Todays independent was the (red) Independent for for HIV Awareness/prevention in Africa featuring Giorgio Armani following Bono in designing/editing the paper, and also Richard Branson was in the news making a $3bn climate pledge

 

so to what extent are celebs needed in rasing awareness in campaigns and charities, and to what extent do we only give note to issues because of these celebs?

I agree that I pay a lot more attention to a campaign headed by someone recognizable ... not in a fickle way, I'm just interested in celebs and pay attention to them

 

I don't see any problem with using them to promote charities etc, if it gets people interested and helping, then power to 'em!

from todays guardian about the independent kate moss blacking up cover:

 

Return to the dark ages

 

It's decades since the black and white minstrels appeared on TV, but now white entertainers, from Little Britain and Charlotte Church to Bo' Selecta!, are rediscovering the boot polish. And yesterday the Independent featured Kate Moss made up to look like a black woman on its front page. What's going on, asks Hannah Pool, who fails to see the funny side

 

Friday September 22, 2006

The Guardian

 

 

Have you ever wondered what Kate Moss would look like as a black woman? No, me neither, but for those of you who have - well now we know, thanks to a picture taken by Nick Knight for yesterday's Africa issue of the Independent newspaper.

 

You can just imagine the meeting. "Let's do an Africa issue," says Well Meaning Executive Number 1. "Great, who shall we get on the cover? Iman? Naomi?" asks WME 2. "Nah ... too obvious. I know, how about Kate Moss? Let's make her look African!" Cue much back-slapping at their own cleverness, followed by, perhaps, a lunch of jollof rice and curried goat to seal the deal.

 

But this picture of Moss is little more than a cheap, old-fashioned blacking-up trick, and the fact that it is being used to highlight the battle against Aids in Africa is a disgrace.

 

Val Garland, the makeup artist credited with making one of today's most iconic white women black, was too busy with London Fashion Week to come to the phone. However, makeup special effects experts Screenface suggest it is unlikely that Garland used boot polish on Moss. "There would be numerous ways to create this look. Ideally it would be airbrushes using products such as Skin Illustrator or Temptu to create a fresh, dewy look," they say.

 

But it's not just about skin tone, as we know - black people have different features, too, don't they? So the cheekbones and nose have been reshaped. The lips have been enlarged, the eyebrows thickened and deepened. She looks shiny (it is hot out there) and just a little bit bony, maybe like she's starving, maybe like she's got HIV.

 

What exactly is this picture of Moss-as-African-woman supposed to portray? I suppose it is meant to be subversive, but what does it say about race today when a quality newspaper decides that its readers will only relate to Africa through a blacked-up white model rather than a real-life black woman? What does it say about the fight against HIV/Aids if that is the only way to make us care? And, as a black woman (born that way), what does this trick say about me?

 

The phenomenon of white entertainers putting boot polish on their faces to "look black" is nothing new, but like Jim Davidson and mother-in-law gags, it was supposed to be something that was banished to the underground eschelons of the entertainment circuit.

 

And yet it's back. From Bo' Selecta!, whose grotesque imitations of Michael Jackson and Mel B (always wearing leopardskin to signify her wildness) to Big Brother's Glyn blacking up, to Samantha Fox dressed up as an Asian woman, to white actors pretending to be black to play Othello. But the most high-profile example is Little Britain, the hugely popular comedy series that has won two Baftas, and its sketch featuring the white actor David Walliams playing Desiree, an overweight black woman with a love of the sauna. She is fat and has that weird wiry hair and funny skin colour.

 

When Mark Lawson questioned Walliams and comedy partner Matt Lucas about the issue on his Radio 4 programme Front Row, they said it was acceptable because the conceit of the show is that they play all the characters, no matter who they are: they play women even though they are not women, and they play black characters even though they are not black. But given that they have made room for Rob Brydon, I am not sure the other argument works. So even if we give Lucas and Walliams the benefit of the doubt and assume they were trying to even up the racial balance of the show, why didn't they go the whole hog and employ a black actor instead ?

