I'm t T and I'm Zakiyah and this is Dope Labs. Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore science with pop culture and a healthy dose of friendship. We've been seeing some of our favorite you know, media stars, are some of our favorite black girl media stars getting
kind of bullied on the internet. Yes, I mean from Ayisha Curry talking about how she is struggling with being thrust into this whole world of being Stephen Curry's wife, very very young and being a mother and not really being able to find herself. Serena Williams with her foray into the golp Ones, Kiki Palmer, people have really been ganging up on her. It just feels like the list goes on and on, and black women and media are never given the race that a lot of their white
counterparts get. And I think that that is something that is systemic. We see it across a lot of cultures where the darker your skin is, the harder people are on you, and it just makes living in your day to day more precarious because you are hyper aware of how you're existing in every space. The darker your skin is. Yeah, I think, you know, One of the things we've talked
about is the democratization of media. It used to be television and just a few channels, but with opening up access to share messages and the ability to respond to the people sharing messages, we didn't start fresh. We came with the same drama we've had all these years ago, your mama's drama, your grandmama's drama, your great grandmother Listen,
it's still here mm hm exactly. And so I think when we think about this, I think we kind of want to know what is the path, what has the path look like, and where should we be looking for it to go. I think that was a great what do we know and what do we want to know? I think we can jump straight into the resitation. Our guest today is icon Mikayla Angela Davis. She has a long career in fashion and journalism. If you feel like you don't know who this is, google her you know.
Who she is.
She's an image activist who describes her work as examining how identity, race, gender, beauty, and style intersect with black culture and mainstream media. She co wrote the bestseller The Meaning of Mari Carrie and co created the documentary series The Hairtails, which puts a spotlight on black hair and identity in contemporary culture. Mikayla has won a ton of awards and is a living legend. Mikayla, thank you so much for joining us today. Let's jump straight into your book, Tenderheaded.
Your book starts with the retelling of your first day of second grade when a group of older girls surrounded you and had a girl to hold a pair of scissors, and then they tried to cut your hair. I don't want to give away too much because it is a great story, but just no, your brain survived the attempt at jumping. Can you talk to us about how that has shifted your perspective of what it means to be a black woman?
The Hairtail. It's interesting because I've been using hair as a thesis as an organizing principle to talk about black women's identity, humanity, and culture. My first day of school at all black school, that I couldn't wait. I couldn't wait to be with all black girls, right I was little, you know, and having that near death experience around my hair.
You know, that was a pivotal moment because the story could have been these black girls are mean they don't like me because I'm light skinned and I got long hair, and that's it, right, or the choice I made was something's going on with us, and they are not gonna cut me out of the Black girls society. I'm gonna watch my bat hence on the cover, you see how my hair is doubled up. I did that after that incident because I'm like, they're not gonna cut my hair,
but they're also not gonna cut me out. And so that kind of became a way of being because I knew that my hair and my skin was complicated and how it confounded and complicated and triggered things in other Black girls. And it was one of the reasons why I wanted to layer in history also in Tender Headed, so that we can also understand the context in which
black women were organized. It was there was strategy around us being in conflict with each other, right, there's policy, there was propaganda, there were practices and laws around color cast system, and so it was really important for me to kind of dig into that history.
For those of you that don't know, colorism is a racial distinction within the African American community that further fragments blackness based on skin tone, and there's a hierarchy associated with your proximity to whiteness. So the more Eurocentric your features are, the more privilege you receive. So we want to talk to you, MICHAELA, about the history of colorism and how it showed up in your life and in your work.
I grew up in DC and I went to high school at Duke Gallingy School of the Arts, and so that was a very different experience. Had I gone to another kind of school, I probably would have experienced the color cast system because it gets around teens. But we were united around being artists, so I didn't get that.
It really came to fruition once I started working in media and working in fashion, because I'm very clear that my proximity to whiteness and my how I presented got me to be in certain spaces in a certain way. And I'm also aware of the legacy of people like Angela Davis, other light skinned radical women who we can't go in and change the DNA, but when we get in a room, we're gonna bring as many black girls with like. So I'm from that school. So that was
part of why I wanted history in this book. For instance, The first quote unquote American it girl was an enslaved child named Ida who was very, very, very fair. Abolitionists took a photo of her with a pretty dress, her hair slicked down, her hand, on a stack of books and sold this image and basically was saying slavery was wrong because look how close to us it can get. Not slavery is wrong because it's a violent, brutal crime against humanity. But there are some enslaved people that are
so light, so close to white. So that began the propaganda of light skinned closer to the master society, closer to the freedom of black people, like this notion that we could save the race. But even more diabolical TTY is that by the end of the Antebellum era, ten percent of all formally enslaved people were at the term I'm going to use the terms mulatto right, So that means there were six hundred thousand empirical pieces of evidence
of serial rape against black women. So that population was at the time more disgraced than the enslaved that were not missed because they were proof of rape. There was no other explanation for their existence. And these are children that came out of black women's bodies, and that's often
lost in the conversation. Right, these are still children of black women, and so what happened was in an attempt to sort of reshape the narrative out of being in this shame space of product of rape, it ballooned into that they were better and privileged. And that ballooning of that propaganda at the time. This is media. So it started in the antebellum era of selling this notion that light skin and particularly girls were favorable. So that's what
we're having to grapple with. We're grappling with history and media and propaganda.
