Really? Because I recognize some of the black names, but honestly, none of the white names.
And I’m white myself. Presumably, I watch different movies than you.
Well, if Vanity Fair had a cover devoted to a Niggers Are Stupid campaign that would be racist. The absence of a black face is too trivial to even consider, unless you really have nothing else to complain about. And even then, exactly how is said absence demeaning to black people?
You want to know what’s racist? Countless rap songs that glorify the gangster lifestyle. Now that’s demeaning.
Then call it “unconscious bias” but I view that as a euphemism. It not done out of a desire to deliberately hold a group down, or from hatred, or from fear, but rather because the person has a standard that winds up excluding people who aren’t white. If every “up and coming actress” featured by Vanity Fair is a skinny white girl with blond hair then you really have to wonder WTF is up. The effect it to favor one group over another even if there is no deliberate, conscious motive to exclude someone else. Usually done by people who have black friends and do like some aspects of black culture, who might well be kind to all children, curteous to all adults, and who give money to help post-earthquake Haitians but who nonetheless regard their own kind as the default of “human” and everyone else as a qualified version of that - a white actress is just “an actress” but a black actress, no matter how lauded, will always be qualified as a black actress even when her skin color has zero to do with the conversation or topic at hand. Or an Indian actress or a Latin actress, but none of the non-white women are ever referred to as just an actress, just as the white actress never has the modifer “white” associated with her.
It’s not that this ONE photo shoot happens to have no non-whites – it’s that 10 pages of Vanity Fair covers on Google and there are NO non-white women anywhere on any of their covers. Seriously, there has NEVER been a non-white woman worthy of gracing their cover ever? Maybe there has been - I’m not a regular reader - but like I said, 10 pages on a Google search and no sign of one. That’s a little… odd to my mind.
If Vanity Fair had a history of featuring even an occasional black woman on their cover it would be a different story - it could just be the luck of the draw, so to speak, that every up and coming starlet this year was a stick-thin blond-haired waif - but the lack of any women who isn’t white is, to my eyes, glaring.
Why should it be incumbent on them to put a non-white woman on the cover just to placate your desire for niceness and poly role modeldom?
If the editors didn’t feel that there were any non-white up-and-coming actresses (not that I agree or disagree) you think they ought to have just thrown a non-white on there just to satisfy some sort of quota?
That’s racist.
p.s. as for Zoe Seldana, the fact that she was a big blue CGI alien for her largest role to-date doesn’t do anything to help advance the notion that she’s an up-and-coming actress. like a voice actress.
You mean… like this one?. Oh, wait, that’s Oprah at Home or something, maybe that doesn’t count. OK, how about this Oprah cover? And this one and here and here. Granted, they’re all Oprah and Ellen but hey, Oprah puts a white woman on her magazine cover more often than Vanity Fair puts a woman other than white on their cover, so…
… um, your point was supposed to be what?
A data point: I, who don’t watch many movies, have heard of precisely one of these white actresses, that one being Evan Rachel Wood, and the only reason I’ve heard of her is that the name caught my eye while browsing through a newspaper one day, and I wondered whether it was a her with a man’s first name or a him with a woman’s middle name. Mystery solved.
Now, I’m hardly Vanity Fair’s target demographic, I suspect [typed “demongraphic” first…kinda like that, actually], so the fact that I’m essentially 0 for 9 on these folks probably doesn’t mean a thing. Still, I’m with the people on the board who’ve concluded that this is unconscious bias. We are not talking about people who are known by everyone.
You know, fuck this noise. You aren’t thinking. You’re angry before it even occurs to you to consider the argument.
Halfway through the OP I wouldn’t have thought anything of the Vanity Fair cover. White people are famous, same old shit. The comparisons to Ebony, followed by the obviously factually ridiculous claims that the white girls were objectively more worthy than Zoe Saldana, and now this total non sequitur about gangsta rap in a post that also takes convenient advantage of the hyperbolic-use ‘nigger’ exception, and I’m starting to feel pretty good about the argument in the other direction.
First of all, if you don’t get that a magazine primarily for and about black people is different from Vanity Fair, there are a lot of things you need to learn about the world you live in. If you don’t understand that physical attractiveness is not the same as worthiness to play in a professional sports league, well. I don’t believe you. I think that you are being reactionary because you’re hypersensitive to even the suggestion that racism might exist and not be incredibly overt and violent.
Second, it’s not like Vanity Fair just had a cover with a bunch of white girls on it - I’m sure they do that a lot, and 9 isn’t exactly conclusive statistical proof of bias. But this:
just comes right out and states - baldly - that fucking looking like a member of the ruling class is important among the attributes that make these women special. If you don’t think that’s worth thinking about, you don’t like thinking. That is the name of your problem.
Now, please, Contrapuntal. Explain to me what gangsta rap has to do with anything. Anything at all.
Jesus christ, is it that offensive to you all to be asked to think about something?