 

Following the path set by Little Britain, earlier this month Charlotte Church donned prosthetics and face paint to become a black man for a speed-dating sketch. (It must be said that this was one of the least convincing black men you could ever imagine - you could almost see the boot-polish smears.)

 

What were they thinking? Not about race, according to a spokesperson for the show: "The only reason Charlotte's skin tone was changed ... was due to the practical reason that the professional prosthetics company making her disguise had advised us that the prosthetics would not look convincing if they were white."

 

So both Little Britain and Charlotte Church deny that their blacking up had anything to do with race or politics. At least they're not employing the irony defence so beloved of lads' magazines, who claim the sexist images between their covers is "ironic" because we are all past caring about sexism any more. But the underlying message is the same: stop taking yourself so seriously, stop being politically correct, we're only having a laugh.

 

This is not a new line. George Inns, a producer on the Black and White Minstrel Show, once said, according to black TV historian Stephen Bourne: "I've never had a letter from a coloured person complaining about the show ... I don't see how you can bring politics into it, this is an innocent programe providing entertainment."

 

Why has it become OK for people to black up? "People feel free to play with this stuff because they are operating in an environment where the criticisim of being politcally correct allows you to do what you want," says academic Paul Gilroy. "The threat of being labelled politically correct creates an environment where we are scared to voice our objections." Given the context, the Kate Moss picture is "empty nihilism," he says.

 

Blacking up has become acceptable in the same way that pole dancing is now sold to women as an empowering thing to do. Both assume that the thing they are poking fun at no longer exists - ie discrimination, racism and sexism. But of course they are wrong. If blacking up existed in a society where racism was not an issue, then it would not be such a problem. But then it would also lose its power to shock. After all, what is so shocking about a white person being made to look black if black and white are equal?

 

And is it really so hard to relate to those who are different from us? I'm not from Iraq, but I don't have to dress up as an Iraqi war widow to care about what goes on there. As Robert Bianco wrote of the American TV show Black. White, in which two families did a "race-swap" for six weeks: "Black. White is based on two false premises, one more pernicious than the other: that you can understand someone of a different race simply by putting on makeup, and that you need that kind of understanding in order to treat people as the law and morality."

 

And you know, there really are black women who could have done this job. Next time a photograph of an African woman is needed, they should call on Iman. Call on Alek Wek. Call on one of any number of black girls you can see on the street. Call on me.

 

· Additional reporting by Tomi Ajayi.

 

 

A History of Blacking Up:

 

Patrick Barkham on the history of blacking up

 

Friday September 22, 2006

The Guardian

The burnt cork ash smeared on his face and the clownish red lipstick were more rudimentary than today's sophisticated makeup and photographic techniques but the effect was just as crude. When white comedian Thomas Rice turned himself into a black stable-boy called Jim Crow in 1828, he sparked an American craze for blackface and minstrel shows that lasted more than 100 years. From Al Jolson to Bing Crosby, Kate Moss is the latest in a line of white celebrities to turn themselves black.

 

Blackface is "a form of racist caricature invented by white Americans in the minstrel-show days of the 1800s," says American academic John Strausbaugh in his book, Black Like You. Blackface minstrelsy became one of the US's most popular musical styles. In this white imitation of black characters black people were portrayed as stupid, superstitious, lying, lazy and lascivious. By the late 19th century, minstrel shows regularly featured black performers - but they continued to black themselves up in darker hues for their white audiences.

"It was a deliberate attempt to suggest that black people had no humanity," says Caryl Phillips, whose latest novel, Dancing in the Dark, looks at the life of Bert Williams, a light-skinned Antiguan-born black man who became America's highest paid entertainer by blacking himself up and playing a dim-witted funnyman. "When you're in blackface you can basically only smile or cry. You're not able to get beyond the blackface mask to display the full range of human emotions, and that suited exactly the prevailing idea in America at the time. It played absolutely into the idea of white racial superiority."

 

Jolson became one of the best-known white actors and singers to use blackface in the US, performing a song, Mammy, as a black man in one of the first talking films, the Jazz Singer, in 1927. Entertainers such as Crosby and Bob Hope performed comic skits and songs in blackface, while Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland donned black makeup for a 1941 film as popular entertainment continued to be influenced by minstrelsy.

