worth stopping to look at what happened while we were busy ending the Cold War and building a multicultural society and enjoying the longest economic expansion in history.

Umm. Yeah. That's not quite how I'd describe the last thirty years, though many of these goals are works in progress. While reading through the fifteen segments that compose Time's series, I kept thinking of a phrase I hear often in anti-racist circles when discussing the realities of racism. The phrase (which adapts a bit depending on the speaker) is that whites like to measure progress by how far we've come; minorities like to measure progress based on how far we have left to go. This article is definitely taking the "how far we've come" view.

Much of the article frames gender issues as small matters, individual squabbles between couples, instead of systemic issues. However, it also does a bit of reframing, pushing the idea that women are the cause of their own problems:

This is not to say there's nothing left to argue about. More than two-thirds of women still think men resent powerful women, yet women are more likely than men to say female bosses are harder to work for than male ones. Men are much more likely to say there are no longer any barriers to female advancement, while a majority of women say men still have it better in life. People are evenly split over whether the "mommy wars" between working and nonworking mothers are finally over.

And the tenuous idea of happiness resurfaced:

Among the most confounding changes of all is the evidence, tracked by numerous surveys, that as women have gained more freedom, more education and more economic power, they have become less happy. No tidy theory explains the trend, notes University of Pennsylvania economist Justin Wolfers, a co-author of The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness. "We looked across all sectors - young vs. old, kids or no kids, married or not married, education, no education, working or not working - and it stayed the same," he says of the data. "But there are a few ways to look at it," he adds. "As Susan Faludi said, the women's movement wasn't about happiness." It may be that women have become more honest about what ails them. Or that they are now free to wrestle with the same pressures and conflicts that once accounted for greater male unhappiness. Or that modern life in a global economy is simply more stressful for everyone but especially for women, who are working longer hours while playing quarterback at home. "Some of the other social changes that have happened over the last 35 years - changes in family, in the workplace - may have affected men differently than women," Wolfers says. "So maybe we're not learning about changes due to the women's movement but changes in society."

And of course, there is the idea that inequality can be completely resolved in the span of forty years, and suddenly men will be the ones with a systemic disadvantage:

If male jobs keep vanishing, if physical strength loses its workplace value, if the premium shifts ever more to education, in which achievement is increasingly female, then we will soon be having parallel conversations: What needs to be done to free American men to realize their full potential? You can imagine the whole conversation flipping in a single generation.

It's no longer a man's world. Nor is it a woman's nation. It's a cooperative, with bylaws under constant negotiation and expectations that profits be equally shared.

Journalist and First Lady of California, Maria Shriver, writes an ode to her recently departed mother, Eunice, but also goes into a discussion of shifting gender roles and confusion. However, I appreciate how she still reframes the argument to look at the inequalities that have not been resolved:

Men are feeling out of sorts and stressed out as well. Wherever I went, I was surprised at how open men were to sharing their bafflement about what women want - and their insecurities about what's expected of them. "All of us grew up thinking this was a man's world, that doors were just gonna open to us because we had a Y chromosome," a Seattle man told me. "And suddenly we have to adjust to the fact that that's not the case. And the recession has made it even more intense for us. So every family is trying to figure out what does it mean that we're both working, or that I'm laid off and you're working? We haven't thrown some switch to go from a man's world to a woman's world. It's more like we're finally, for the first time, in a position where it's no longer only a man's world. Now what does that mean?"

While there's much to cheer about these days on the equality front, we still have a long way to go. Women still don't make as much as men do for the same jobs. The U.S. still is the only industrialized nation without a child-care policy. Women are still being punished by a tax code designed when men were the sole breadwinners and women the sole caregivers. Sexual violence against women still is a huge issue. Women still are disproportionately affected by a lack of health-care services. And lesbian couples and older women are among the poorest segments of our society.

What I find most interesting in the series are the discussions and breakdowns by race. While there is quite a bit of consensus, it's interesting to look at just how different opinions can be along racial lines.

Take "The Argument About Women Working is Over," a segment exploring breakdowns by race, asking respondents if having women in the workplace was "a positive change":

[T]hat view holds regardless of age, race or political ideology: 81% of African Americans view it as a positive change, along with 84% of Latinos, 88% of Democrats and 68% of Republicans.

And I would love some more analysis on racial/gender attitudes toward marriage:

Being married is very important to 58% of men vs. 53% of women. Only 38% of men strongly agree that a woman can have a fulfilling life without marriage, compared with 54% of women. Both white women and highly educated women (61%) strongly agree vs. 37% of Latino women. Of both black and Latino men, only 35% strongly agree.

Also, although one section is titled "Working mothers are broadly accepted..." the actual statistics show that race does influence overall attitudes:

Seventy-four percent of men and 84% of women say women with children are just as committed to their jobs as women without children. Seventy-two percent of black women strongly agree vs. 57% of Latino women and 55% of white women.

I am in favor of looking at racial analysis alongside of gender analysis because the lives of black, Latina, indigenous, and Asian women to differ a bit from the white norm. I was at a feminist conference earlier this year, and one of my co-panelists was trying to nail home the fact that women should be grateful that we have so much power and visibility. She, an older feminist, noted that many of these advances would have been unthinkable 40 years ago, and she feels that the situation and potential for women was wonderful. She began naming successful women in Hollywood, and continued to do so until I pointed out that not a single one of the women she held up as proof women had broken through all the old barriers was a woman of color. Sometimes, our gender struggles look a little different through a racial lens, and- as the stats above demonstrate - it's important to remember that the term '"women" encompasses a large and diverse group.

The Time piece concludes by following up with some of the women profiled in the magazine's 1972 feature "Where She Is and Where She's Going." The women profiled all saw their lives changed, as some worked outside of the home in the years following the article. Other women said in 1972, they felt fine with their lives and placing others first, but also felt grateful their daughters had more opportunities. Interestingly, the original article also wondered why women were not happy, when they had so much more than women of previous generations.

I will admit one thing though - the Time article certainly has me reflecting on where I am and where I would live to be in terms of gender equality. Readers, how does "The State of the American Woman" look from where you sit?

