Editor’s note: This article contains social media posts that some may find offensive.
But it was the scene in its entirety that, perhaps, troubled me the most. The degrading pain being inflicted upon the young black woman while everyone looked on, unwilling to interfere, serves as a prescient illustration of how black women and girls in a white supremacist society continue to be both invisibilized, endangered and exploited for the benefit of white women and capitalism, more specifically King Cotton.
It was heart-wrenching to watch for several reasons, the obvious one being the horrifying visual of the young black woman’s skin breaking and bleeding with each lash.
It was with these thoughts in mind that I saw the Ellen DeGeneres-fronted GapKids x ED ad featuring Ava, 8; Lucy, 8; Fanny, 12; and Angelina, 12, known collectively as Le Petit Cirque, “the only all-kid humanitarian cirque company in the world.” The image of these girls, three white and one black, was socialized with the tweet “Meet the kids who are proving that girls can do anything”—preferably in Gap cotton.
While all of the girls are adorable, and indeed, all of them should grow up to be and do anything, it becomes problematic when the black child is positioned to be a white child’s prop. And this isn’t the first time a similarly dehumanizing editorial choice was made. In 2014, online magazine Buro 247 published a story about Dasha Zhukova, the editor-in-chief of Garage magazine. Its feature image was of Zhukova sitting regally in a mannequin chair in the form of a half-naked black woman.
Of course, it could be argued that these images are vastly different, but the intense feelings they both evoke are not—the feeling that our black bodies are undervalued and positioned to serve as props upon which white bodies can be better appreciated and admired. If anything, the Gap ad shows how early that positioning begins.
@GapKids This is an #epicfail on so many levels. You should be embarrassed. #misogynoir
— ImDG (@IamDeborahG) April 3, 2016
@GapKids Thanks for perfectly illustrating what ’passive racism’ looks like in mainstream media. #DiversiryFail She is NOT your arm rest. 😑
— Jasmine Wow (@Jmo120) April 3, 2016
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