Beyoncé Knowles has been lambasted for looking Caucasian.
The singer has just released her newest promotional ad for her album 4.
Beyoncé’s bright blond hair and bleached eyebrows in the promo are simply too blanch for some critics.
“I think in a lot of ways [Beyoncé is] culpable because there’s history there,” founder of blog ThisIsYourConscience.com Lincoln Anthony Blades told the Daily News. “She’s not saying explicitly you have to lighten your skin, but it does carry that inherent message.”
Beyoncé has been criticized before for looking like a white girl. In a 2008 ad for cosmetics company L’Oréal, the singer’s skin appeared abnormally light.
Filmmaker D. Channsin Berry who helmed Dark Girls, a documentary exploring discrimination faced by dark-skinned black women, thinks the singer’s neutralized ethnicity is a requisite for successful marketing.
“[Beyoncé is] doing what she needs to do to be accepted worldwide and keep those sponsors happy,” D. contends.
Skin color in the black American community has been a contentious issue since early members of the African diaspora crunched their feet in the dirt of the state of Virginia in the 17th century.
Mixed race house Negroes got to serve the master in the comfort of his Deep South Confederate mansion while the plantation’s darkies were bloodying their hands picking cotton in the grueling heat outside.
An obsolete dialogue that still rages without addressing the issue.
Who are black Americans?
The descendants of African tribesman, Native American tribesman, European slave owners. Partially, in between and wholly all of these.
What is being whitewashed? Were the first members of the African diaspora not sanitized of their heritage when slave owners ripped tongues from the mouth at the sound of a native utterance?
America has been bleached since the Indians dwindled from small pox.
Now, with tanning beds at the peak of popularity, there is an opportunity to change the hue of pop culture.
Blackwash: bust out the Sharpie.
