What a week it has been in the world of (white) women’s lifestyle media. It's been a week where white editors, those employed and unemployed, continued to make it clear that while they love profiting off of black women, they have little respect for black women.
Let’s start with Grazia UK. The publication asked Lupita Nyong’o to be their cover girl, only to photoshop her picture in a way that erased her blackness. And for those of you haven’t had the chance to have a look the before and after pictures, the magazine cut off her afro ponytail and smoothed out the kinks in her hair and in the words of the actress herself, these edits were done to “fit a more eurocentric notion of what beautiful hair looks like.” We saw the exact same photoshop happen with Solange Knowles when she appeared Evening Standard, when the magazine cropped out her braided halo. These incidents cement my belief that “diversity” doesn’t matter in the world of journalism and there is a lack of diversity when it comes to who is making the decisions at Grazia UK.