“Black Girl Magic” is the universal term used by Black women to celebrate the broad scope of our magnificence. It’s our special way of uplifting and confirming our own beauty and that of our fellow sisters —so how did we get here?
It seems that as straight forward of a phrase as it may seem, the meaning of “Black Girl Magic” has been misconstrued and misused to the highest degree via online retailer Zazzle.com.
According to Yahoo Style, beauty blogger Jackie Aina was the first to call out this weird instance of white models rocking Black Girl Magic t-shirts and Black Twitter followed suit with vigor.
Many pointed out that this incident may be a result of sellers using default models to advertise their designs but that alone brings several questions to mind including but certainly not limited to —why are the default models white?
The retailer cleared up the confusion via a statement to Yahoo Style saying,
“Each designer is shown a series of pre-posed randomized model shots upon which their design is placed. It’s always possible that gender, race and other attributes of the model do not match up to the specifics of the design, given the ratio of our millions of designs to the 100 or so t-shirt styles we offer. At Zazzle, we’re committed to diversity and are working on increasing the diversity of the pre-posed model shots and the t-shirt range itself.”
Zazzle, it looks like someone needs to get to work on providing a diverse model base asap because it has clearly become a dire situation.
In the meantime, the gifs used on Aina’s thread are classic and should be saved for future questionable transgressions — since we all know they’re coming.
