White Out

When I'm sick, I become obsessive-compulsive, which is so far from my usual behavior that it always comes as a shock to me when I fall into it. A week ago, still feeling miserable but ambulatory, I went to a supermarket for provisions and came home with a copy of Vogue.

This is also far from my usual behavior and I blame it on Serena Williams, fierce, strong, beautiful, and black, gazing at me from the cover. How often do you see a woman with real shoulders on the cover of Vogue? Or more importantly, how often do you see a woman who is truly dark taking that pride of place? (If she's the First Lady, I don't think that counts.)

So because I was suffering from a virus that carried OCD, I began to count how many non-white faces I saw in this particular issue of Vogue. At first glance, there seemed to be quite a few but I wanted to nail down the exact number.

The editorial pages featured women of color but when I began to count, fifty faces were not white, or were of more than one race. And yes I included the Australian singer whose bloodline includes Maori. The remaining eighty-eight faces were pale and Euro-based.

The faces in the advertising pages? Twenty-two were of women of color. Ninety-two were white, very, very white.

So who is buying clothes anyway? Only white women? And of those white women, only those under the age of thirty with milk skin? The reason for the imbalance has to be economic, because Vogue's editorial pages clearly show that beauty comes in all colors. (Only Dolce and Gabbana dared to suggest that it might come in all ages, with their trio of short, stout, old women dressed in black and holding bejeweled handbags.)

A week later, feeling better but not up to full speed, I bought a copy of Vanity Fair. But my point of view was still altered by Vogue. As I flipped through the pages, I realized almost every ad had a white face, very, very white. (None of those faces were the triumvirate pictured by Dolce and Gabbana.)

As an olive-skinned woman, I began to look for anyone who might look like me. I found ten faces that were not pale white, not ten pages--ten faces that were my color or darker. Of those faces, three were African American, and one of those faces was Kerry Washington. Even the damned high-tech sex dolls that were spotlit in one of the articles were all pale white, making me wonder if white is the new fetish.

A buxom Columbian beauty showed quite a bit of her fair skin on Vanity Fair's cover, which is so dominated by cut-lines that the image is no more than wallpaper. But in very small type near the woman's left arm are the words, "If you haven't got it, you can't show it. If you have got it, you can't hide it." In even smaller type is the name of the woman who made that observation--Zora Neale Hurston.