What Pictures Can’t Tell You…

Glamour, in response to the thunderous applause they received for the photos of Lizzie Miller, seems to be putting out a calendar using this photo of some “plus-sized” women:

I will give the criticism where it is due. I am irked that these women are considered “plus sized”, because I think that they are probably closer to the representation of the average size of women than the majority of cover models that we see. They are certainly not what I am going to say “normal” or “average”, because I have learned in the last years that these labels have just as much harm as they have the intended good that people try to put behind them. Maybe more. Also, if this photo is trying to be representative of diversity, it does fail to hit that mark in its exclusion of differently abled bodies. I am not surprised by these oversights. I don’t want anyone storming down into my comment demanding that the fashion industry as a whole eat a sandwich…

One critique that I did find that I want to expand upon was over at Renee’s blog:

They have one Black woman in this photo spread, sporting straightened hair and she represents their attempt at inclusivity.  Putting one Black woman in amongst a crowd of White women, only serves to other and create her as exotic.   News Flash:  There is more to WOC than Black women.  I suppose all of the first nations and Asian women were in hiding and steadfastly refused to pose the day this image was taken.   Diversity means adding various WOC instead of promoting the White women as the representative of beauty.

With no disrespect to Renee, because I do have a lot of respect for her: This photo is definitely heavy on the light skin and blonde hair collective, that is for sure. And I am going to say, yes, I would like to see more brown, red, and other bodies represented in mainstream modeling. Something, however, always irks me when this type of narrative comes up. We don’t know, in today’s world, by looking at a photo or representation of a person what their racial or ethnic identity is. I can only speak from a USian perspective, but our country has had a great and proud history of whitewashing people’s heritage. Native American and First Nation tribes have had their people systematically married off with white folk, either to civilize them or make them more religiously appropriate, to the point where there are almost no blood lines that are not at least half European anymore. In other words, you won’t know by looking at a person if they are in fact Native. There is a damn good reason why many people who identify as Native or who have the government sanctioned appropriate amount of Native blood in their veins might look European. I am not going to get into all of them, again. I’m tired. I’ll give you all a moment to work that one out for yourselves.

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I feel that I know what point Renee was trying to make (without saying “what she meant to say” because I would never presume to do so), that it would be nice if we had more people in mainstream modeling who looked more obviously like stereotypical representations of different racial groups. Some color would be nice. But I can’t even say I agree with that, because I have such a hard time agreeing that someone needs to look X in order to represent it. Being bi-racial or mixed race is such a hard thing to be, because you never quite feel like you belong in any one group, and no one else is really like you, so who do you belong to? We all talk about how we want to see someone who looks like us represented on the television, but for most mixed race people, there isn’t anyone. If we embrace one aspect of it, we don’t look Native enough, or they don’t look the right kind of Asian, her eyes aren’t slanted enough, or his features are too European, or they are too white…

Race isn’t just black and white, brown, red, or yellow. Mostly it is a spectrum and everything in between now — especially in melting pot areas like North America. Honestly I can’t get into some of this anymore without feeling dismissed. I want to discuss race issues, and be open to these kinds of dialogue… but every time I feel like my own personal identity is fading into the background. I too want to see more representations of people of color, especially WoC, but I get hesitant to bring up the lack because I don’t want to assume that everyone who isn’t obviously First Nation or Latin@ or Asian is white. I don’t want to inflict that hurt of erasure on other people that I feel every damn time race comes up in Bloglandia.

Incidentally, one of the women in that photograph looks an awful lot like me. Enough that she could be related to me, on my mother’s side.