 

As black and blackface vaudeville acts moved into film and, later, TV, the black minstrel style crossed to Europe. In Britain, amateur performers at local carnivals had been turning white folk into black caricatures for decades. By the time the Black and White Minstrel Show began on the BBC in 1958 - a Saturday night variety show with blacked-up white male singers and blonde women performers - the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was pressing for an end to racist blackface performances in the US. With the success of the American civil rights movement, the practice lost all acceptability and disappeared from American entertainment.

 

In the UK, it became unacceptable more slowly. The Black and White Minstrel Show won the Golden Rose of Montreux in 1961 and had audiences of 16.5 million by the mid-60s. It was axed by the BBC only in 1978, when it still pulled in five million viewers. Even then, a stage version ran at the Victoria Palace, London, for another 10 years, followed by tours of Australia and New Zealand.

 

Black characters were impersonated by white people in high art as well as popular culture. Laurence Olivier spent two-and-a-half hours every night covering himself in black grease and whitening his eyes with drops to play Othello at the National Theatre in the 60s. He was similarly made up in the 1965 film while Anthony Hopkins blacked up to play Othello in a 1981 TV production and Michael Gambon did so on stage as recently as 1990.

 

It was claimed there were simply not the black actors around, an argument still advanced in the opera. A year ago, Glyndebourne Opera revived Verdi's Othello - and controversy - by casting a blacked-up white singer in the title role. "There are only six or seven singers in the world who could play this part and none of them is black," said Glyndebourne's general director.

 

Predominantly white communities have clung to local traditions of blacking up, none more so than in Padstow, where locals have defied criticism to continue to blacken their faces for "Darkie Day" festivities held on Boxing Day and New Year's Day.

 

In the arts and popular entertainment, however, the blackface and minstrel tradition was seen as increasingly unacceptable in Britain by the 1980s. "I don't think it was so much black people objecting as white people seeing it in a different way," says Bert Williams (no relation to his American namesake) of the Brighton Black History Project.

 

Local councils banned white actors from blacking up, although the rules were flouted by theatrical performances in Redditch and Hull in the 90s, where white American entertainer Clive Baldwin portrayed Al Jolson. Meanwhile, rural police forces courted controversy with blacked-up reconstructions, most notably Norfolk police, who apologised in 1989 after dressing two white detectives (it had no black officers at the time) in Afro wigs and blacking their faces to impersonate two jewel thieves for a TV reconstruction.

 

Phillips believes the blackface tradition in the UK is less rooted in ideas of racial superiority than in the US but is baffled by its resurgence. "In the US it has been a pejorative image 99% of the time," he says. "In the UK it has traditionally been presented playfully and with a sense of innocence. But as the 20th century moved on it became clear this image bestowed a certain amount of hurt and distress on black people and people in Britain and organisations such as the BBC became more aware of this. I am all for satire but I don't understand how the image has re-emerged. It doesn't seem to be satire in these modern forms. It seems gratuitous."

 

 

Wrong to use Kate Moss IHO but right to use celebraties to highlight issues.

 

No, totally pathetic and borderline racist... Plenty of black and Afro-Caribbean models out there that they could have used to highlight this issue.... <_<

BUT, would we be talking about it and have our attention brought to the issue if they had just used "regular" models.

 

Controversy = attention ...

BUT, would we be talking about it and have our attention brought to the issue if they had just used "regular" models.

 

Controversy = attention ...

 

Controversy without a good reason is merely attention seeking and sensationalism of the most pathetic kind.... If you need to resort to this sort of sh!te to get a message across (which you DONT actually need to do with an issue like AIDS...) then you're not really giving people the credit that they're smart enough to realise that it is an important issue....

 

WE DONT ACTUALLY NEED TO BE BLUDGEONED OVER THE HEAD WITH A STUPID PUBLICITY STUNT LIKE THIS!!!! :angry:

the guardian were again doing this issue in their little tv guide about issues and celebs.