Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta star Spice went above and beyond to draw attention to her new album.
She purged her Instagram of old photos, and uploaded just a few new ones — in which she has blonde hair and is wearing, well, whiteface.
Spice promises that she has a perfectly good explanation for this controversial choice.
Erica Mena was arrested for drug possession and Stevie J barely avoided jail for being a deadbeat dad in a major way.
Unlike her co-stars, Spice isn’t in trouble with the law, but she sure is in trouble with some of her fans and followers.
See, she released her new mixtape.
One of the songs on it is titled “Black Hypocrisy.”
In order to promote that song in particular, she wiped the slate clean on Instagram and posted new pictures.
These new images all show Spice, well, looking white.
“Wow I can’t believe this, Spice!” wrote one fan.
That same fan continued: “What the F–K have you done?”
Another simply wrote: “Girl you look crazy af.”
“Anything for likes and views… sell out your own… Babylon has your soul,” lamented another in the funniest way possible.
“Enjoy your payment for selling your soul. This is the only attention I’ll ever pay you,” this commenter promised.
“Enjoy thinking you’re white,” that commenter concluded. “Despite your great grandparents.”
(Here is Spice with her natural skin)
Folks, Spice doesn’t hate her skin. She was promoting her song, “Black Hypocrisy.”
The song itself — which has an accompanying music video — is all about not only accepting, but loving one’s natural dark skin.
There is an epidemic of black people bleaching their skin to have lighter skin.
That’s more about colorism than trying to be white, and it is a problem in the Caribbean and in many part of Africa.
She even speaks about how she was told early in her career that she would have more success with lighter skin. It’s heartbreaking.
Some even blasted her for looking white, as if that were somehow equal to blackface. It is not.
The reality, of course, is that outside of a very few places — places like Japan — “whiteface” is not a problem.
The reason that blackface is so horrific and offensive is not because someone put on too much makeup — it is tied to the history of the practice.
White men used to put on performances in which they would wear blackface and then act and speak in a way that ridiculed real black people.
(And if you see someone in blackface today, the odds are pretty good that they’re aiming to make fun of someone, not making an attempt at flattery)
In history, blackface wasn’t just rude — it was a racist instrument of oppression.
What came to be called “Jim Crow laws” were named after one such blackface character.
Blackface represents a history of people of privilege punching down.
Whiteface, in America, has no such power because no one in the U.S. is marginalized for being white.
Again, there are places in the world — like Japan — where whiteface can be offensive because the history and dynamic is different.
It seems safe to say that Spice didn’t bleach her skin just to prove a point.
That would be a weird thing to do for a song in which she sings about loving the strong melanin of her skin.
Instead, we’re going to go out on a limb and say that she’s wearing a whole lot of makeup.
She is parodying the way that some people — including people within her own community — seem to believe that she should look.