The Skin Tone of African American Women and "Women of Color" that Appear in Hip-Hop and R&B Videos

What amazes me is that the same women who complain about which women are in hip-hop and R&B videos refuse to support artists who do show dark skinned women in their videos. Marques Houston is one such individual, but women aren't all that interested in his work. Redman has been known to show dark skinned, and "heavy-set", women in his videos, and of course we all know how Tony Yayo made a big deal out of the fact that the primary love interest in his video was a dark skinned women back when 50 Cent and G-Unit were hot.

This shouldn't be an issue, because men do not buy other men's records, particularly in hip-hop. You may say that you like an artist, and a light-skinned woman may be used to sell the record to a larger audience on the music video, but if you do decide to buy that record it is for completely different reasons that most women would. If the product is an R&B record by a female singer men may purchase the record to listen to the latest beats and the fact that the woman selling the record is attractive does not hurt at all. Men generally aren't that caught up in the actual lyrics of an R&B song regardless of who is performing, male or female, because for the most part they don't really take R&B or pop music that seriously.

On the other hand if men are going to buy a hip-hop record, the lyrics must be on point. You may download a single or copy the record from elsewhere if the beats are good, but you are not going to buy a hip-hop record from an artist who sucks. Women are the same way, but, most successful hip-hop artists have a few records particularly tailor made for the ladies, and the music videos for those songs are the source of contention. Take Kanye West, when he was spending a lot of time making fun of women in his videos; those exact songs were the same reason he had a lot of female listeners. Men didn't honestly care about a song like "Gold Digger", and for the most part men skipped over Kanye's last record because there wasn't a single song on there for us.

But you have to take this issue up with the record companies themselves. Why Lil' Wayne's Lollipop video had a heavy set girl, and a song like Every Girl In The World appeared to have nothing but Caucasian or Latino women is beyond me. At the same time, men aren't listening to those records, women are. In fact this goes back to similar arguments posited back in the nineties as to why women continue to support men who degrade them. The answer can be found in the sexual component that is offered in those songs, plus the fact that a lot of those songs either were or could be construed as dance tunes.

This is what women want. A song where they cannot dance, and one that skillfully avoids any talk about "relations" or relationships, is often a deal breaker for women. Songs that talk about how other women degrade themselves are more exciting than songs that, in and of themselves, just feature the skills of a woman as an artist. Even still, men are never going to buy anything by these artists, so if you do not see yourself being represented on these music videos, why do you continue to purchase their records? I have to either assume that women may not care as much about the issue as they say they are, or aren't angry enough to withdraw their support from those artists and stop attending their concerts and buying their records.

When women do attempt to stand up for something in the Black community, they are ridiculed. If you look at BET's infamous Hip-Hop vs America series, Nelly feels as thought the women of Spellman were hypocritical in attacking his Tip-Drill video considering that there were strip clubs within walking distance of the college. The irony of this, is that Nelly has never had anything good to say about African-American women, and on top of that, featured women that appeared to be anorexic in his videos, and clearly, "light-skinned", before anyone else was doing it. Why he expected those same women to support him after the Tip-Drill video is beyond me.

You can't say that you hate the way women are portrayed in a music video and then continue to go back to that new music videos from that artist in the future expecting to see dark skinned, and heavy-set women one day when they were never in that artists videos before. There are a lot of artists whose skills I appreciate, that I will never buy or support because I don't agree with their message, whether it be the actual message in the songs or messages that were conveyed in the music video itself. In many cases, Black women are the ones who are making that choice; how they live with it is beyond me, but they realize that regardless of how much noise Black women make about it, this will always be a small minority. In general there are so many women stepping on each other to be in the music videos themselves trying to lose weight that will always drown out the noise made by intellectual, feminist Black women that take issue to these videos, so the former will win every time.

In fact many of these women who take issue with music videos are perfectly fine with reading "street lit" in where a Black women writes prose that can easily be construed as degrading to women in general because of the situations women find themselves in. What empowers one woman degrades another; that lack of consensus is one of the reasons why women are never going to get a fair shake in Black media. If there were dark skinned Black women they would be portrayed through that same skewed lens, from those same stereotypes of Black women, so what difference does any of that really make?

To be in a music video, and not be an artist, means to be there in a background capacity, period. You're no better than an extra in a movie scene; you aren't the protagonist, and it is not your project, so the best you can hope for is that you will get that opportunity to stand out from the rest. The job pays more than similar jobs do, and it should because the capacity to be seen by the entire world on television is there as opposed to people coming to see you. The industry, as a whole, is disrespectful to women in general, but in particular to African-American women. If you see a woman with talent that doesn't necessarily fit up to the beauty standards of mainstream America support that woman. We are programmed to say that someone like Alex Wek is ugly because she does not have any Eurocentric features whatsoever, and we cannot wrap our minds around someone with our own features being attractive. Until women support each other men are never going to respect their ideas ...