White model. Facepaint. African animals. Shot by Steven Meisel and starring Dutch model Saskia de Brauw, a fashion story titled "Abracadabra" in the March 2014 issue of Vogue Italia feels sadly familiar and offensive.
Since the '80s and early-'90s days of Christie, Barbie's black friend, Mattel has tried to repair the damage done to young African-American girls' self-image with 2009's So In Style line of African-American Barbies with "fuller noses" and "fuller lips" rather than simply choosing a brown shade of plastic and using the…
One of my favorite sitcoms of all time is "A Different World," the "Cosby Show" spin-off series that followed the lives of students at Hillman College, a fictional historically black college located in Virginia. Though the series had a slow first season, "A Different World" ultimately managed to captivate audiences…
