Vanity Fair Cuts People Of Color Off Its Annual Hollywood Issue Cover … Again. Do You Care?
It’s a Vanity Fair magazine tale as old as time. All year long the men and women of Hollywood, many of them people of color, work hard to produce award worthy projects. Then Vanity Fair comes along to choose the cream of the crop for their annual Hollywood Issue. The list reads like a very well-known ‘who’s who,’ featuring the likes of Halle Berry, Ben Affleck and more, yet when it comes to the cover it seems only the cream of a certain color make the cut.
They try to appease the darker half with a spot on the cover’s gatefold (the part that folds into the magazine), but we all know that being seen on the actual cover, the one that will be seen on newsstands across the globe, is the only section that carries real weight. So once again, Vanity Fair dims the light that is Hollywood’s colored actors and actresses for another year and we are left to wonder, again … what the hell is the deal?
Since this isn’t the first time this has happened you would think that when Vanity Fair released the cover for its 19th annual Hollywood Issue, a circus-themed portfolio called “Bruce Weber’s Adventures in Hollywood,” we wouldn’t be left with a bad taste in our mouths. But alas, when the magazine revealed Ben Affleck, Bradley Cooper and Emma Stone as the cover stars, with youngest-ever best-actress nominee Quvenzhané Wallis and Kerry Washington regulated to the cover’s gatefold wasteland, that taste was as fresh and rank as ever.
But should we care?
Clearly Vanity Fair sees nothing wrong with how they present the “best” of Hollywood to the world and I guess we can and should be proud that Vanity Fair chose to recognize the talent of people of color at all considering that there are so many media outlets that would rather pretend our talents don’t exist.
But still, it’s upsetting that the magazine makes an obviously conscious decision to keep people of color off the cover. The first time might have been an oversight, second and third, a mistake, but by the time you hit nineteen it is clearly a planned decision. Every year we get up in arms about the lack of melanin on the cover and every year we are ignored, so with the release of this latest issue one has to ask themselves if it’s worth fighting about anymore.
Vanity Fair is only one magazine; for every rebuff, there are several others out there who have no problems with putting Kerry Washington on the cover, front, center and in all her Scandalous glory. Perhaps if Vanity Fair doesn’t want to fully support talented people of color, maybe we should stop supporting them. Stop buying their issues and talking about their features. Starting with the end of this piece right here, and starting right now.
Whomever made that decision is stupid. Why cut out part of a market you could capture by making sure you represented EVERYONE on the cover? Don’t be fooled , black people spend money reading too.They better start marketing to anyone they can,now that you can read online, on your Kindles and IPads, it’s only a matter of time before you’ll have to stop printing and go electronic THEN you’re going to need the very readers you don’t bother to market to now. Trust me, you’re not going to interest people in you being so white washed.
The one’s who are stupid are the whiners. They need to start their own magazines. The only reason they are whining is because the white magazines reach a broader market which translates into more dollars these stars. They could care less, otherwise. It’s not about race, but about economics.
Who cares? Let them pool together their resources and pursue those same markets, and but themselves and their cronies on the cover. Many black stars go hard caping for corporate American interests and social ideals, to the detriment of their community, and sucking up to the white powerfuls to get into and keep their place. Then, they have the nerve to shocked? Why should being on that cover be so damn valuable?
Piss on them!
How is starting our own magazine the answer to being excluded from mainstream media?! So, if a person of color actually LIKES reading VF, instead of wanted to be included in their representation of “the best of Hollywood,” they should go off and start their own? It is VERY much about race and asking to be included in an established publication that has been around for a long time is in NO WAY bowing down to white folks and currying favor.
If we followed your logic, then we should get our own Fortune 500 companies (since they hate hiring us), our own government (since they don’t want us representing them – PLEASE don’t bring up Obama, it’s bigger than him), shoot, we should get our own COUNTRY ‘cuz they sure as hell don’t want us here. WHY should be bother begging the man for equality when we can just go somewhere else and make our OWN? smh
It’s their magazine. They created it so they decide who goes on and who doesn’t.
Exactly, the whiners should create their own…
No.
answer to do you care…..NO
I hate to say this but Ben Affleck is an Oscar winner and nominee. Bradley Cooper was named People Magazine’s sexiest man of the year (not that I think so) but that makes him popular and he is nominated for an Oscar. I’m not sure about what Emma Stone has done this year but I think she’s popular or something, but for sure, she has had many leading roles in big films.
Sorry, but as much as I love that little girl Wallis, that was her first movie. But she is still in the magazine as part of the cover. You have to also take into account that the cover people probably have great agents and money to fight for covers and Ms. Wallis probably doesn’t have that. As much as I love Kerry Washington, she has only become super popular recently, but again, she is still part of the cover. Black people shouldn’t be looking to White publications to help them out because all they care about is money and their own image.
I think it would be great to put everyone on the cover. But I also think, who buys magazines anymore anyway? Because of the internet, whoever people write about can be made popular and mainstream publications don’t matter much to me at all. If this cover wasn’t mentioned here I would not have even known about it.