What Are You Looking At?
Over on Multicultclassics, a nice example of the most overused African-American stock image in the ‘families’ category. I believe these two were also on a United Way poster recently. This is not a critique of the models, by the way, but of the advertisers and marketers who chose those models, and who appear to have one ‘go-to’ black image, one which incorporates very, very light skinned people as representative of African-Americans, and is comfortable with representing an AA family as one with a child and one female parent. I notice more and more lately, especially after reading excerpts of model Alek Wek’s recently released autiobiography, how oddly African-Americans are portrayed, especially in American advertising and marketing communications, and I can’t help but wonder how we all internalize that representation. Wek made the cover of Elle magazine in November 1997, and at the time that was considered a very daring choice, since the traditional assumption about covers is that magazines with dark-skinned models sell fewer copies than covers with caucasian or light-skinnned models. Think about that for a moment - in 1997, it was considered a daring move to put a woman with dark skin on the cover of an American magazine. In 1997.