Butt of a Racist Joke

            Recently, a provocative magazine cover photo of Kim Kardashian was published and it sparked a conversation about the exploitation of the African-American woman's body. In this photo, Kardashian is opening a bottle of champagne and it pops and pours into a champagne glass that is balancing on her backside. This photo taken by photographer Jean-Paul Goude, instead of being an original piece of art, is actually a re-creation of the photographers most well-known pieces of art, “Champagne Incident”, featured in his 1982 art book called Jungle Fever. 

Upon seeing this image of Kim Kardashian I immediately reflected to the novel Jungle Fever which in turn caused me to reflect upon previous images I have seen of Saartjie "Sarah" Baartman, a black South African woman that was brought to England in the early 1800s and displayed in freak shows for her large buttocks and elongated genitalia. I had written a paper on her in a Women and Gender Studies class and remember being quite shocked by the Baartman's story and experience. Baartman's body was even on display after her death when her body was dissected and parts of her body were displayed in a museum until the 1970s, she did not receive a proper burial until many years later when she was returned to South Africa. 

Now I'm sure you're wondering what does Kim Kardashian have to do with Saartjie Baartman and why should we care? The answer is simple. the objectification of women's bodies, particularly black women's bodies, has become so pervasive in our culture that we cannot see it for what it is: racism and fetishism. Saartjie Baartman, and the awfully offensive caricatures of her from the time period before her death, is a reminder of the centuries of racism, oppression and misogyny that women and people of color experience. 

Photographer Jean-Paul Goude is known for his fascination with African-American women. Photographing women and then cutting apart their features to create the ideal woman, he is quoted as having said, "I've always admired black women's backsides, the ones who look like race horses. Toukie's [my girlfriend’s] backside was voluptuous enough, but nowhere near a race horses ass, so I gave her one. There she was, my dream come true, in living color." In some of his previous work we can see his fetishism of black women when we look at his photographs featuring one woman, his girlfriend at the time, trapped inside a cage with raw meat as if she were an animal. 

Black women are cut and slashed into pieces to create Goude’s version of the perfect woman and the complete objectification of black women’s bodies is unacceptable. 

Not only are their bodies objectified and are they portrayed as less than human in advertising campaigns, but their bodies are hyper sexualized leading to the loss of any other form of identity. Not only does it lead to the loss of an identity, but it leads to it being appropriated by another race.

“Generation Ass” as Bill Maher likes to call it, is the newest generation in the white community within the last 20 years that seems to be obsessed with women and large backsides as a form of feminine sex appeal. This recent fascination with large asses is an interesting phenomenon as 1) homosapiens have had asses since the beginning of time and 2) African American women, who statistically speaking have larger backsides, aren’t the ones that are currently representing this new big booty craze. 

Black women are not the ones representing their own bodies anymore. Instead women of different races, predominately white, are now making having a large ass fashionable because apparently having a large ass only looks good if it is on a white woman’s body. Recent artists such as Jennifer Lopez and Iggy Azalea sing a song called “Booty”, with lyrics like

“I'm queen big booty Iggy, now find me a bone to sit on

Girls with the cheeks, put 'em hands in the air

Then pop that, pop that, let 'em know that you there”

Accepting the photograph at face value, it is clear to see the parallels between Kardashians photo shoot and the photo taken over 35 years ago by Jean-Paul Goude. If we accept them at face value then we cannot deny the racism and objectification in them and how our culture allows people to be exploited.