Iggy Azalea: Please Pack Up Your Degrading Minstrel Show and Take it Back to Australia Where Folks Might Think You're Onto Something New

It's been a rough few months for sisters' struggling to hold onto to some shred of dignity.  First, Cliven Bundy announced that we'd be happier back on  slave plantations.   Then former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling made a slew of racist comments in public.

Driving down the highway this afternoon with my son, Iggy came on the radio. I loved the beat and said something about the sistah's gravely voice.  "Sorry," he informed me.  "Iggy Azalea is a white woman from Australia."  O-k-a-y.   My family is multi-racial and I don't peg women by the shade of make-up they wear.

But this Iggy business stuck in my craw.  I just couldn't at the time articulate why it had really upset me. Yes, musicians borrow one another's style, sing one another's songs, imitation being the highest form of flattery and all.  But this was something different. And it took a few hours before my jaded neurons made the connection. This wasn't Elvis Presley embracing Chuck Berry, and re-expressing him from the depths of the rock n' roller's soul.  No, this was Al Jolson, a black face minstrel show, cartoonish, caricaturing black vocal tones, music and intonation and doing it for precisely the same reasons.   Audiences ate it up then and eat it up now.    It's a form of racial cross-dressing that jolts audiences because of the sexual dichotomy between how white and black entertainers are seen. I have come across several insightful articles on the subject (here) and (here) One commenter on the Gawker site made the following comment:

(ModMudd):   You see an artful play performance. I see a white girl putting on a fake African American female sexuality and indentity and selling it for consumption. And she's handsomely rewarded for being able to project this identiy from the safety and acceptabilty of a white body. Because black feminine identity and sexuality is very profitable and attractive when disassociated with blackness.

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There will be those youngsters who don't know what blackface is, who even insist that Iggy Azalea is doing black women a favor by caricaturing our style of expressiveness or maybe even helping to build a post-racial America.  Well, all I can say to them is that Cliven Bundy believes his goals are at least as noble.