Wait…what?
Only women count? http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y279/NrllAless/blog/news/covergirls/vanity-fair-africa-brad-pitt.jpg
Look, they also pick only white bears: http://www.thestranger.com/blog/files/2007/03/knut%20polar%20bear%20cub%20german%20vanity%20fair.jpg
I’m not remotely angry. I’m overjoyed that the search racism has been reduced to investigating magazine covers for proper white/black ratios.
I’ll cop to the gangster rap reference but the rest of that is on someone else.
Again you seem to have confused me with someone else. Maybe it’s you who are angry, and that anger has clouded your vision.
Are you having a bad day? I’m not hypersensitive to anything.
I grew up during the civil rights era. I marched in civil rights marches. I have lost jobs and friends defending the rights of black people to be free from racism. And a bunch of white chicks on a magazine cover is not a pimple on the butt of racism.
Some people are just looking to be offended.
They are fucking actresses man! Christ in heaven! Ruling class?
It’s an example of real racism; i.e. behavior that demeans or denigrates a class or ethnic group.
Oh, I’ve thought about it. White chicks on a magazine cover are to racism what … hell, I don’t know what. It’s too silly to even find try to find a comparison.
You know, people think in images. We’re awfully good at connecting words with pictures. If I say “surfer,” a picture springs to mind, and it ain’t of a short black guy with gray hair. If I say “plumber,” you don’t think of Angelina Jolie. If I say “handsome,” I don’t suppose anybody out there instantly sees a picture of Yogi Berra pop into their minds.
I don’t really follow the careers of movie actors, but I do follow baseball pretty closely. It would be insane to write an article called “Nine up-and-coming baseball players” and have all 9 be white guys: there are too many objectively great black and Hispanic players for that to fly, and nobody would even try. It would be ridiculous. Our images of a “really good” baseball player for those of us tuned in to that don’t encompass only whites; we’ve seen too many Henry Aarons, Albert Pujolses, Bob Gibsons, and Roberto Alomars for that to make sense. (It helps that ballplayers have stats, too.)
BUT you COULD write an article called “9 Players who would make great managers” or “9 Really Smart Ballplayers” or “9 Guys Who Always Play Real Hard,” and those categories would be less statistically-based, and I would not be surprised if someone did that and came up with 9 white guys. Not because black players don’t play hard, or because Asians wouldn’t make good managers, or because Dominicans and Venezuelans aren’t “smart,” but because many fans and writers and perhaps particularly announcers have an image of a player who IS smart, who WOULD make a good manager, who DOES play hard, and that image is of a white guy. It’s an image of Cal Ripken, not Robbie Alomar, of David Wright, not Jose Reyes, of Greg Maddux, not Dontrelle Willis. It’s an image of that Bo-Hart/Rex-Hudler utilityman type, the little guy who maybe doesn’t have all that much talent, but man does he play hard…who incidentally or not so incidentally is almost always white.
Is that racist? On the one hand, no. I suspect that if you pointed it out to the announcers who say this kind of thing all the time, they’d be offended that you thought they might be prejudiced. I suspect they’d bring up a few guys like Joe Morgan and Ozzie Smith and Cito Gaston, who are justly celebrated for their intelligence/managerial smarts/etc. And I suspect they’re not knowingly racist. I just think it’s really easy to fall into the trap of thinking of Pete Rose or Cal Ripken as the archetype, or that little guy who runs the bases so well…and then whether you know it or not, you start defining your candidates for smartest/most managerial/plays hardest on the basis of how closely they match that image you’ve got, and by golly that image includes light skin. And it takes some thinking and recalibrating to view it differently.
And I submit that this is what’s going on with that cover. An up-and-coming young actress, in the eyes of the folks who write and edit Vanity Fair, is…white. They all are. That’s just the way it is. That’s the image they have, and no one else needs to apply. Racist? Not consciously, okay. But de facto racist thinking all the same.
Which is a fact that you made up to be overjoyed about, unless the idea that there is such a thing as a matter of degree is something you’ve never considered before, in which case let me present you with the idea that some things can be really incredibly overtly racist, and some other things can be mildly and quietly racist, and that pointing out a case of the latter says nothing about the eradication of the former.
Stay right there a sec.
I’m obviously referencing posts in this thread that you didn’t make. Maybe you shouldn’t be taking them personally. Like maybe you’re being hypersensitive or something.
… oh, are they actresses? Well that settles that!
That is what the word patrician means, isn’t it? What did they actually mean by it when they chose to include it, then? Magazine editors and writers don’t usually choose descriptors at random, as far as I know.
What did it have to do with anything? Magazine covers can’t be racist because Coo Coo Cal talks about guns and drugs, that was your point? Gangsta rap is racist, so don’t worry about whether entertainment and culture magazines prop up unrealistic and harmful ideals? The only possible value anybody could have gotten from the insertion of that particular, well, counterpoint, into the discussion at that juncture was that racism is now the providence of the blacks, so leave the white magazine alone.