The State of the American Woman [Time Magazine]
Where She Is and Where She's Going [Time Magazine]

MSNBC reports on the new hot trend in domestic workers - the Tibetan nanny:

For the past several years, Tibetan nannies have been all the rage in New York City. On message boards and playgrounds, some parents claimed Tibetan nannies were "very balanced and Zen" and aided in children's "spiritual development," whereas in areas such as Dallas, for example, Latino nannies have been more in demand for their Spanish-speaking abilities.

At the Diki Daycare Center in Astoria, N.Y., demand for Tibetan nannies became so great that the preschool began offering a Tibetan nanny referral service.

"Tibetan women are well known for being caring and loving nannies," reads the promotional literature. "They are recognized for becoming ‘one of the family' and offer the same compassion and quality of care for their charges as they do their own children." Furthermore, it says, "Cleanliness, organization & dedication to education are values of Tibetan culture."

Over the years, we hear about nanny trends that come and go. The always in-fashion Swedish or French au pair, the ubiquitous Caribbean nanny, the Chinese nanny boom in the 2000s, and now Tibet is the new hot spot. It can be tough for those who aren't the flavor of the month, or those coming from a similar class/race background as the employers:

"They talk about how everybody hires the Filipina nannies because you can get them to do anything or that families will look for a British nanny who has the right accent," says Tasha Blaine, a former nanny and Sacramento, Calif.-based author of the recently-published book "Just Like Family: Inside the Lives of Nannies, the Parents They Work For, and the Children They Love."

Blaine discovered this first-hand while working as a nanny - not just from fellow caregivers, but also from prospective employers. In one interview, a mother advised Blaine to warn families in advance of meeting that she was Caucasian, with a degree from a prestigious college. "She said, ‘I'm not sure that people would feel comfortable asking someone like you to make their beds or do the laundry,'" she says.

Ahhh. And this race/class dynamic resurfaces again when discussing the small matter of how to compensate some who is assisting in raising your children:

In fact, Tibetan nannies have become so popular that they may have become victims of their own success as they've been able to request and get escalating salaries - much to the annoyance of some employers.

"Our nanny has priced herself out of our range and I will let her go because she guilted us into paying through the nose," recently wrote an outraged New Yorker on the message boards of UrbanBaby.com.

Damn it, you darkie ingrate, what's wrong with cheap labor anyway? We brought you to this country!

Okay, at this point, I should explain that I am not exactly impartial in this whole designer nannies debate. From the time I was eleven years old until the time I was about fourteen or fifteen, I worked as a nanny. For a nanny. My employer was a lovely woman from El Salvador. In the 80s, she was forced to flee civil war, leaving behind her home country in pursuit of a better life in America. When she arrived here, she then fled with her two sons from domestic violence at the hands of her husband. When I went to work for her, I always noticed that her medical degree was prominently displayed on the walls of her apartment, in spite of the work she found as a nanny/domestic.

Back then, I didn't know anything about the situation, save for the fact that this nice lady (I'll call her Isabel, here) saw me playing with her children and my younger sister, and offered me the unheard of sum of $100 a week to stay with the children after school and to make them dinner until she came home, around seven or eight in the evening.

I didn't understand, then, what it meant to make money under the table, and why there were weeks when Isabel could not pay me the cash she promised. I did not understand why she would often call me around eight or so and ask me to stay later, or promise me $40 in cash for an overnight stay, when her employers wanted her to stay late to clean up after a dinner party where she remained in the shadows for most of the evening.

I didn't understand the strange dynamic of power when you assist in raising someone else's child because they have asked you to, and the even stranger dynamic that occurred as Isabel spent her days cooing over a white child and I spent my days helping her children traverse the hostile worlds of elementary school and middle school.

Later, when I grew older, I felt a bit of rage at Isabel's employers. Why did they keep her late, so many nights? They knew about her children. Did they just not care that their nanny had a life of her own as well, children she needed to raise? Why did they so blithely blow off payment so many weeks, weeks when Isabel would struggle to put gas in the car and feed her children on the already paltry wages they were able to pay in cash?

It is one of those situations where there aren't many good answers. Isabel, with her conversational English skills and non-transferable degree found a job where she could, and was grateful for the opportunity. She joined with an El Salvadorian church in the area and eventually worked her way into a better job, her own home, and a better car. We've lost contact over the years - I still hope she is doing well.

But my time with her changed the way I look at domestic labor forever.

In this month's Latina, Elizabeth Méndez Berry evaluates a new film called The Maid, a character study of a loyal domestic worker who often sabotages the other maids in the house to retain her spot as number one. Berry interviews Angélica Hernández, a former domestic worker that served families both in Mexico and the United States. She explains:

As a 20-year-old newlywed, she could only find work as a live in maid, so she saw her husband briefly on Sundays. "I used to go to my room and cry," she says. Her work was never done: She'd go to bed at midnight and get up at 6 a.m. to make breakfast and then get the children ready for school. After her husband died 11 years ago, she moved to New York City.

"It's hard for us because there are no rules and no support," says Hernández, who has had several employers refuse to pay her. "There are good employers, but it's like reading the lottery." While live-in domestic work in the States is less common than it once was, it's not extinct, according to Priscilla González of Domestic Workers United, a nonprofit in New York City. "Domestic workers are not protected by most labor laws in this country," González says. "Along with farm workers, they're explicitly excluded from civil rights protections and the right to form unions."

Indeed, it is a global problem. A wave of scandals involving the abuse of domestic workers by diplomats have surfaced around the world, but most of the issues of modern nannies revolve less around physical abuse and more toward labor coercion and withholding of wages - which serves as a very convenient method of control.

I am sure there are families who treat their domestic employees equitably and fairly. But I am also sure these would not be the type of people comparing and contrasting different ethnicities as if they were deciding between two of the latest "it" bags instead of hiring an actual person.

Tibetan Nannies: Parents' New Status Symbol? [MSNBC]
Latina [Official Site]
Diplomat's Nanny Lifts Lid On Modern Slavery [The Independent]
Diplomats May Often Fail to Pay Household Staff [Women's E-News]

Part of the question is easy to answer. Oudin is a great player, with great technique. She rose quickly out of relative obscurity and has bested players with years more experience and much higher rankings. And according to all the interviews, Oudin also appears to be a fairly normal teen. She is praised for her "heart" and her inspirational faith in her own abilities. On Monday, following her win against 13th-seeded Nadia Petrova, Oudin said, "Today, there were no tears because I believed I can do it. Now I know I do belong here. This is what I want to do."

