Sans Noir

As I sat watching The City the other day, I began to think about how there is a serious paucity of African-Americans in the fashion industry. Here Whitney Port is, a 24 year-old, white female with a degree in Gender Studies, working for Diane von Furstenburg. How does that happen? Before her gig with DFV she worked for The Peoples Revolution, a Public Relations powerhouse that is well known in the fashion world, and for Teen Vogue before that. All with a degree in yes, you heard right, Gender Studies. It doesn’t make much sense to me. If I aspire to work for a well-known designer, do I too have to be white, wealthy, and have connections? I have seen maybe one or two black people on the show. None of the girls she works with are black, nor are any of her friends (at least from what I’ve seen on the show) black.

Is it impossible for blacks and whites to travel in the same circles, for an equilibrium to exist among careers? It somewhat of the same case with regards to gymnastics. I believe black people are naturally acrobatic, but often times we do not have the money to finance a child’s gymnastics career. That’s why you see one, maybe two of us peppered among the Olympics gymnastics team every four years. As there needs to be more Dominique Dawes, there needs to be more Angela and Vanessa Simmons, but they wouldn’t even be where they are today with Pastry if their father wasn’t Rev Run and if their uncle wasn’t Russell Simmons.

We need more BLACK.