Black Women Carnival Masquerade: What’s Yours?

The servant, the slave, the prostitute. These were pretty much the choice of masquerades I’ve had since a teen. After all, do you know any popular African or African-American women carnival masquerades?

I don’t. Today I could dress as Olivia Pope or other characters from TV series created by Ms Shonda Rhymes (god bless her!). But they don’t look so peculiar, do they? I rediscover this hard truth while trying to look for a costume to go to a party last Saturday. I looked it up on the Internet and apart from the fact that women’s costumes were all highly sexualized (huge chests and bottoms and thin waists), it was hard to find many feasible costumes of black women.

Does this tell something? I think it does. In the US they talk a lot about the role models to be given to young African-Americans but they don’t do enough to create those models in the way they’ve always done: media. It should be so normal: a country that has blacks, white, Asians, Latin Americans…should have all that diversity represented, shouldn’t it? Yes, yes, there is Hancock and Catwoman (Will Smith and Halle Berry) but is that enough?

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