Oudin certainly seems to be a lovable sports star, and her accomplishments are definitely praise-worthy, but there is something off about the way she is being celebrated. She has been called the "darling" of the U.S. Open, America's "sweetheart," a "pint-sized, freckled-faced blonde from Georgia," the "tiny little savior of women's tennis," everything it seems, save tennis' "Great White Hope" (although given the media coverage of Oudin's win, it would probably be more like the "little, teeny-tiny, super cute White Hope").

Especially problematic was this article from the Daily Beast, which quoted ESPN sportscaster Michelle Beadle comparing Oudin to the Williams sisters. "From Day 1, I've never heard the Williams sisters referred to as sweethearts," she said, which prompted Jez commenter sympathyforthebasementcat to remark:

Yes, there's just something different about them. Americans just aren't quite to fully relate to them. They just don't seem like the type of girls that would live next door. Hmmm, what could it be?

Jezemale put it even more succinctly:

Young, white and cute= sweetheart
Black and muscular= not a sweetheart?

This is certainly only part of the equation, but it is an important part. It seems like every sportscaster reporting on Oudin feels the need to comment on how pretty she is, how cute, how "All-American." Again, there is nothing wrong with Oudin being blonde, petite, and white, but much of the commentary, which focuses so heavily on her looks, fail to recognize the racism that lurks behind these terms.

The New York Times attempts to explain why Oudin's story is so special. Columnist George Vecsey argues that the "crowd is fickle. The crowd wants new faces, new stories, every hour, on the hour." Oudin is just the next new story. However, Vecsey says, unlike the Williams sisters, Oudin has fought her way up from the bottom:

The crowd always loves upsets, which is one reason Venus Williams and Serena Williams are not universally loved at the Open. They are sometimes too good for their own good, and they take up the same airspace, with the same history.

Which reminds me of something commenter heykoukla posted yesterday:

What a shame the Williams sisters don't have a rags-to-riches backstory. You know, like growing up in a poor neighbourhood and being coached by a father who had zero experience of their sport, and fighting their way to success against the odds. Yep, that would have made a great story and endeared them to the public, right?

The Williams sisters are great, but what does it mean to call them "too good?" And, on a related note, when is the last time you heard a male athlete called "too good for his own good?"

An article in the Wall Street Journal suggests that Oudin is working with a new level of technique and precision that had been missing in the game. She may be able, the paper says, strangely, to "drag tennis from the dark ages" with her superior skill. And the New York Observer calls the Williams sisters a "tired act." Oudin and Kim Clijsters may just make women's tennis "watchable again." Unlike many other players, Oudin "doesn't play this monotonous tennis," said Jon Wertheim from Sports Illustrated. He praises Oudin's variety and ability to move about the court, but he also remarks upon her size. "She's noticeably smaller than most players, and that's part of the appeal, too."

Unpacking all the different levels of sexism and racism that are operating subtly behind the scenes is an incredibly difficult task. Oudin is small, skilled, and attractive, which seems to automatically endear her to the American public. None of these things is a problem in and of itself, but it becomes a problem when the focus is no longer on her skill or achievements, but instead on her "relatability." "America's sweetheart" is a label that is only given to certain people, and those people nearly always look the same. I am personally familiar with this phenomenon. Last month I was stopped on the street by a woman who wanted to tell me just how "wonderfully all-American" I look. It was clear that she meant this as a compliment, but when she went on to explain how I have the perfect "all-American skin and hair," I began to feel incredibly uncomfortable. What is so "American" about being blonde and pale? I am all-American, and so is Oudin, but most importantly, so are the Williams sisters. They may be stronger and bigger than players like Oudin, but they that shouldn't make them any less American, or any less beloved.

For Generation Text, Tennis Role Models Get Younger [New York Times]
Thoroughly Modern Melanie [Wall Street Journal]
The Tiny Little Saviors Of Women's Tennis [New York Observer]

Related: American Teen Is The "Cinderella Story" Of The U.S. Open

Sue Shellenbarger of the Wall Street Journal talks about a rising trend of assigning mental-health workers to preschools. These therapists and consultants can help teachers resolve kids' problems, like tantrums and rough play, before they get out of hand. Shallenberger writes,

The idea of assigning mental-health workers to child-care centers and preschools is jarring; I was skeptical when I first heard the idea. Children so small shouldn't need mental-health help, it seems, and having therapists or counselors working in classrooms seems to risk stigmatizing them with labels, or simply interfering with the innocence of childhood.

But therapists can help preschools reduce their expulsion rates, which are currently three times higher than those in kindergarten through high school. Preschool teachers also say behavior problems are rising, perhaps because preschool is becoming more academic or learning disabilities more prevalent. And if depression can occur in kids as young as three, maybe having therapists on hand isn't such a stretch.

Perhaps even more controversial than giving very young children therapy is talking to them about race. According to Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman in Newsweek, researcher Birgitte Vittrup asked parents of white five- to seven-year-olds to talk to their kids about racial equality, with or without accompanying videos. She hoped the conversations would change kids' racial attitudes. They didn't — because parents couldn't actually bring themselves to have them. Rather than talking to kids explicitly about race, the parents "reverted to the vague 'Everybody's equal' phrasing" — or dropped out of the study early because it made them too uncomfortable. Another study found that 75% of white parents never, or almost never, bring up race with their kids.

Bronson and Merryman write that parents may believe "we should let children know a time when skin color does not matter." But kids are never really oblivious to skin color. A study of six-month-olds showed they stared longer at faces with different skin color than their own, implying that they perceived these faces as more unfamiliar. And an experiment by Rebecca Bigler of the University of Texas shows that children may be "developmentally prone to in-group favoritism." Assigned to wear red or blue T-shirts for just three weeks, preschoolers began to believe that kids who wore the same color shirt as them were more likely to be nice and smart.

