Essence<\/em>, that started to celebrate the beauty and style of women with diverse body types and different skin tones (often ignored by other publications), offers a position to a woman who doesn’t have the same experience of opening a magazine and not seeing any faces similar to her own, naturally there will be questions.<\/p>\nUltimately, the only one that really matters is if\u00c2\u00a0 Placas will be able to connect with readers. According to Burt-Murray, she already has, and has done a great job at it.<\/p>\n
While there are undoubtedly talented black candidates who could have been considered, one thing critics assumeis that black women’s style is a monolithic entity – and it’s not. Before Lady Gaga, black singers like Kelis (and Grace Jones before both) were wearing avant-grade, eye-catching clothes. While remarkable, their style wasn’t representative of the majority of black women in the same way that Lady Gaga’s style doesn’t represent the majority of white women. On a personal note, although I grew up in a household with subscriptions to Essence<\/em>, I – a black woman (teen at the time), didn’t always find something I could connect with. Suede, a magazine from the same publishers, and one that I miss to this day, appealed to me far more. Placas may not understand being black, but when it comes to style, that doesn’t mean she can’t connect with a black audience. Specifically, the black audience that reads Essence<\/em>.<\/p>\nFor the talented black candidates who may understand being black, but may not have been able to connect with the Essence<\/em> audience, we do hope that more publishers follow in Essence<\/em>‘s footsteps and hire based on talent and ability to connect with an audience, rather than the perceived advantages of hiring a familiar face.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In case you’ve missed the controversy, here’s a quick recap. Essence is a magazine that’s targeted towards African-American women. They’ve been searching for a fashion editor since March. They recently chose Ellianna Placas, a white editor who had former positions at O: The Oprah Magazine and celebrity weekly US Weekly. Before being named to the position, Placas contributed to the magazine on a freelance basis. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[4139,4140,4141,4138,4137],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14806"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14806"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14815,"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14806\/revisions\/14815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}