I understand that there are PC-minded folks who are eager to seize on any comment and call it racism. But we don't have to be so politically correct that we have to pretend we don't see what can be hard to ignore.
Every black person in America knows what Lindy just said is true. Not only is it true, but most like it like that.
" When a girl walks in with an itty bitty waist
And a round thing in your face
....
Take the average black man and ask him that
She gotta pack much back"
Sir MixALot
More "racist attacks" on Michelle's butt follow - ALL of them from black women:
Women Celebrate Michelle Obama's Beauty...And Booty
.....
Nia1999 I'm a Fan of Nia1999 permalink
I didn't think the article was offensive at all. As a 49 year old African American and theatre costume designer, the article is just touching on a little fashion history. I was made to wear a girdle since I was about 9 years old because my grandmother and mother said my behind was starting to shake when I walked. Back then it was not proper for a young lady's behind to shake. It meant you were loose and bought attention to your business. Working in the costume shop, a lot the clothes come from wealthy donor. When doing period plays like the 40's or 50's, many of the women (specifically white women) back then wore size 2 to 5. When I had to do "A Raisin in the Sun" (1950's), the character Lena played by an actress today costume had to be made because the dresses we had for that period was too small or too tight around the rear end. So the article is a matter of historical fact. Even today, the model who walk down the runways does not reflect the average female measurements black or white. So, no the article was not offensive.
southernsepia I'm a Fan of southernsepia permalink
They don't get it because they've never BJWB - bought jeans while Black.
Ugonna I'm a Fan of Ugonna permalink
I have to say that there is a difference between white women's butts, and women of colors's butts. There just is. Equal doesn't mean we're the same. Just like hair texture and skin color, there are other differences. Black women's big butts tend to stick high up, there's a distinct curve between the back and butt area when we turn sideways. I know, mine definitely stands out. A white woman's big butt tends to be more about how "wide" it is. A flat butt could be wide, but its not what women of colour talk about when they say "big butt". I could be stepping into controversy here, but I'm bein honest.
Ugonna I'm a Fan of Ugonna permalink
I liked this article. It was not offensive in the least. She makes black women with big butts feel good about themselves, and that's positive.
ArmyCentrist I'm a Fan of ArmyCentrist permalink
Spot ON! The African rear end has been a delightful curse for me all my life! From the time I was a child, my uptight upper middle class Creole family did everything they could to obscure my beautiful behind, thinking I could never truly be a lady with a "Black girl butt". Well Grandmere, the most classy Black woman I've ever seen is now First Lady, and butts are BACK! I'm going to the grocery store in my Pilates gear (betcha I get more stares from 50+ White guys than anyone else...can you say "Strom Thurmond?")
huffingtonpost.com
First lady got back
I'm a black woman who never thought I'd see a powerful, beautiful female with a body like mine in the White House. Then I saw Michelle Obama -- and her booty!
AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall
Michelle Obama waves to the crowd at the Democratic convention in Denver on Aug. 25, 2008.
Nov. 18, 2008 | Free at last. I never thought that I -- a black girl who came of age in the utterly anticlimactic aftermath of the civil rights movement -- would say the phrase with any real sincerity in my lifetime. But ever since Nov. 4, I've been shouting it from every rooftop. I'm not excited for the most obvious reason. Yes, Obama's win was an extraordinary breakthrough and a huge relief, but I don't subscribe to the notion that his capturing the White House represents the end of American racial history. Far from it. There is a certain freedom in the moment -- as in, we are all now free from wondering when or if we'll ever get a black president. Congratulations to all of us for being around to settle the question.
But what really thrills me, what really feels liberating in a very personal way, is the official new prominence of Michelle Obama. Barack's better half not only has stature but is statuesque. She has coruscating intelligence, beauty, style and -- drumroll, please -- a butt. (Yes, you read that right: I'm going to talk about the first lady's butt.)
What a bonus! From the ocean of nastiness and confusion that defined this campaign from the beginning, Michelle rose up like Venus on the waves, keeping her coif above water and cruising the coattails of history to present us with a brand-new beauty norm before we knew it was even happening.
Actually, it took me and a lot of other similarly configured black women by surprise. So anxious and indignant were we about Michelle getting attacked for saying anything about America that conservatives could turn into mud, we hardly looked south of her neck. I noted her business suits and the fact she hardly ever wore pants (unlike Hillary). As I gradually relaxed, as Michelle strode onto more stages and people started focusing on her clothes and presence instead of her patriotism, it dawned on me -- good God, she has a butt! "Obama’s baby (mama) got back," wrote one feminist blogger. "OMG, her butt is humongous!" went a typical comment on one African-American online forum, and while it isn't humongous, per se, it is a solid, round, black, class-A boo-tay. Try as Michelle might to cover it with those Mamie Eisenhower skirts and sheath dresses meant to reassure mainstream voters, the butt would not be denied.