So it may be better to address racial prejudice with children head-on, rather than pretending it doesn't exist. Parents — especially white parents — may be so uncomfortable discussing race that they dance around the issue or shush children when they bring it up. But kids may not understand abstract words like "equality," and it doesn't do them much good to learn that all discussion of race is taboo. Bronson and Merryman say that white parents could take a cue from minority families, who are typically much more likely to talk about racial issues. One psychologist, they write, found that "minority children are coached to be proud of their ethnic history," and that this is beneficial for their self-confidence. Bronson and Merryman add,

That leads to the question that everyone wonders but rarely dares to ask. If "black pride" is good for African-American children, where does that leave white children? It's horrifying to imagine kids being "proud to be white." Yet many scholars argue that's exactly what children's brains are already computing. Just as minority children are aware that they belong to an ethnic group with less status and wealth, most white children naturally decipher that they belong to the race that has more power, wealth, and control in society; this provides security, if not confidence. So a pride message would not just be abhorrent-it'd be redundant.

In fact, white children may need not pride, but a little guilt. Rebecca Bigler found that after a lesson on Jackie Robinson, white children had much better attitudes towards blacks if they learned that Robinson had faced discrimination from white people. Bigler says the lesson "made them feel some guilt. It knocked down their glorified view of white people." Instilling guilt in innocent children may sound cruel — but again, kids aren't really innocent when it comes to race. They tend to think their own group is the best one, perhaps especially if that group happens also to be socioeconomically advantaged. Teaching them that they're not superior may actually be kind, both for their personal development and for a society where they will one day be voters, workers, and parents. By the time they grow up to inhabit those roles, it may already be too late.

See Baby Discriminate [Newsweek]
Therapy In Preschools: Can It Have Lasting Benefits? [Wall Street Journal]

Most of Amber Rose's Complex shoot, which was photographed by Matt Doyle, refers to iconic shots of Grace Jones. The image of Amber with jewelry in her mouth, for example, is a recreation of this picture of Grace eating diamonds, as photographed by Gordon Munro for Interview in the '80s:

There's Amber smoking in a tux…

And Grace smoking in a tux, on the cover of her 1981 album, Nightclubbing.

There's Amber in a cropped grey tee, with boxing hand wraps…

And Grace, on the cover of her '82 single "Pull Up To The Bumper," wearing a cropped grey tee and boxing tape.

There's Amber, her naked body covered in oil, posing with a whip…

And Grace, her naked body covered in oil, with a whip.

Perhaps most offensively, there's Amber in a cage.

And Grace in a cage.

The French artist Jean-Paul Goude shot that last image of Jones; the two were involved in a tempestuous and sometimes violent relationship. The objectification and exoticization of black women isn't incidental to Goude's art: it's the whole point. "Blacks are the premise of my work," the artist told People in 1979, "I have jungle fever."

In case anyone thought that was a joke, Jungle Fever was also the title of Goude's 1982 book. The shot of a caged Jones made the cover.

So it's no surprise that Goude shot Jones surrounded by raw meat, under a sign that reads "DO NOT FEED THE ANIMAL." But why would Complex choose to emulate images, some of which come across as not just dated, but riven with deep and troubling statements about black women as animalistic, primitive, and uncivilized creatures? Latoya Peterson has noted of such pictures that the women are always "looking like they are ready to fly off the page and attack." Claire Sulmers of The Fashion Bomb says of the Complex photos the message is that "these women are so wild they must be caged–they're sultry, snarling sex beasts."

Modeling opportunities for women of color in general are slim; as we know, far too many designers consider diversity on the runway and in their advertising to be entirely optional. The industry's slowness in even inviting black models to the metaphorical table is probably why, thirty years on, Grace Jones remains the most easily identifiable short-haired black model, and therefore a ready subject with which for Complex to associate the close-cropped, bi-racial Amber Rose. (Imagine if Jerry Hall were still considered the only and ultimate blonde model, or Paulina Porizkova were still the touchstone brunette, and white models starting their careers were constantly booked on jobs that recreated exclusively those women's old spreads.)

The industry's general unwillingness to embrace models of color as anything besides the exoticized "other" is thwarting the development and popularization of other kinds of black beauty. Even Alek Wek, the Sudanese supermodel, noted that she was often asked to pose in spreads that she felt fitted into a wider and more troubling tradition of black people's representation in the mainstream media, particularly with regard to a Lavazza calendar where she posed inside a coffee cup, her skin intended to represent the espresso. As Wek wrote in her memoir, "I can't help but compare them to all the images of black people that have been used in marketing over the decades. There was the big-lipped jungle-dweller on the blackamoor ceramic mugs sold in the '40s; the golliwog badges given away with jam; Little Black Sambo, who decorated the walls of an American restaurant chain in the 1960s; and Uncle Ben, whose apparently benign image still sells rice."

It's worth noting that in re-creating these pictures, Complex did tone them down; gone are the chains from the whip photo, and so too is the raw meat and the sign explicitly referring to the model as an animal in the cage photo. The choices the Complex art director made are almost certainly intended to mitigate the offense of the original images; we've come at least some way as a society since Jean-Paul Goude's day. But how long will it be before we automatically recognize any picture of a black woman caged up like an animal as offensive?

Amber Rose [Complex]
Caged Black Women: Amber Rose & Grace Jones [The Fashion Bomb]
When Disco Queen Grace Jones Lamented 'I Need a Man,' Artist Jean-Paul Goude Prowled Too Near Her Cage [People]
Darker Skinned Glamour Girls [Racialicious]
Bitter Coffee [NY Post]

Earlier:
How Did New York Fashion Week's 116 Shows Treat Models Of Color?

Michelle Obama may have become an archetypal African-American female success story - law career, strong marriage, happy children - but the reality is often very different for other highly educated black women. [...]

The unspoken context here is that we are not Michelle Obama, so obviously, we will all die alone. This article is a rehash of a rehash, the same super-hyped hysteria made to display the horrific plight of poor, downtrodden, manless black women. (Which goes nicely with the stereotype of us as castrating, swivel-necked harpies).

But this article really goes above and beyond to ratchet up the madness. Apparently, we're responsible for the decline of the black middle class!

