Thursday, September 3, 2009

Why Time Doesn’t Matter

Well, we made it again! Yep, Time magazine. Big time. A whole article about Lady M’s hair. It’s called “Why Michelle’s Hair Matters.”

The timing couldn’t be better: we don’t want to talk about the weight MO gained on vacation, and Big Guy just wants to talk about anything other than health care death squads.

It’s a great article with visuals: we especially loved the Andy Warhol effect, and might just use it for our Christmas Card - whoops, I mean Holiday card - this year. Let me know what you think. I could probably touch them up a bit with my special facial slimming refractors.

andy warhol michelle

I’m glad they didn’t just do this as a puff piece, which it easily could have been. Instead we got some insightful analysis on just what we have to deal with, being a black woman in America.

For black women, hair has classification power (witness the connection Don Imus made between hair and sexual promiscuity when he referred to the Rutgers women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos").

…not to mention the power to get you fired from your big-time radio gig. And then there’s this:

The notion of natural black hair as being subversive or threatening is not new. When the New Yorker set out last summer to satirize Michelle as a militant, country-hating black radical, it was no coincidence that the illustrator portrayed her with an Afro. The cartoon was calling attention to all the ridiculous pre-election fearmongering.

…which is pretty cutting edge journalism, but even I didn’t realize that it was satire.

hat tip to the Grand Rapids contingent

Linked By: theora55 on ask.metafilter, Thanks!