As America fretted about Obama's exoticism and he sought to calm the waters with speeches about unity and common experience, Michelle's body was sending a different message: To hell with biracialism! Compromise, bipartisanship? Don't think so. Here was one clear signifier of blackness that couldn't be tamed, muted or otherwise made invisible. It emerged right before our eyes, in the midst of our growing uncertainty about everything, and we were too bogged down in the daily campaign madness to notice. The one clear predictor of success that the pundits, despite all their fancy maps, charts and holograms, missed completely? Michelle's butt.
Lord knows, it's time the butt got some respect. Ever since slavery, it's been both vilified and fetishized as the most singular of all black female features, more unsettling than dark skin and full lips, the thing that marked black women as uncouth and not quite ready for civilization (of course, it also made them mighty attractive to white men, which further stoked fears of miscegenation that lay at the heart of legal and social segregation). In modern times, the butt has demarcated class and stature among black society itself. Emphasizing it or not separates dignified black women from ho's, party girls from professionals, hip-hop from serious. (Black women are not the only ones with protruding behinds, by the way, but they're certainly considered its source. How many gluteally endowed nonblack women have been derided for having a black ass? Well, Hillary, for one.)
But Michelle is bringing those two falsely divided minds together in a single presentation -- finally, unity for the real world! Talk about a power base. Thanks to Michelle, looking professional and provocative in a distinctly black way will become not only acceptable but also part of a whole presidential look that's more, well, inclusive. Now we'll all be able to wear leggings to board meetings; we'll sport pencil skirts sans the long jackets meant to cover the offending rear at big conferences where we have to make a good impression. It turns out that Sir Mix-A-Lot, he of "Baby Got Back" fame, was not a novelty but a prophet. Who knew? Give that guy a Cabinet post.
•
RELATED STORIES
Back is beautiful
Does the public's embrace of Jennifer Lopez's abundant butt signal a cultural revolution -- or simply the triumph of watered-down multiculturalism?
Erin J. Aubry
The momification of Michelle Obama
The next first lady is an accomplished lawyer. But with the media focused on her clothes and family, Bamalot is starting to look a lot like Camelot.
By Rebecca Traister
salon.com
Back is beautiful
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DOES THE PUBLIC'S EMBRACE OF JENNIFER LOPEZ'S ABUNDANT BUTT SIGNAL A CULTURAL REVOLUTION -- OR SIMPLY THE TRIUMPH OF WATERED-DOWN MULTICULTURALISM?
BY ERIN J. AUBRY | If I had any doubts about the ascendancy of Jennifer Lopez's butt, they were put to rest during a recent stroll through a New York City airport. After arming myself with magazines to while away the three hours until flight time, I sat down and began with Vanity Fair. There, in the middle of a long narrative about the Reagans, dropped as coyly as a handkerchief, was a photo spread of Lopez. Its point of impact -- detonation, to be more exact -- was a shot of her from behind in which she peeked over one shoulder, clad in nothing but mules and a pair of old-fashioned briefs that rode strategically up over a high, rounded butt.
Being a black woman with a similar (all right, bigger) endowment, I felt an odd mixture of pride and panic. Was this a passing Hollywood fancy or a giant step for butt-kind? A racially steeped fetish wrapped in the glitter of celebritude, one of the chief bibles of which is Vanity Fair? Would my own butt, which I have alternately embraced and lamented and written about extensively as a metaphor for tortuously unrealized black assimilation in America, finally get its aesthetic props? Would James Brown be called out of retirement to record a '90s version of his signature new-social-order anthem titled "Say It Loud, I Got Back and I'm Proud"?
The short answer is it's far too early to tell. While the reviews of Lopez in her latest film have been wildly enthusiastic -- the L.A. Weekly rhapsodized bluntly about her "spectacular ass," the more restrained New Yorker dubbed her a bona fide "voluptuary" -- I reserve suspicions that folks are merely effusing over the appearance of a young actress in a romantic lead who isn't blond and/or appears to live entirely on Slim-Fast. But from where I sit -- and from what I sit on -- Lopez's butt, while certainly one to be admired, is of entirely modest proportions. I went to see "Out of Sight" with a woman friend who turned to me as the final credits were running and said, looking rather bewildered, "Where was the butt here? What in the world are you going to write about?"
It was a good question. The movie was clever enough, but the heralded butt of its co-star, the current buzz of the industry and the alleged bellwether for better sexpot trends to come, was itself notably out of sight. Oh, it was evident in flashes -- a couple of side-view shots that threw it into startling relief and prompted a woman in the predominantly black audience to exclaim, with more confused alarm than admiration, "Sto-oo-oo-op!" No need for concern; Lopez in this movie is more worrywart than bombshell, ultimately another do-good woman who spends most of her time fretting about how to save an imperiled love interest. For all the butt brouhaha, Lopez is tightly reined in, and her shrink-wrap outfits are less sexualizing than symbolic of how limited her movement is before the camera. Hollywood may acknowledge the butt this time out, but it is still mightily uncertain about the crossover appeal of its owner.
Of course, Lopez's butt is more acceptable than most because, like Halle Berry and many other women who date back to Lena Horne and long before, she appears racially ambiguous and therefore is more palatable to white audiences, a safe vehicle with which to indulge a café au lait fantasy. A pale face with a black butt is intriguing, titillating, as any reflection of a racial mélange has always been in this country; a black face with a black butt has always been worse than ordinary.