Beyond the personal interests of individual women, the trend is significant because "in terms of American society, this is one additional obstacle" to the broadening of the black middle class, Brueckner said. Fewer highly educated black people having children means that they cannot pass on those advantages and knowledge."

This defeats the goal of affirmative action, argue some demographers. The idea behind assuring that blacks had access to higher education and graduate school was that after a generation or so, African-Americans would reach a kind of achievement parity after generations of suffering educational and career restriction. But if black women, who comprise 71 percent of black graduate students, according to the census data, do not have children, the rate of achievement reaches a kind of familial dead end.

All our fancy schooling is for naught and we've undermined Affirmative Action! Woe, woe is us all!

But it gets worse. Hysteria Point #2 - All the men are leaving!!!

Highly educated black men tend to "outmarry" (marry outside race, religion or ethnicity) at a higher rate than black women, researchers say. Think of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates or Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Both married white women.

How dare they!!? (Wait, did we want them? Is there a voting block where we lament departed black men? Seems foolish to try to force someone to like you, but if the article says so...)

So black men are going to other pastures. But we can't do that because (Hysteria Point #3) our families are racist and we can't resist the pressure!!!

In interviews with a large number of black women, she found that community pressures on black women to marry black men can be more intense than the reverse.

"A greater negative reaction falls on them," Clarke said. "Some women in my sample told stories of African-American men on college campuses getting upset if they dated outside the race. There seems to be a sense of some policing of women's sexuality. I think women are more controlled by these community and family pressures around who they should date. Men have greater freedom."

And too bad for that, because (Hysteria Point #4) Black women are a bad dating investment!

A sociological line of inquiry called "exchange theory" suggests that in the piggy bank of goods each of us brings to a possible relationship - money, smarts, sense of humor, looks, family background, education, gender - African heritage is devalued compared with European or Asian heritage. African-American females, even with lots of education, do not fetch as much "value" in the marriage market.

That may be a cold way to look at love, romance, and sex, but studies dating back to the 1980s support it.

Damn. Do I need to get on my Cyrano de Bergerac over here, and find a white face to front me?

When I read things like this, it just annoys me.

Analysis like the type done by the National Center for Health Statistics, that puts the racial stats in perspective along with age, region, location, and income bracket is hard to come by. (The last study in this vein was done in 2002.)

There are some conversations that wold be very worthwhile and fruitful about marriage rates in the black community and intraracial dating. However, I hate these kinds of articles because they over-sensationalize everything, in the same way op-eds written to let women know their sell by date is passing and a few years back there were a rash of articles about how college educated women wouldn't be able to find suitable mates, these kind of article use the hyped up hysteria to reinforce existing (often racist and patriarchal) ideas.

Marriage Eludes High Achieving Black Women [MSNBC]

Cohabitation, Marriage, Divorce, And Remarriage in the United States [NCHS]

Rupert Murdoch has one. So do financiers Vivi Nevo and Bruce Wasserstein. Why are the West's most powerful men coupling up with younger Asian women?

I'll cosign with the Frisky here:

Asian woman as commodity? Asian woman as status symbol? Offensive much?

But I'll need to fully disclose something: I hold a deep personal hatred for racial trend pieces. While I think that discussing shifts in demographics can be quite useful information, the this-minority-is-the-new-hottness pieces only serve to reinforce stereotypes and dominant paradigms. Kind of like that term "blipster", the idea of an Asian trophy wife is only remarkable if one concludes minorities don't have the same types of motivations, thoughts, likes, dislikes, and feelings as everyone else.

There's nothing really new about this "trend." So what's makes this so special? That it's now socially acceptable to be seen marrying or dating someone nonwhite, instead of just having sexual relations? After all, the Marie Claire piece quotes from the author of The East, The West, and Sex who notes that this fascination with exotic others has been going on as long as humans have had the capacity to travel to other lands:

In researching his new book, The East, the West, and Sex, author Richard Bernstein found that the Orientalist illusion continues to influence. "Historically, Asia provided certain sexual opportunities that would be much more difficult for Western men to have at home. But it remains a happy hunting ground for them today," he says, citing one phenomenon in the northeastern region of Thailand called Issan, where 15 percent of marriages are between young Thai women and Western men well into their 60s.

Reading the piece, I was also struck by how the focus returns to the people-as-status-symbol theme again and again:

It's as though these Western men are hungry for a piece of that mystical Eastern formula. As such, Asians (in addition to African orphans) are hot commodities right about now-status symbols as prized as a private Gulfstream jet or a museum wing bearing your name (neither of which goes so well with a frumpy, aging first wife).

Though, I wonder how much I can fault Chu for perpetuating this kind of treatment. After all, while researching this piece, I read article after article looking for information on Rupert Murdoch's wife, Wendi Deng. Ultimately, the only information I could find was on her marriage history. I never got the answers to my two main questions: essentially, who is Wendi Deng outside of Murdoch and why people seem to think that her pussy comes with a side of the Chinese market?

But Chu plays into this, writing:

Skepticism aside, the new trophy trend does have its benefits. We're already seeing a positive impact on global politics, economics, and the arts: The Chinese became privy to online social networking in 2007 with the launch of MySpace China under the News Corp. umbrella; contemporary Chinese painters-including Xiaogang Zhang and Minjun Yue-have rung up nearly $400 million in sales on international art circuits since 2006, thanks to well-connected supporters like Ziyi Zhang; and almost 43 percent of international adoptions, which have more than tripled since 1990, now come out of Asian countries (more playdates for Pax and Maddox).

In addition, while the article appears to try to have a reasonable discussion about fetish and relationships, it seems to embrace other stereotypes whole-heartedly:

What's more, perhaps a proliferation of gorgeous, mixed-race, multilingual offspring (assuming a classical Mandarin tutor is on the Chen-Moonves registry) is just good for our landscape.

Hybrid vigor, again? That's a lot of pressure to put on generation swirl.

And there are all kinds of essentializing stereotypes put forward in the piece (emphasis mine):

While I'm sure that real love and affection is sometimes the bond in these culture-crossing May-December romances, could it be that power divorcés of a certain ilk make the perfect renegade suitors for these overachieving Asian good girls-an ultimate (yet lame) attempt at rebellion? Maybe these outsized, world-class moguls are stand-ins for emotionally repressed Asian dads (one cliché that is predominantly true). Or... are these women just glorified opportunists? What's so perverse is that while Asians have always revered their elders, sleeping with a guy old enough to be your grandfather is just creepy-in any culture.

