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PHOTO CREDIT: supercapes.com
I'd like super powers. In a time when more is demanded of us all, when our phones' IQ seems to outpace our own, and we measure minutes like drags of oxygen, who wouldn't want to level the playing field with a secret ability to read minds, or run awfully fast?
But it's the powers that are visited upon me that I don't want.
I'd like the golden lasso, the perfectly arched brow, and the gadgets.
But please stop rendering me invisible.
The force field of invisibility around which women, particularly women, that look and sound like me are cloaked is an unwanted power, one I’d gladly take back for a refund at the Superhero Stop n’ Shop.
With scarce exception, there's rarely a time a face reflective of my own beams out at me from the pages of a magazine, or from the small or silver screens.
And yes, I'm omitting the Spanish-language television soap operas and the magazine Vanidades (my mother's favorite) in this round-up.
The sad fact is, that any story that aims to tell (or sell) a "universal" truth about a person in America and/or this city, by and large, will seek out the face of a white woman or man to reflect that reality - be it unemployment, affluence or even the scourge of insomnia. And when Latinos or any of us of color are depicted, there's a reason, like the "special episodes" around the holidays.
It's an argument I've trotted out before in the company of less-outraged friends (try it; it's fun): presenting a person of color (Latino, black, Asian, or any combination thereof) as the primary visual conduit within the narrative requires explanation in a way that placing a white person at the center of the story will not.
This seems true across the board: Vogue magazine lay-outs, print ads for anti-depressants, television sitcoms, Target commercials. By and large, white people are universal stand-ins for us all: see a lissome white woman at the center of a Ralph Lauren ad, admire the dress, move on. Same if it's an older white woman in a field of sunflowers, hawking an anti-ulcer medication.
Place instead a black woman or someone of discernible "other" in the Census' ethnic category, and it's like Desi Arnaz said, "You've got some 'splaining to do."
Hmm, you're bound to ask, is it that blacks are at higher rates for ulcers?
Or is it Black Heritage Month?
Ask yourself, why isn't the eponymously named "Whitney" on NBC Dominican? A no-big-deal-so-what-just-another-Dominican-woman-in-the-big-city-hashing-things-out-with-her-noncommital-boyfriend?
God knows there are enough single women whose parents hail from Moca or Bonao living in New York City to fill a fall television line-up to brimming - on all channels.
But she isn't there on the screen. Save for Carla Espinoza, the character Judy Reyes played on "Scrubs" a few years ago, you'd be hard-pressed to find a Latina, let alone una dominicana, in any central role on television. That would require an explanation, as it would be a departure from the norm (There is a Youtube video for this: http://bit.ly/EiToc)
But what norm?
Isn’t the cacophonously accented reality that we daily inhabit in this city, and increasingly, this country, one in which a single day features Dominican nurses, Korean grocers, Trinidadian cabdrivers, and Ecuadorian messengers, one to which we barely give a thought to?
But it certainly is not reflected on the screens of our televisions or I-Pod's, in print media.
Here's the Times a few weeks ago with Pamela Paul's "Mother's New Little Helper" about mothers finding it hard to sleep with encyclopedic to-do lists.
Best way to tell that story, visually?
A staged shot of a blond, blue-eyed woman standing in a satin white robe on a suburban lawn, as dusk ominously descends around her.
Imagine the same story, with the front shot of a stately black woman in dreadlocks. Of an Asian woman in teal patterned pajamas and silk slippers. Or of a Latina in an "ethnic" wrap with vibrant colors.
To make visual sense for us, the corresponding story would need to be about any one of these woman, singularly: it would need to be about the celebrated black female author, or the Asian genealogist who doubles as a sculptor, or the charitable Latina finance guru.
For any of those women of color to be placed within the story as its representative, she would need to be famous or unique. She could not serve as the "everyday" model as does the white woman in this staged shot. It would be incongruous and dissonant; the "otherness" of the woman of color standing in for a message of "everyone-ness" would puzzle us.
Invisibility is the other option, and one that casting directors and editors opt for, and we, as readers, audiences and consumers, too readily allow for.
It's the same reason that sitcoms and movies tend to either do away with people of color, and focus instead on a homogenous set of family and friends. When we're invited in, it's typically to sit on the fringes, ready with a sassy (accented?) one-liner.
Even those television shows that prides themselves on straying far from traditional tropes, and seek to be intentionally "different" cannot seem to get past ethnicity as just part of the story.
"Modern Family" is as witty a take as there is on the claims we make in the name of family, including a gay couple with children, and a game actress in Sofia Vergara. But the fact that Vergara plays a Latina, with a heavy accent and musical earrings, seems the extent of the character, and the joke.
Couldn't she be a funny Latina neurologist, a Latina hand model, a Latina anything, without the central thrust of the joke being that she is Latina?
Being Latina is who I, and many, many other women are – just as much a part of what I do, how I eat and live, and what language I use, as being white or Inuit or Somalian is for the next editor, mother, insomniac (some of us are all three).
What it is not is the punch-line to a joke I'm never in on, or an inconvenient truth I get – or want to – absolve myself of.
Even as broad a comedy as "Wedding Crashers" years ago makes the point, if crassly. In one of the opening sequences, in which Vince Vaughn's and Owen Wilson's characters tumble into bed, separately, with a bevy of woman, there doesn't appear to be a single woman of color with whom they "hook up." That's a lot of women.
And a lot of invisibility.
Turns out, we "colorful" sorts are just as sane, weird, complicated and lovely as the other girls (and guys) we're supposed to be focused on in these movies, shows, and ads.
Swing past any bus or train stop in this city at 7:45 am when the gaggle of fresh-faced boys and girls, freckled-faced, olive-skinned or ebony-bright, is a stunning reminder of the lush arc of youth.
Or better, hit the senior Center at 11:45 am to see the real beauties: you’ll find thick-knuckled men trading glances with tawny-cheeked belles in prim coats and crimson nails.
People, all of us, waiting to be observed, super and extraordinary, regular and real.
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