So ‘Precious’ star Gabourey Sibide made the October cover of ELLE magazine, but instead of celebrating that remarkable achievement, critics choose to complain that the cover was Photoshopped to make Gabby light skinned.
So what? Doesn’t Beyonce Photoshop her skin to look lighter all the time and she’s not even dark skinned?
…there’s something off in Sidibe’s cover photo. Sidibe’s skin is noticeably lighter than usual. Elle clearly couldn’t handle Sidibe’s real skin color, and traded away her actual color for something dramatically lighter.
It’s a common, tired practice, and the routine is well-practiced: beauty companies and fashion magazines regularly lighten women’s skin (and darken the faces of black men), pissed off consumers shout back, and sometimes an apology is issued. But come the next fall collection or election season, photo retouchers are inevitably back to trying to make women of color more attractive by lightening them, and darkening the skin of men of color to make them seem more dangerous and suspect. Color, still, is everything.
The writer also disparages ELLE magazine for “cropping Sidibe’s cover photo so close” in order to hide her full-figured body, which the writer called a “travesty.”
I guess it doesn’t matter that ELLE bucked a longstanding fashion industry tradition of treating dark skinned heavy set women like they didn’t exist.
I choose to celebrate the fact that Gabby — a dark skinned, full-figured woman — made the cover of ELLE. Especially after shock jock Howard Stern famously announced that Gabourey Sidibe would never work again because she was “the most enormous fat black chick” he’d ever seen.
Good for Gabby! 
