3 by doing this, the commercial-enterprise-posing-as-a-family retraces the historic dispossession of Ebony motherhood, along with the arrest and theft of African being as Black and flesh that is brown. Further, through the heteronormative, domestic enterprise of having Ebony young ones touched by way of a white mother—in a country libidinally started on interracial intimate and rape fantasies—Kim and her family members biologically reproduce non-Blackness-as-multiracialized-whiteness.
And thus, their empire must be approached with as much critical severity as we apply to 18th-century texts concerning the horrors of white domesticity within the Americas—their historical flavor for slavery, rape, and Black children’s captivity—such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of Harriet Jacobs. 4 exactly What would happen if we took competition in KUWTK seriously? If we heard the Kardashians’ voices like the whispers of the wicked and intimately perverse Mrs. Flint, who tortured Jacobs to punish her for Flint’s white husband’s rapacious, invasive behavior?
Multiracialism takes on still more commodity kinds. The Ebony peoples skins that shadow Kim’s shapewear brand Skims are, in her visual economy, like textiles, adornments, and garments to be bought, reshaped, sold, and shipped. In the same way epidermis tones, when pressed into Kylie Cosmetics’ magical market type of foundation, gradate and smooth the violent force of blackface.
And yet, this sentimental white family—their billion-dollar racial drama, their feminization of anti-Black caricature, Black women’s parts to their self-adornment, underneath the protected corporeal racial schema of whiteness—does not frighten most of us. Indeed, millions are enthralled.
Meaning that millions don’t see what is less obvious and harder to generally share. [Read more...]