So with this history of colorism, you saw it continue to manifest throughout your work. Mainstream media was prioritizing lighter skinned women.
I remember in the time when I was working music videos, you could not cast a brown skinned girl and there was no response, no public response to that. So we've made progress because at least there's a glad bag and there's a record, and there's some education. But what I offer this, is it a privilege to be at odds with your sister? Is it a privilege to be set apart?
So how do we make progress and shift the way that things are.
So I'm hoping we have more complex conversations around these notions, around colorism and privilege. What I hope this book does is get us in conversation with each other, because black women are going to save this world if it can be saved, absolutely, and so we need to heal ourselves.
It feels new and fresh when folks are saying, oh, Lupita Nyungo is so beautiful, and so is Isa Ray, and so are these dark skinned black women, and that there was a time where this it was just not possible to be characterized as beautiful when you were dark skinned. And so if feels like we're making those incremental changes, but then it also feels like we're still being held back when it comes to the images that we see.
And you are an image activist, can you unpack what that means to you today, especially in a media ecosystem that is driven by algorithms, clicks and the spectacle of it all.
I a long time ago put all my chips on black women, like all of them. And if there's any group in this population that is going to work to become whole, it's black women. So I'm very encouraged by the Independent media that black women are making and making, so whether it's on Instagram or TikTok, there's so many other places to go. It's not just back in the day where it's like just MTV. You know, you were
like where big pop culture was happening. Because that's what we're really talking about, right, this pop culture and how it influences us. And you know, I was making magazines like Vibe and Honey and magazines were Instagram and so it's so much to consume. And I'm still exploring this because it's challenging these times because it's just so much, so fast, and black women are being targeted in a way like if we And this is also where history
is so instructive. I think part of our revolution and liberation and healing is coming together irl, like in real life, you know, putting down the media, putting down the phones. Just you know what brunch looks like. You get a brunch and you see all these black girls dressed up. You just get like something and you just flutters and flourishes.
The vibes are always just right.
Yes, So we have to take care of our mental and emotional self because it's tough right now.
Absolutely absolutely, you know, you briefly mentioned your work with magazines, and I want to talk about that a little bit because I feel like magazines are the lost art. I am old enough to remember picking up a Vibe magazine my uncle used to have them at his house, or picking up Essence and living through the pages and just like loving every bit of it. And it was also the first time I was really seeing like black women high fashion shoots.
You know.
And in the book you talk about the rise and challenges of black media institutions like Vibe and Essence. Can you talk more about why that form of black media was so important during that time and what it meant to Black folks who were experiencing those magazines.
It was so powerful because for generations, even though Black people knew they were innovators and culture specifically not only That's why I love Evan like vintage Ebony will give you life. And God blessed the Astrogates who has kept the archive in Chicago. Bless that artist, because it's really important to see all the black progress and innovation. But in culture, we had never had a record that we wrote specifically, and hip hop was that rocket, right because
we had money, we had some positionality. We had some agency, so we had a chance to in our own tongues, with our own eyes create you know, si Like while there was a rolling Stone and a spin and a billboard, there's vibe, you know. And so it was very powerful that you didn't have to wait to be anointed to be on the color of Rolling Stone as a black artist, and that we would talk critically about Snoop or right really like spent a month investigating Lauren Hill. That was important.
And we had something to run to. I remember back in the day, like you would run to get your write old magazine, but that was like people you know this this was like critical journalism, top rate photography, new trends. We were the leaders. We got in front of pop culture.
So it was monumental and it was too short. But I actually have been in the process of writing the book, especially that part, experienced some grief around the fact that we don't have a town square in media in that way, like there's lots of small, great pockets, whether they're podcasts or subjects or whatever, like you would look to essence.
Right, we aren't all coalescing around one big correct.
Yeah, but I'm very I'm sad that we don't have a vibe or a honey or an essence that has a real presence in the culture.
