Note to Fashion World: Michelle Obama Is Black

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Womens’ Wear Daily commissioned top designers to ‘dress’ Michelle Obama in her role as First Lady. I’m with Slate’s Julia Turner: Why’d so many draw her as a shiksa?

I get that these drawings are stylizations but, to design for someone individually sorta requires you to deal with their skin tone, right? Would they drape a ‘winter’ in ‘summer’ colors? A few of the drawings make her downright Nubian, but a suspicious few too many have re-imagined her no darker than a color best described as “geisha”.

Why? When they design for white folks, do the skin tones in the drawings vary far from alabaster? One hates to get all psychological on a Thursday, but are these artists ‘helping’ her by making her whiter (and thus ‘capable’ of beauty) or are they so squeamish in imagining a sister in couture that they have to whitewash her to make her ‘worthy’ of high fashion?

Check out the drawings yourself. Maybe I’m overreacting.

Nah. We’re looking at some Freudian slips here.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

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So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

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