At the same time, Madonna is more than happy to position herself front and center of Vogue, a product of queer black innovation forged in the crucible of white supremacy.
The twisted power dynamics from which the products of black genius emerge simultaneously marginalize black life and create a commodity that Madonna, with the privilege of her racial position, is able to whitewash and capitalize on. Win!
Not content with the gift that keeps on giving, Madonna manages to somehow cast herself as a victim, while a black female artist with the talent and soul of Whitney Houston becomes the perpetrator of an imagined crime against her.
In his 2017 biopic Whitney: Can I Be Me, British filmmaker Nick Broomfield argues that, to achieve success in a racist America, Whitney, the beautiful black girl from the hood, had to be sanitized and divorced from anything that could be interpreted as a threatening manifestation of blackness. Whitney Houston was reinvented; a bland, wholesome all-American girl next door, a palatable pastiche of herself.
Critics of Madonna, on the other hand, point out that she was potentially the far blander prospect who then reinvented herself as the reverse, becoming an edgy punk, a high-school dropout, with a persona largely cobbled together from characters to be found on the New York club scene.
During her lifetime, Whitney Houston was plagued by rumors that she was in a closeted lesbian relationship with her best friend and later creative director Robyn Crawford. In contrast, during the course of her career, Madonna has stage-managed high-profile lesbian stunts with women ranging from Jenny Shimizu and Sandra Bernhard to Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, and Nicki Minaj—whoever happened to be media flavor of the month. While the suggestion of being a lesbian in the 1980s was anathema to the career of a black woman like Houston, the effect on Madonna’s was the exact reverse. Broomfield makes the claim that Houston’s life of secrecy resulted in her eventual separation from Robyn. Accordingly, the rumors, the secrets, and lies and the eventual breakup in turn played a hugely significant role in Houston’s personal problems, which ended in tragedy on the night of February 11, 2012, when she was found dead in a bathtub in Las Vegas.
Madonna smashed it with the critically acclaimed “Vogue.” Commercially, it remains one of her biggest hits, having topped the charts in over thirty countries, including Australia, Canada, Japan, the UK, and the US. Shifting over 6 million copies, it was the world’s bestselling single of 1990. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame listed it as one of the “500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.”
The spoken-word section of the song is particularly egregious, reproducing and carving out a special place for itself in the cultural appropriation hall of fame. Ms. Ciccone does not see fit to list even one African American performer in her roll call of virtuosos, while happily acknowledging Marlene Dietrich.
Who is included? Well, we’ve got Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, and Joe DiMaggio. Madonna also sees fit to include both Marlon Brando and Jimmy Dean. Up next we have Grace Kelly and Jean Harlow, followed by Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, and Ginger Rogers. On and on it goes, this roll call of whiteness, and while Madge is impressed by ladies who have attitude, seemingly this doesn’t extend to a single black performer!
Madonna, with her androgynous dressing and badass boss-bitch vibe, is a direct performative descendant of Dietrich. As such, this is some seriously meta shit—an act of erasure with a fascinating historicity of which I suspect Madonna herself was not directly cognizant. Josephine “The Black Venus” Baker was the originator of much of Dietrich’s schtick, from her provocatively androgynous style of dress to The Blonde Venus, a film that even commentators at the time remarked had strong parallels with Baker’s life.
Baker’s opinion of Dietrich is well documented: “That German cow has copied me my whole life. The only thing left for her to copy will be my funeral” (and indeed, both stars had extravagant French state-sponsored funerals).
A history of unparalleled theft is the real reason emotions run high when Susan throws her hair into the “messy buns” “invented in 2014 by white fashion designer Marc Jacobs.” It’s the explanation of the anger when a white girl flexes some “boxer braids” (ahem), another cornrowed style popularized by Kim K. And it’s the reason why it is more than frustrating when Kylie Jenner is celebrated for her “edgy dreadlock style” or feted for canerows, the same protective hairstyle that the American military forbade black women to wear until 2014. How can it be that an art that is by definition classical can be reimagined as “gangster” or “urban” (we know what they really mean).
The practices around black hairstyling are, like our hair texture itself, dismissed as coarse, then elevated to an entirely different status when copied or appropriated by white people. Just another example of the many ways black bodies are positioned as either lesser or threatening. This positioning in turn is used to justify the regulatory procedures enacted upon them.
In a 2011 court case, St. Gregory’s Catholic Science College in Harrow, London, defended its right to exclude a twelve-year-old boy for having cornrows. The headmaster, Andrew Prindiville, argued that the ban
plays a critical role in ensuring that the culture associated with gangs of boys in particular—e.g. haircuts, bandanas, jewellery, hats and hoodies—has no place in our school. What I am saying is that if we were to permit the wearing [of] any particular non-traditional haircut, such as cornrows, this would lead to huge pressure to unravel the strict policy that we have adopted, and which is a vital part of our success in keeping out of our school influences which have no place there—gang culture and pop culture.9
“Gang culture and pop culture”? Hmmm, okay, this makes sense—if you are an unwitting racist (or perhaps even an openly explicit one), but I see it entirely differently. Let’s consider European styles. Go back less than a hundred years, let alone two or three centuries, and they look old. They are historic relics of the past, impossibly dated. Surely it is testimony to the futurism inherent in African cultures that they allow something so ancient that it was present at the dawn of humanity to still be seen in the twenty-first century as the cutting edge of popular culture, as new and edgy?
Black people are penalized for their creative expression while the scale at which black creativity is repackaged in the modern world as white in origin is unprecedented. The historian Sally Sommer of Duke University explains that this is a process at the heart of American culture and identity. I would extend this (to varying degrees) to most of Western culture.
Sommer advances a controversial proposition. She makes the argument that in the US “only political and economic power are held by white males . . . Everything else, all the popular entertainment, all major American culture is, to me, black.”10 In short, the creative genius that has dominated the modern world throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is . . . black!
With caustic humor, the African American writer, musician, and producer Greg Tate breaks it down:
Our music, our fashion, our hairstyles, our dances, our anatomical traits, our bodies, our soul, continue to be considered ever ripe for the plucking and the biting, by the same crafty devils that brought you the Middle Passage and the African Slave Trade. What has always struck Black observers of this phenomenon isn’t just the irony of White America [or the UK, Ireland, Japan; pick a country, any country: they all hate us, they all crave us] fiending for blackness, when it was once (not so long ago) debated whether Africans even had souls. It’s also the way they have always tried to erase the black presence from whatever black thing they took a shine to. Jazz, blues, rock and roll, doowop, swing-dancing, cornrowing, anti-discrimination politics, you name it.11