The best of yesterday: Paint, color, race, and the real thing

The best post I read yesterday was written from Siddhartha from Sepia Mutiny titled, “Burnt Cork and Grease.” It is about race and about the media and other producers of culture don't know how to talk about and use false and manufactured images, which focus on superficiality, without getting to the core of the issue. Here is the money quote:

The depiction is of Kate Moss, the decidedly non-black British fashion model and alleged onetime cocaine/heroin fiend, not only blackened but Blackened — bigger lips, thicker brows, fleshier cheeks. “NOT A FASHION STATEMENT,” the headline blares, while an inset on the sidebar promises a poster of the image inside. (...) Though we’ve long had our own backlash against “PC” here in the United States, the prospect of a prominent white actor or model appearing in actual or virtual blackface is, I’d venture to say, more remote. But other communities — whether ethnic, religious, regional — that have not achieved a certain degree of recognition and respect in the US should see this as a cautionary tale. The urge to appropriate, marginalize, and trivialize, with an amazing level of ignorance and insouciance, is apparently built into the workings of our consumer society. Ah, them crazy whitefolks, what will they come up with next?

I agree with Siddhartha for two main reasons. The first is that too often to talk about race, people would rather focus on color and ignore the bigger points about culture and about diversity. The second is that the depiction of Kate Moss painted in black is shocking because of what it says which that all people have to do is to paint their faces in black to understand race and to become black. I have an idea for the Independent the next time for a cover that would actually make people focus on Aids and Africa what about putting on the cover the face of an African dying from aids, what about showing us the real thing instead of trying to cover it with beauty and artificiality. The challenge isn't to clean up the image of the damages of Aids in Africa, but to show them no matter how ugly and disturbing they are.