BACK IS BEAUTIFUL | PAGE 1, 2
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It's ironic that Lopez is obliged to walk a tightrope here. In her breakout role as Tex-Mex singer Selena Quintanilla in the biopic "Selena," the actress was not only thoroughly Latina, she was cast in part because her Puerto Rican heritage afforded her an ample butt -- one of the late Selena's defining physical characteristics (although Lopez still had to be padded to round out the picture). Her butt was shown to great effect in "Selena," but unfortunately the teenage abandon of that film is replaced in "Out of Sight" by a noir dourness that serves the butt not at all. Watching Lopez as Karen Sisko, sitting in a hotel bar, dressed in a turtleneck and hunched grimly over a drink, I found myself wishing she would leap up and break into "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom."
Not that I think that all Latin types should keep a set of maracas handy in case of an ethnic emergency, but I swear it felt like Lopez was doing the old passe blanc. If her butt was out of the closet, she wasn't -- she moved in an entirely white world (dad, boyfriend, would-be lover). It's a familiar enough situation to many folks of color, but that doesn't mean we forsake our cultural selves or completely ignore the tension inherent in living a split-screen existence. I may be asking Steven Soderbergh ("Sex, Lies and Videotape") for too much here, but what is he if not a director of story and nuance? And once again, the most vicious criminals were black or otherwise colored (Don Cheadle, Luis Guzmán) while the most virtuous outlaws were white (George Clooney, Stephen Zahn, Albert Brooks). In the old black/white, good/evil dichotomy, Lopez really had no choice.
I don't want all of this to sound too much like a complaint, or sour grapes. It's gratifying to know that the moviegoing public may be more enamored at this point of Jennifer Lopez's natural fleshiness than of Demi Moore's surgically enhanced breasts. At the very least, the prominence of Lopez's butt is a crucial bit of redress for Hollywood's long history of mangling ethnic sexuality or ignoring it outright. Movies have passed over many a sho-nuff butt, and when it does let one out for the day, it tends to do so clownishly, pornographically -- think witless "urban" comedies like "Booty Call," "B.A.P.S.," "How to be a Player" (or the white version, "Bulworth"). The paltry few black leading ladies who have managed to avoid such poor script choices are consigned to the opposite extreme, to a kind of ennobled frigidity that Whoopi Goldberg and Angela Bassett have perfected over the years. Too bad, because Bassett, to say nothing of her butt, deserves better. I don't ascribe to many conspiracy theories, but this industry practice of presenting black women as either pieces of ass or completely asexual -- thereby denying them an essential part of Hollywood allure -- is too concerted to chalk up to coincidence.
But, thanks to Elmore Leonard, the pattern may be breaking; we actually had a taste of butt liberation last Christmas with "Jackie Brown." Pam Grier is much more kick-butt than Lopez in her turn as a Leonard heroine. Grier is an unapologetically black woman who bristles with a languid intelligence, while her butt (and bust) is eagerly showcased by Grier admirer Quentin Tarantino. Lopez's sexuality, in contrast, is cautious and done-up in "Out of Sight." While you can practically see the hovering shadow of a stylist in all of her shots, ensuring that a tendril of auburn-tinted hair falls at just the right angle across her manicured brow, you get the sense that Grier picked all her clothes, blue collars and all, bought her own cigarettes by the carton, did her hair daily over a bathroom sink.
Grier's relaxed presence is far more visceral: The opening shot of "Jackie Brown," which simply follows the actress as she wends her way through an airport in stewardess garb, is much more sensual than the shot of Lopez leaning over a car trunk in a tight skirt, butt literally in our faces, straining to ask us, "Ain't I something?" The comparison might seem a little unfair: Grier is older than Lopez by a generation and has had ample experience in the zowie action flicks in which she learned, if nothing else, to put her tongue in cheek and let the devil take hindmost.
Hollywood made little of Grier's reappearance, partly because of her age but mostly because the industry has always considered black sexuality -- real sexuality, not the rap-video variety that is rooted, ironically, in the '70s blaxploitation films with which Grier is identified -- a conundrum. Grier, as far as the business is concerned, despite all evidence to the contrary, had no butt. Steeliness, cool, pecuniary troubles, other hallmarks of put-upon black women, yes; sexiness, longing, a prediliction for romance, no (a shame, as Grier had all these qualities in abundance). And don't even talk to me about romance-novel pabulum like "Waiting to Exhale."
The problem with "Out of Sight" is that Lopez is granted a butt, but it is undone by the fact that her character is so ethnically neutral. The industry is so busy congratulating itself for mainstreaming a possibly African-descended Latina, for putting a body type up front that is not a Gwyneth Paltrow slat, that it fails to allow Lopez anything else of interest. Many people will argue that this movie is at least a triumph of multiculturalism -- a term that denotes little more than a fuzzy, New Age racism parading around in the sheep's clothing of progress. Divorced from its native attitude, this butt lacks bite.
SALON | July 15, 1998
Erin J. Aubry is a staff writer at L.A. Weekly.
salon.com |
