Caged Black Women

Black women are often featured as sexual objects in fashion advertisements. In this ad the black model is not making eye contact with the viewer, her breast are exposed, her face is covered up by a mask, and she is wearing a type of bondage apparatus. She is contrasted with the confident white model who is making direct eye contact with the viewer and is clothed. The implied message in this advertisement is that the black model is purely a sexual object to be possessed and looked at, but the white model commands more respect from the male viewer.



These two images are terrifying examples of the way black women's sexuality is reduced to racist notions of animal aggression. These black female representations were articulated in Bell Hooks' article Selling Hot Pussy where she uses examples of different black women to describe how white viewers have enjoyed seeing black sexuality as something "exotic" and "animal" in order to further "other" them. In the top image, the model is carrying a whip and has chains around her ankles. Both items are reminiscent of slavery.

However, the model is smiling and naked and the image is suggesting that she likes being chained up, whiped, and treated like an animal. In the next image she is naked in a cage baring her teeth like an animal. If that wasn't enough the sign above the cage reads, "Do Not Feed The Animal." In these fashion advertisements, the photographers made blackness "othered" by depicticating their sexuality as something deviant and animalistic. These types of advertisements make black women into racist caricatures that are not only demeaning to the black models, but all women of color.

LeBron James Vogue Cover

This cover was at the center of a huge amount of controversy in 2008 after bloggers began to notice historically racists parallels in the imagery. To many, the image shows a gorilla like angry black man who seeks to possess a white woman. When bloggers started to point out the possibility of this World War I recruitment poster as being the model for the cover, people noticed that the similarities between the two were indeed hard to ignore.


One blogger from Watching The Watchers put it, "The positions of James and Bundchen, the way he holds his mouth, the color of his clothes, the color of her dress, the curls of her hair, the placement of her feet inside his and his arm around her waist, the basketball in the club hand, and his hunched-over posture." He believes, that Annie Leibovitz (who has a history of referencing iconic images in her own photographs) was blatantly referencing this poster in her photograph.

This type of photograph is not at all uncommon. It is typical for white athletes to be portrayed smiling or laughing, while black sports figures are portrayed as angry and violent. To me, this image is overtly racist and resorts to horrible stereotypes about black men as violent animals. But many do not see it this way. For as many bloggers who posted about the apparent racism in this cover, they recieved dozens of comments about how they were looking too much into things and reading what they wanted out of the image. One woman said, "James is a huge, black beautiful masculine statue and Gisele is a feminine, sexy gorgeous doll. I didn't see any kind of racist overtone to it. I still don't. I think there is such a hypersensitivity to race still in this country." Another commentor said, "It's a magazine for god's sake. Quit trying to be the pc police. I don't give a damn if she's with King Kong or Godzilla, it's a damn magazine that wants to sell some issues."

This cover is blatantly racist and harmful in the same way that Time's infamous OJ Simpson cover is. In both cases viewers have to wonder, "how could editors have missed this," and "was this intentional?" I think that regardless of intent--although it could be easily argued that Annie Leibovitz knew exactly what she was doing--this image is communicating and perpetuating racists notions about violence and black men.