Yet, earlier in the piece, Chu talks about "excruciating colonial stereotypes-Asian women as submissive, domestic, hypersexual." So I guess those ones are bad, but the others are okay?

Ultimately, I can't help but feel that the article is a scattershot bunch of ideas, culminating in nothing.

It doesn't really put forth any information about the women who seem to be the subjects of the article. It speculates about their motivations and agency, but doesn't provide any evidence. It broaches a discussions fetishization but does not seem to take into account that people enter into relationships for all kinds of reasons. And while I do not agree that these types of relationships are above questioning, I believe that any questioning about racial motivation should be done with a healthy understanding that relationships are ultimately individual choices, and individual motivations are complex things.

This is better articulated by Vickie Chang, writing in 2006 on "Yellow Fever" in the Village Voice In the article, Chang talks about Asiaphilia (focusing mainly on male practitioners and women recipients) but makes one very interesting observation:

I was the 10-year-old girl swooning and singing along with Rivers Cuomo over the three-chord riffs of Weezer's "El Scorcho," that song about half-Japanese girls that do it to him every time. Oblivious to its implications, I was pleased that the man in the Buddy Holly glasses had a penchant for Asian girls because, you know, that way I actually had a chance. It was better than being invisible. After all, how many times did I come across references to Asians on television or radio? Let's see, there was professional tennis player Michael Chang, who provoked squeals of delighted pride from my parents, the unsportiest people you'll ever meet, whenever his matches were on television. And there was Margaret Cho and her hopelessly unfunny, short-lived ABC comedy series, American Girl. And that just about wraps it up.

I was a year into college, still listening to Cuomo as he referenced Madama Butterfly, when a friend pointed out that Cuomo was merely exoticizing and objectifying Asian women, the social phenomenon that is Asiaphilia.

And just like that, my favorite Weezer album, Pinkerton, suggested a disturbing question: Was Cuomo, the god of cutesy, simple-but-not rock-the guy I'd been so thrilled at merely standing near at the Roxy a few years before-was he actually a quasi-racist, ignorant Asiaphile?

And even if he was, would he ever call?

Is a white man dating Asian woman acting out a fetish?

Is an Asian woman dating a white man acting out a fetish?

If two people mutually fetishize each other, does that make it okay?

I've been trying to untangle how to have a productive conversation on racial fetishes and racial preferences for the greater part of two years now. The only think I can do - which doesn't always work - is to tread very lightly. After all, people internalize the political as it reflects their personal, and what begins as an intellectual exercise can quickly become a witchhunt, looking for people who don't have the proper justification for one of their personal relationships.

However, articles like this one published in Marie Claire continue to baffle me. Even after giving it a third read through, I still can't discern a purpose for why this was published. What was this supposed to prove or accomplish?

Chu ends the piece by saying "Asian women dating white men may never really know if it's a fetish thing." I'd add that racial trend pieces, seeking to profit from some idea of new minority cool, can never do anything but scratch the surface of our ultimate humanity.

The New Trophy Wives: Asian Women [Maire Claire]
Asian Trophy Wives: A Label We Can Do Without [The Frisky]
Buppies, Blipsters and other black unicorns [What Tami Said]
Hybrid Vigor Alert: Halle's Pregnant [Racialicious]
Official Site [Swirl, Inc.]
Yellow Fever [The Village Voice]

After we got the reader tip on this one, you know I had to investigate. According to Spiegel Online International:

The poster put up by the environmental Greens party in the western town of Kaarst contains a play on words: "Black" in German party politics refers to the color colloquially used to describe Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party. Other major parties are described as red, yellow and, of course, green.

The poster is meant to highlight the Greens' support for same-sex partnerships, said the local head of the Greens, Christian Gaumitz, according to the daily Rheinische Post.

German Green Party Defends 'Racist' Campaign Poster [Spiegel]

At Charleston High, even though black students and white students learn in the same classrooms, there is always a "white prom" and a "black prom."


Freeman gathered the senior class together and asked them if they wanted to have an integrated prom. It was a little bit of a set-up; no white students were willing to raise a hand and admit — in front of the black students, on camera, and in front of a black celebrity — that they or their parents didn't want to dance with their black peers.

But the senior class agreed to have an integrated prom after Freeman urged them to — and after he agreed to pay for it.

This turned out to be troubling for white students — or their parents. A competing "white prom" was organized.

The "white prom" was held at a location near the town, and only white students were invited to attend. But it wasn't racism! As a lawyer for some of the white students' parents says, the attendees just "happen to be" white.

Heather and Jeremy were the only interracial couple in the senior class. Heather's father was not happy that Heather likes Jeremy, and said he'd like to see them grow apart. Later in the film, Heather said she wants to marry Jeremy someday, and have his kids; Jeremy agreed that the relationship is headed in that direction. In school, they kept their relationship pretty quiet, just meeting by lockers and texting a lot, but the prom gave them the opportunity to show off… and actually attend a school function at which they would dance together.

The film did attempt to question why there is fear surrounding black students and white students dancing together — when they have grown up together and attended the same schools for years. It came down to sex, and the centuries-old stereotype that black men are sexually aggressive maniacs who will "dance up" on the town's precious white daughters and sully/ ruin/ impregnate them. Unfortunately for Heather and Jeremy, their dynamic — white female/black male — means that some people in their town will just never accept the relationship; and that includes Heather's father.


This is what will put a smile on your face: The limo ride! A giant white stretch limousine, rolling through dusty Southern roads, picking up dapper seniors, both black and white. (Yes, that is Erykah Badu singing in the background.)


In the end, the prom was like any other: Teenagers danced and enjoyed socializing together. And there was some intense krumping going on, from which a young lady emerged victorious.