And it’s great that you marched for civil rights and all that, really. Good for you. You are currently staking out the kneejerk reactionary position that nothing can possibly be racially charged if it involves the choice of which women go on a magazine cover. In this little corner of the internet, for the one-millionth of a percent of our lives that it will require, that is the issue we’re talking about, and your stance is an absurd one. Again, good work on the marching, not so much with the gangsta rap.
Gods yes. Scrappy white guys. I can’t remember who pointed that out to me fifteen or so years back, that white guys always get the “smart” or “hard working” or “scrappy” monikers, while black players are “talented” or “effortless” or “naturals.”
My point, which apparently zoomed over your head, is that my post was a joke poking fun at Oprah for sticking her mug on the cover of her own magazine repeatedly. It tied in with the discussion of decisions made regarding cover model choices.
You did see the big green smiley-guy, didn’t you?
So lighten up, Girlfriend. 
Fire Joe Morgan did yeoman work keeping track of the grinder/gamer/scrapper obsession.
It’s hilarious to me that the last post was about Casey Blake, former Scrappy White Guy of the Cleveland Indians who had some sort of secret love affair with Eric Wedge (it might have been the beard), or maybe not-so-secret since Blake, all scrappy-like, blocked the progress of Andy Marte for quite some time. Marte, you see, isn’t scrappy. AT ALL.
Do you know why I’m sitting at a desk? So I can bang my head on it.
It may be racist. It certainly seems to be ageist, sexist, and anti-plus size.
It does seem to me that someone who has had roles in two major films could be considered hot material instead of “up and coming” though.
Where are the “up and coming” thirty year olds and over? Laura Linney seems to have a really great career going for her and she is in her mid forties. Who says that you have to be under 30 to have a career?
I don’t get why talking about an issue like this means racism must be dead because it’s obviously unimportant. I don’t think that this particular magazine is the be all and end all to racism. But as Anaamika alluded to earlier, it kind of adds up. As someone who’s grown up non white in a white culture, it does get kind of annoying–white, blonde, etc.=attractive. Blonde white dolls, actresses in movies, models on billboards, magazines…everywhere. And once in a while you get a token, but the mainstream is what it is. And I think if you’re white, you take it for granted that everyone around you, everyone in the media, looks just like you.
And you see non white people, or anyone for that matter, questioning this and to you it’s just so much whining because who cares? To you, racism is overt oppressive stuff. The stuff you can relate to. This is just so far outside your realm of experience that it doesn’t even register to you.
Now, I do agree that sometimes it goes too far in the opposite direction. I don’t think EVERY movie, book, or ad is something that represents deep entrenched patriarchy, sometimes a spade is a spade, etc. I don’t know if this particular cover is racist, but I do agree that there definitely is this bias. And it’s just something that most white people don’t think about.
It reminds me a lot of Toni Morrison’s the Bluest Eye–where the (black) character Claudia talks about her hatred for the beautiful white baby dolls that she’s given and for Shirley Temple and all little white girls, because everyone–even black women–are telling her that that’s how you’re beautiful. And if you’re a little black girl, the closest you can hope for is to be light skinned or mixed–otherwise, you’re just out. No, stuff like this isn’t racism in the same way as obvious topics like slavery or lynchings or voting rights. But I think it is important to acknowledge that so many people feel unacceptable or ugly or invisible because of what the culture presents.
That’s nonsense. Of course there is racism without malice. There are people who simply think that blacks are not as intelligent as white people are. One of the kids I grew up with is now a school teacher and she feels this way. I was rather horrified when she told me that the black kids on her class just couldn’t learn and she felt sorry for them. She doesn’t hate them, she simply believes they’re inferior.
This isn’t at all to say that the VF cover has anything to do with this, so I suppose this is a hijack. But you’re just flat out wrong. If not, what term would you use to describe such people?
It just occurred to me that this whole thing reminds me very much of a story about the movie Eraser that my con law professor used to illustrate a point. The producer gave an interview about casting Vanessa Williams:
And that’s the point at which the weaklings among us, looking for something to get offended about, start to complain, right, but all he said was ‘mainstream,’ which could mean anything. Same as this magazine cover; how do we have any idea what the standards were? Except in the case of Vanessa Williams, he went on:
Not that it’s a perfect analogue for the magazine cover (and obviously she got the part so he wasn’t out to prove anything), but I think it’s very common that somebody gives the first part of that explanation and omits the second. The thing that’s interesting is that he came right out and said it. It’s fair enough to say that this one guy’s viewpoint can’t fairly be attributed to everyone in the world, but then if he hadn’t stepped right up and owned it it would never be attributed to him, either.
If the default for a leading lady is white, and you have to actually “think about going” any different direction, at what point is it fair to call that institutionalized racism?