So if someone is listening to you right now and they're saying I want to get into media, whether it's social media, print, editorial, you know, whatever the format, what advice do you have for them.
Well, you know, we're actually trying to do in the work right now because part of writing the book. And this is just my perspective, right Like, there are a lot of other I'm sure there're gonna be some editors are going to come for me because I came for them. But I just wanted something on record that we could reflect on together because I don't know. What I do know is that we're always seeds, right like, we always find something else. I just don't know what it is.
But part of why I wanted a record of what happened from what I saw to partly be a cautionary tale. The money, the patriarchy, the lack of support. When I was contributing to Vanity.
Fair, I was just about to bring that up.
More than fifty percent of their photoshoots would be canned. The amount of money that they put in the trash was my entire photo budget for Honey, So there was no room for experimentation. There's no room for black girl imagination. We just had to hit the track and win before they even saw we were out there running. And the
advertising industry is notoriously racist. Hip hop helped break some of that up, but as you see it for tracks like there's a moment where we're hot, and you know, I had several friends this is kind of bleak, but I had several friends that said, like George Floyd was their executive producer, Like they got their shows done or their organizations funded because of George Floyd. And the guilt
not that's over, they're taking DEI. So we're always vulnerable if we only look to establishment, and that's why history is really really instructive. Absolutely, so I hope to have many of these cross gen conversations so we can have some strategy about how to build and maybe how to perhaps recover and restore. Very early on, I started an esthetic practice of looking at life and beauty not through
a Eurocentric lens. That is harder than it sounds, particularly with you know, if I'm coming of age in the eighties and nineties and I'm looking at Vogue because I was a fashion girl, like I looked to that fashion in art. There's a photographer that I referenced a lot in the book, Ruven Fonnador, who's brilliant and he's Colombian,
and he too didn't work from a Eurocentric lens. So what that means, how that plays into real life or when I was contributing to Vanity Fair, is that when we and we often did things together, we did not create images through their lens and they didn't quite know it. They knew something cool was happening, but we also did it at the level of craft that they were accustomed to, right, meaning our tech nicole, our craft was on par and
maybe even superior. So if one is wanting to work in the mainstream wherever that is fashion, law, tech, science, come with your own lens and look, you know, because science and science however, the scientist is right, you know what I mean, the body of the person through which this information flows. Absolutely So I think that that was the strategy and I worked on it for years and
again it wasn't easy. So that's important for us to consume the beauty of us, whether it's art, whether it's soul trained whether it's reading books.
You know, Michaela, I think this is such a great point. I think something that folks grapple with is being one of one in a room and trying to push the envelope and being a little afraid of being ostracized because they're coming with a different perspective that might not be accepted by the mainstream media.
What are you afraid of? Because we're so familiar in white spaces. We know their history, we know their institutions, we know their tricks. Why are we bothered? And not so much bothered because it's annoying because it is the same tricks, But why are we afraid? We know who they are? They don't know who we are. We have a lot of power. If we didn't, they wouldn't try to take our vote. If they didn't, they wouldn't try to take our jobs. If they didn't, they wouldn't try to take our titles.
I really loved everything that Michaela had to say. It really gives a fresh perspective on her because she's definitely a black woman who I feel like I've seen my whole life. And to hear her stories, her personal stories about her life and the work that she's done, and how as a photo activist, how she's been able to kind of disrupt the system. I think it's really encouraging because it doesn't end with her. She's passing the torch on to the next generation and we can already see
the shifts happening right in front of us. So true. Tt SO, I think when we look at media and we're on social media or looking in magazines or watching movies, that we should always keep in mind that there's a long history of the treatment of women of color, specifically black women, that we also need to be remembering. And so when you see a black woman being talked about in the media, ask yourself a few questions like is she being treated fairly? Is this the same treatment that
a white woman would receive? And if you don't feel like it is, call it out because this is how we make strides. It's when people say this isn't right and we need to be different, we need to be better. You can find us on X and Instagram at Dope Labs podcast tt is on X and Instagram at dr Underscore t Sho, and you can find zakiya at z said so. Dope Labs is a production of Lamanada Media. Our supervising producer is Keegan Zimma and our producer is
Issara Asevez. Dope Labs is sound designed, edited and mixed by James Farber. Limanada Media's Vice President of Partnerships and Production is Jackie Dansinger. Executive producer from iHeart Podcast is Katrina Norvil. Marketing lead is Alison Kanter. Original music composed and produced by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex sugi Ura, with additional music by Elijah Harvey. Dope Labs is executive produced by us T T show Dia and Zakiah Watki