Uplifting as it was to see these students make history, it hardly canceled out the rage at that small portion of the class who felt the need to segregate themselves at the white prom. There were a few white students who attended both the white prom and the integrated prom; and conflict was evident in their faces — on one hand, they wanted to party with friends; on the other, they didn't want to be perceived as racist themselves. Morgan Freeman is to be applauded for his initiative (he actually tried this once before, in 1997, but got nowhere), and the students of Charleston High should be proud of their efforts. You can't dance your troubles away, but it's a start.

Prom Night In Mississippi [HBO]
(view the screening schedule here.)

He was standing on the train when he saw this:

A young woman, maybe 18, was standing against the opposite door. She slapped her daughter, who looked to be about 4. I looked away. Then she hit the child again. And again, and again.
(...)
She had a friend with her, perhaps 16. And when the child cried, the friend hit her, too. Five smacks now and counting - from two people.

This was all very public. People were watching them and I was watching the people while also watching the hitting. Someone, please, say something.

Hits 6, 7, 8. Harder.

On a subway full of people, Halperin (a self-described "54-year-old white Jewish guy") was watching a much-younger African-American woman abuse a child, and was hoping that someone, anyone would stop her.

But they didn't. So he did.

"Stop hitting that child!"

Who said that? Stepping toward her, I took a dive off a sky-high cliff - and there was no way back.

"Who are you to tell me not to hit my kid? She's my kid!"

"Don't hit that child again or I will call the police!"

"I will hit my child if I want. I know how to hit my child. Go ahead and call the police!"

Since the confrontation halted the abuse, Halperin ended the confrontation, comforted to see an older, African-American woman start a quieter conversation with the mother.

A woman sitting nearest to the young mother started a quieter conversation with her. I could not hear the entire thing, but it was clear that this woman, in her 50s, was counseling her on how to handle an unruly child without hitting.

"You don't know me," the younger woman said to the older one. "You don't know my child."

Although the woman's posture might have just been public defensiveness and bravado brought on by being corrected by older people in public, it certainly doesn't seem like she knew there was anything wrong with her behavior — but neither Halperin, the woman or the two other dudes who congratulated him for saying something contacted the police.

Most people — those on the street as Liv Tyler drove by (not to mention the paparazzos who took the shots) and those in the subway car with Halperin — don't want to get involved. They don't want to be yelled at, humiliated in public, to confront issues that, too often, fit within stereotyped roles. Halperin expresses discomfort at the racial politics of the situation, but what about the issue of their difference in age? Other questions:. How far do you go to stop a child abuse you're forced to witness in public? And when do you get the cops involved?

Complaint Box | Defending a Child [NY Times]

Related: Liv Tyler Rushes To Help A Troubled Baby! [Celebuzz]

In Sunday's NY Times Magazine Kirn writes,

The reason that most thinking Americans consent to our modern procedures for advancement (and the reason some seek to correct their "cultural biases," in the words of Sotomayor, with policies like affirmative action) is that we esteem the ideal on which they're based, namely that of equal opportunity. [...] From the first time I raised my hand in kindergarten, eager to prove that I'd memorized my alphabet, to the day I sat down with three sharpened No. 2 pencils to demonstrate my mastery of analogies on the SAT, I held it as self-evident that being created equal was just Step 1 in the process of proving myself somewhat superior. I eagerly gave myself over to this program, because I believed that its principles were just and that any benefits it conferred on me would be deemed legitimate by all, and especially the students I'd surpassed.

Here he handily encapsulates the prevailing middle-class liberal attitude toward meritocracy — the secretly but deeply held idea that some people are always better than others, and what's important is finding a "fair" way of determining who's the best. As Kirn points out, the SAT certainly isn't it — the test would have ranked him above Sotomayor, even though she graduated from Princeton with the highest honors while he spent his time there practicing "shoddy, pretentious dodges."

The "cultural biases" Sotomayor mentions are well-documented. Black students, for instance, have historically performed worse on the SAT than white students, perhaps due to entrenched negative stereotypes about black achievement. A disturbing graphic related to this gap went up yesterday at Sociological Images (Gawker found it last year). The graph purports to show which books "make you dumb," by correlating favorite books listed by university students on Facebook with the average SAT scores of their universities. At the high end of the graph — books that purportedly make you smart — are Lolita, A Hundred Years of Solitude, and Crime and Punishment. At the low end are the Bible, Fahrenheit 451 (reading books about burning books make you dumber?) — and The Color Purple, True to the Game, Flyy Girl, The Coldest Winter Ever, and Their Eyes Were Watching God, all by black writers. The graph's methods are totally unscientific, and the readers of the books aren't differentiated by race, but "Books That Make You Dumb" does offer a crude graphical representation of a possible bias in the SAT: people who like books by black writers, whether these books are classics like The Color Purple or more contemporary "urban fiction," seem to do less well on the test.

This supports the notion that the SATs don't really test one's "aptitude" (which Kirn defines as "some quotient of promise and raw mental agility thought to be crucial to academic success and, by extension, success in general"), but rather one's comfort level with a certain dominant (read: white) culture. One solution to this is affirmative action, or, as Kirn states more broadly, periodicially "amending" our "systems that seek to rank human beings according to "merit.'" But maybe the problem is that we have such systems at all. Obviously not everyone should be a judge or a firefighter, and we need some way of making sure people are good at their jobs before we give them power over others' life and liberty. But do we really need a way of determining beforehand who will be good at the job of being a college student? Does our current admissions system, in which the best schools try to pick the best students, before most of them have even taken a college class, really make sense? What would happen if everyone got the same college education?

Of course, educational inequalities start long before college. My brother and I both graduated from the Los Angeles Unified School District, one of the most problem-plagued in the country, but we both got IQ tested at an early age (I was five) so that we could attend well-regarded "magnet" schools. I loved the schools I went to, and I've always assumed that I escaped a lot of nerd-shaming by being in classes with other nerds. But I also (and I'm far from alone in this) suspect that the schools I went to perpetuated existing class and race divisions in LA, and that kids in general might be better off if magnets didn't exist.

Segregating students by ability or by aptitude, at any level, not only presumes that it's possible to perform the segregation fairly, but that there is a reason to do it. Some people argue that the reason is to challenge smart students who might otherwise get bored and not achieve their potential, and this argument has a certain amount of value. But another argument, less often openly articulated but perhaps even more broadly believed, says that good education is a scarce resource, and that we should allocate it to "good" students — because they may make better use of it, but also because they may in some way deserve it more, as Kirn once believed he did. No one deserves better education than anyone else, though, and our methods for determining who will use their education the best are deeply flawed. Isn't it time not only to question how we're testing kids for "merit," but why we're testing them for this at all?

