POP FEMINIST PERBLOG

Regarding “white privilege” vs. “white supremacy”:

The beauty industry consistently ignores, erases, and pathologizes the existence of any skin darker than a Kardashian’s. I’m not just talking about fashion magazines, advertisements, photoshop, runways. I mean: makeup brands consistently market, sell, and normalize millions of products which explicitly are designed for light skin and which do not work “normally” on darker-skinned people. Do you really think “the invisible knapsack” is useful for explaining this? Do you really think that a bajillion-dollar industry just kind of “forgot” about dark skin? (You know, like all those dark-skinned people who package and produce their products?) Do you think this is the same as Peggy McIntosh being like, “hey! I never noticed that if my skin was darker my band-aid would look kind of weird!” Do you really believe that? Do you really believe that all this money is spent every day producing and reproducing an industry based on whiteness, and this is all because a bunch of privileged white people don’t have to think about their whiteness?

Or do you think maybe all that capital is invested, re-invested, produced and reproduced in order to prop up white supremacy? Don’t you think it’s possible that a “beauty industry,” necessarily by its own definitions, is an elaborate device to streamline and produce white supremacy? Don’t you think it’s possible that an industry whose purpose is to sell products which entrench a body performance as a cultural norm is, in turn, systematically entrenching certain bodies? Do you think it’s an accident that any brand that consistently produces makeup which functions on dark skin is either difficult to find or significantly more expensive or both?

Or do your really think that Revlon just innocently forgot that black people exist when they invented “Nude Attitude”? Do you think capitalism doesn’t even know about its invisible knapsack?