BLACK MODEL: Blair

Blair in June 2012 modeling for
White House Models

"It has long been a fight to be a dark skinned woman in a white world, and the fashion world is no different. Naomi Campbell, the famous model of some notoriety, has often been blasted in the media for her raunchy behavior, and violence towards working people. She doesn't appear in a good light with those court appearances and her defense of her behavior, but what she does in the shadows of her publicity sat me straight up!

She has organized Black models bringing light to the contradictions of the fashion industry's opinions of women of color, and their actions towards darker hued models. She is very clear in her evaluation of the industry talking about the history of inclusiveness in the industry. She points out how long the fashion industry refused to put Black models on the runways, and into designer clothes. When the EBONY fashion fairs started she had to buy the designer's clothes to put on her models in the early years because the whites in the business did not want dark skin on their clothes! Mrs. Johnson of EBONY magazine talked about this also when asked about the history of the EBONY fashion shows. Both women shared a  determination to represent the best of African women in the fashion industry.

Naomi Campbell speaks clearly. I learned from listening to her how dark women were employed, and what they enjoyed in terms of success until the industry grew tired of them, and began to substitute dark hued women for "exotic" women who were either tanned white women with botox lips, or of mixed heritages or from the Mediterranean area, or Brazil with its color dynamics. Naomi Campbell says, the fight for equality in her field is ongoing, and full of pitfalls, and trickery as the designers, and players play politics with the issue. With millions of Africans throughout the Diaspora acting out their wishes to be white, and the millions of Asian, and Arabian women and men who ache to be white there will be no outcry to influence racial change within the fashion industry. But in actuality the yearning of white women to have the attributes of African women is the most astounding jolt to the assumptions of the practice of not including dark African women as models in the industry! Iranian women have the highest number of nose jobs in the world trying to create the white noses of European women with a backdrop of a horrible history with Europe and the United States. The numbers of women of color who buy  their hair from a Korean run business know and don't care and worse, don't see the contradictions of buying hair from India.

When India fought and won her independence from England the British were so enraged they took everything they built from the the Indians, even the bolts! It left the country prostrate with poverty.  As old and revered as the spirituality of India is their caste system heaps the darkest people on the bottom with shit, and the maxim Indians hold, the world over, against dark people is very clear and in the open. They practice and believe it is OK, but not preferred, to marry a white man, but under no circumstance an African, or Black American man. But Africans and Black Americans don't care about those contradictions or how it impacts esteem. We enjoy being able to sit with and eat with and imitate white people to get along and hold jobs. Some Blacks will say it is survival, but is it? Some Whites have argued it is progress; a mixing of cultures, but is it? Bouncing back and forth is a ball; a roundness to the centerpiece of identity, and each group suffers from a crisis of identity.

Not only is this industry fickle the followers are fickle, and full of crippling fears." - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 8. 29. 12

Blair