Amanda Brooks Serves Condescension to Stylish Black Waitstaff

by Rachel Tension | 12:53 pm, June 7th, 2012

Rachel Tension, our newest contributor, is an impossibly gorgeous multicultural style obsessive with a PhD in race relations from the School of Hard Knocks. Join us in reading her first piece for Styleite as she analyzes a recent gaffe of luxury retail expatriate Amanda Brooks.

Don’t you hate it when privileged white people try to be complimentary of another race and completely miss the mark? Because I hate it when privileged white people try to be complimentary of another race and completely miss the mark.

I refer here to a recent post on the personal blog of Amanda Brooks, the former Fashion Director of Barneys. (For those of you who haven’t been diligently tracking what Mrs. Brooks is up to, she recently gave up her job — and voluntarily! — to take a year-long creative sabbatical with her husband and their two kids on a farm in the English countryside. LOL WASPs, amirite?)

Anyway, Brooks has been blogging pretty regularly now that she doesn’t have all that fashion directing to do, and on Tuesday she extolled the virtues of a Jamaican-themed restaurant in New York called Miss Lily’s (which she misspells). And that extolling basically takes the form of, “Look at how cool all these Black people who work here are!” From the post:

Melvin, a gentle yet spirited rasta juice-master greets you with a familiar smile, while a gorgeous black chick in hot pants rings you up. There are gorgeous black girls everywhere at Miss Lilly’s [sic], and they have daring personal style to match. My favorite is a Grace Jones look-alike who wears head to toe leopard (hood included) and too much gold jewelry, in a good way. I’m getting up my nerve to take her picture — I promise I’ll share it with you when I do.

Rough translation: “Black people! I’ve written about maybe one brown person in the history of this blog so get excited! They’re in hot pants! They wear leopard! And OMG LIKE SO MUCH GOLD JEWELRY YOU GUYS I CAN’T.”

Ahem. I’m not suggesting Brooks’ post is racist, or that she is herself is a bigot of any form (and I know this because she celebrates the taste of people from a variety of racial backgrounds in her book, I Love Your Style). But in her zeal to commend the Black women who wait on her at Miss Lily’s, she ends up condescending to them. Whether or not Brooks realizes this (and she probably doesn’t, God help her), her commentary on the style of these women singles out their Blackness and links their personal style to it inextricably.

Was it really necessary to point out that these women are Black no less than three times in the space of 60 words? It was not. And yet there are the references to their skin color, right alongside the laudatory opining about those goddamn hot pants. The effect of this is to separate the really good style of this handful of women from the really good style of all women. Per Brooks’s assessment, being Black and stylish and being any other race and stylish are separate distinctions, and one simply must hoot and holler and blog whenever one spots a Black person wearing a pleasantly gaudy amount of jewelry.

Granted, this isn’t exactly on the scale of the Jackie magazine scandal, but it’s still not great. Fashion (well, specifically, the wearing of clothes) is something all people have in common — and good style should be a force for bringing people together, not pointing out the Grace Jones-sized differences between and among us.

Amanda Brooks Miss Lily's Rachel Tension

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=535667505 Anonymous

Oye
Anonymous

http://goo.gl/b7I22
Blaquemamba

Shania Twain has . This is a look that had solidified itself in pup culture decades ago. I suspect Brooks had completely forgotten about it, having been distracted by the overwhelming blackness of the staff… in a Jamaican restaurant.
Don’tQuitYourDayJob

Okay, I get it, Rachel Tension = Racial Tension. It appears that you have the rare ability to read peoples’ minds. Good to know the Thought Police are alive and well and living at Styleite.
Blaquemamba

Shania Twain has already OWNED the hooded head-to-toe leopard look. If you say her name, that’s the image I conjure up in my head. I suspect Brooks had completely forgotten about it, having been distracted by the overwhelming blackness of the staff… in a Jamaican restaurant.
Blaquemamba

see below.
Nospam

She’s being visually descriptive not condescending. It sounds like the new author is ultra-sensitive and looking for problems where they exist not.
http://www.etsy.com/shop/graysonmae GraysonMae

Here is the test: replace every usage of the word “black” with the word “white”. It would sound strange, right? You’d think it was strange for her to point that out and not just once, but several times. I’m sure she was well-intentioned, but it does sound like she’s writing about another species that she’s studying in its natural habitat or something.
http://taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com/ Taste_is_Sweet

Unfortunately, it’s not the intent that matters, but the result of that intent. I’m certain that Ms. Brooks didn’t mean to be in any way condescending in her post, but that’s what came across anyway. As another commentator clarifies below, the problem is that Ms. Brooks is so keen on specifically pointing out that everyone is *black* and stylish, not just stylish, as if the former would normally preclude the latter and therefore needs a special mention.
Anonymous

Rachel Tension, huh? How novel. You might want to think about changing your moniker to Amanda Brooks the 2nd though, you both seem to be on the same, “lets mock people of color”, level.
http://www.physassist.com/ Arnetta Heinz

Don’t you hate it when privileged white people try to be complimentary of another race and completely miss the mark? Because I hate it when privileged white people try to be complimentary of another race and completely miss the mark.

Amanda Brooks Serves Condescension to Stylish Black Waitstaff

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