i’m gonna harp on this some more
Because I need for people (mainly white folks) to understand how insidious anti-Blackness is as a cultural meme, particularly when it comes to beauty standards in our pop culture and media.
Anti-Blackness is at work in an article talking about the attractiveness of an alien character from a species that was designed with male gazey sex appeal in mind, a hairstyle deeply associated with Black people is linked in the same breath to markers of monstrous otherness (tentacles) and used as shorthand for “disgusting, ugly, undesirable, scary” to denigrate a female-presenting character’s appearance.
Never mind the fact that asari scalps/fringe looks absolutely nothing whatsoever like locs. That’s neither here nor there in this argument.
It’s the fact that features associated with Blackness are used as shorthand for ugly and undesirable, particularly where female-presenting people are concerned.
This in a series, in a fandom where Ashley Williams, our Latina party member (only confirmed as such out of game) gets her skin (which wasn’t even dark to begin with) lightened as part of her sexxxxy makeover for the final game.
Go on YouTube or even tumblrs devoted to FemSheps and see how many are WOC. Go ahead, I’ll wait. And I won’t even get into the sham beauty pageant for new default FemShep and how the voting went.
Or the fact that the one hairstyle that remotely looked textured like a Black woman’s natural hair was straightened the hell out in the ME3 demo.
None of this shit is isolated is what I’m saying.