Life, Liberty And The Pursuit Of Aptitude [NYT]
"Dumb" Vs. "Smart" Books [Sociological Images]

Earlier: These Books Will Make You Dumb [Gawker]

While Bess Rattray's essay feels like part of Vogue's conspicuous recent push to run more "serious" content - albeit safely online - it's a piece worth reading. Rattray, like Madonna, has adopted a little girl from Africa. And while this might imply a certain solidarity, Rattray's feelings are ambivalent.

I would like to think that Madonna had pretty much the same motivation I did when I adopted an eleven-month-old girl named Nettie Tesfanesh from Ethiopia a year ago: She wanted a child, and if that child could come from a place where millions of kids live without safe homes and loving arms, well, all the better. Yes, OK, it's always to the greater good when a celebrity adoption gets us talking about Africa's children-so why could the sound of smacked foreheads be heard in multiracial families across America? Because the talk that results when a white Western superstar-sporting an $800 haircut and Parisian safari gear-"rescues" a black child is not usually an enlightening dialogue on AIDS orphans, or how money can best be spent to address poverty. In the hands of the tabloids, it's more like an outtake from Brüno.

In other words, whatever the motivation, these celebrity adoptions run the risk of reducing the act to a fad - or worse, to politicizing the dynamic in ugly ways. And of course, with Madonna, everything's different. It's like, is Madonna a role model for single moms? Is she showing how strong and independent a woman can be, that she's perfectly capable of taking on the challenges of parenting alone? Not really; Madonna has nothing to do with the challenges of the average single mother. Maybe in some contexts, a newly-single woman adopting a child could serve as an empowering example, in Madonna's it's... not. Simply put, no one would think to compare Madonna to other single moms. They will, however, compare her to other white women adopting African children, and while in one sense this is equally unreasonable, in others it's inevitable.

Madonna, Rattray notes, has further muddied the waters by, in both her adoptions of children from Africa, engaging in custody battles with the children's families, further increasing the impression of colonial entitlement that already, inevitably, hangs over the business. Says Rattray,

What is so irksome to workaday adoptive parents like me, is ...why Madonna, who adopted a boy named David to much criticism in 2006, decided to adopt another child from a country that doesn't have an established, transparent adoption system. In reputable adoption countries-which include China, Russia, and South Korea-there are elaborate checks and balances in place to guard against baby-trading and to protect the rights of a child's birth parents.

In contrast, Rattray says her adoption of her daughter, Nettie, was carefully supervised, and requires periodic updates and contact with Nettie's family. The writer finds it frustrating that Madonna's cavalier approach, the seeming ease with which she and Angelina acquire children, serves to trivialize both the seriousness of the process for most parents, and their motivations.

It was important to me to adopt a baby who might otherwise languish in an institution, scramble to stay alive on the streets-or die. People often ask why I didn't adopt in the United States, and, boiled down, my answer is that I wanted an infant, I wanted to go where the need was greatest, and I was open to a child born to a mother infected with HIV. In the States, there are families waiting around the block to adopt healthy infants, while in East Africa, formal foster-care and domestic-adoption systems are more or less unheard of. It's never easy to leap through the flaming hoops of paperwork and bureaucracy, especially as a single parent, but my year-and-a-half journey to motherhood via a remote, coffee-growing hill town called Mudula was relatively smooth, even speedy, in relation to most international adoptions.

Rattray acknowledges, however, that this dynamic will always, to a degree, be fraught. Given the burden of context, it simply is - hence the frustration when a star seems to reduce it even further to cliche. Take last year's controversy surrounding Italian-Brit artist Vanessa Beecroft's work. She says it's art that plays with ideas of colonialism. Critics say it can do this and still be racist. Beecroft says her images of African men in blackface devouring fried chicken, or of herself as a Madonna nursing Sudanese twins, are about reclamation. But there's the inevitable question: can it be "reverse colonialism" when it's still, well, colonialism? Can we get away from the fact that this is a white woman rescuing African babies - and, at the end of the day, does she want us to? Beecroft, who attempted to adopt the little boys, said the process - captured in a documentary film - was (according to the artist's press releases) "not just fetishization of the blacks. It will be a beginning of a relationship with that country." But her high-handed attitude, her patronizing references to "these people" and "these poor creatures" render her easy to dismiss. Said New York in its review of the documentary,

In the film's most disturbing scene, sisters from the orphanage try to stop her from stripping the children nude inside their abbey for an elaborate photo shoot. Beecroft refuses, complains, starts shooting again, and eventually loses a physical confrontation with one of the sisters, who takes the children away from her, furious that Beecroft is stripping children naked inside a church.

As Racialicious's Latoya Peterson sagely puts it, "Her penchant for darkening the features of the models used in her work, the casual disregard for the environment she is in, and even her positioning as a white woman who wants to make the world aware of these issues plays into longstanding issues with neo-colonialism and racism" and that the viewer can see two things:

"1. That she is an artist, interpreting the world as she sees it.

AND

2. That artists can be influenced by racism and colonialism, even as they are trying to make a statement about one of these topics."

And there's the rub. Because anyone is influenced by these things, making a statement or no. And take someone like Bess Rattray. She may not be making the same kind of self-glorifying statement Beecroft is, but by definition, her act is still a statement in itself. What I was struck by, looking at Beecroft's lightning-rod image from The Art Star and The Sudanese Twins was the sheer vulnerability of the babies: they don't know whose breast they're suckling, just that they want nourishment. They don't know that their skin is being used as a contrast to the artist's angelic robes, or that the image is burdened with centuries of context and meaning. And it's this at the end of the day simplifies and complicates everything. And it's pretending that it doesn't, as Rattray knows, that's the problem.

Madonna And Child [Vogue]

Related: The Thin Line Between Art and Explotation [Racialicious]
‘Art Star' Vanessa Beecroft: Slammed at Sundance [New York]