Of Course People Hate It
Why The Grounded in the Stars Backlash Doesn’t Surprise Me
In today’s post:
QTNA Beauty & Pop Culture Questions
The Full Beat Of Course People Hate It: Why The Grounded in the Stars Backlash Doesn’t Surprise Me
What kind of strength does it take to face your abuser down in court? IDK baby, but Cassie has it. She should be applauded for her bravery.
Is it just my algorithm, or are there a lot of Black women getting nose jobs online? It started with this video, but since then, I’ve seen a lot of ethnic nose jobs on my fyp. The biggest difference between those and traditional rhinoplasty seems to be that there is a focus on maintaining some of the original shape. While I’m not anti-plastic surgery, but the idea of making one’s nose slightly less ethnic is…interesting.
Are you ready for the newest celebrity beauty line? This week’s celeb launch is from Savannah James, everyone’s favorite entrepreneur and basketball wife. Her brand reframe seems interesting: fun packaging, science-backed ingredients, and beauty veteran support. But, do we really need another celebrity’s $100 moisturizer?
Of Course People Hate It: Why The Grounded in the Stars Backlash Doesn’t Surprise Me
Typically, I shape my essays around a few core questions, but the only question I had about the “Grounded in the Stars” backlash was, “Why is anyone surprised?” If you aren’t familiar, there have been a ton of racist posts that reimagine the sculpture as Aunt Jemima or Photoshopped versions that show her holding fried chicken and watermelon. Similarly, some Black viewers have referred to the figure as monstrous and a mockery that shouldn’t represent Black women.
My question should be, why aren’t I surprised that people are bothered by the image? The easiest answer is that I, like the fictional bronze woman, am also a big tall Black woman. My lived experiences told me that people would not want to be confronted with such an image, especially towering 12 feet in the air.
Beyond my lived experiences, I spend a lot of time studying beauty and pop culture online and IRL. While thinness has always been foundational to our beauty standards, early 2000s thinness is in like low-rise jeans. When celebrities began to depuff, deflate, and dissolve their fillers for a gaunt look, we knew the tides were turning against the body diversity movement.
When the Ozempfluencers were asking us to click the link in their bios for easy access to their favorite semaglutide shots, we knew that the desire for thinness was growing. The past two years have reflected these changes through dips in body diversity on global runways. In 2024, Emma Davidson described major fashion shows as globally shifting away from body diversity, with 90%-100% straight-sized models (US 00-6) in many major shows. Specifically, plus-size models (US 14+) made up just 0.8 per cent and mid-size models (US 6-12) just 3.7 per cent of people cast across the four fashion cities this season. That’s within 230 shows and presentations, and amongst 8,800 looks.
But thinness isn’t the only reason people don’t like this statue. This fictional woman isn’t having fried chicken and watermelon Photoshopped onto her to signal anything about her diet. Her crime is that she is a fat and Black woman.
This shift, towards a Black femaleness that is thin, was also predictable. Visualize the rise in Black Girl Luxury content. The woman who comes to mind may be dressed in pale pink activewear, preening in a giant mirror, and admiring herself stretched out thinly on a reformer. Black femininity, especially in public digital spheres, is held to an even higher standard of beauty that is ever aspirational. I describe it as ever aspirational because one can be disqualified easily if they have dark skin, Black features, a fat body, etc.
In Lizzo’s most recent Instagram and TikTok posts, she poses in front of “Grounded in the Stars.” She wears a similar outfit and hairstyle, and draws a direct comparison between herself and the sculpture. Lizzo’s captions are direct quotes from a Katt Williams comedy special: “You can be fat… you can be black… but you can’t be no fat, black, BITCH.” Williams’ point was that Lizzo was receiving so much public hate, despite being largely unproblematic, simply because she was a fat Black woman.
Unlike Lizzo, the 12-foot figure isn’t real. This image of a woman is largely a figment of Price’s imagination. And, besides sharing some physical similarities with some women, she just is. Andrea Harris-Walker writes, By placing this everyday Black woman in one of the most iconic and visible places in the world, he [Price] is asking all of us to examine who we consider worthy of being monumentalized.
Price has an ongoing solo show in Hauser & Wirth titled “Resilience of Scale." All of the other pieces are like Grounded in the Stars in terms of what they represent and their large scale. According to the show’s official press release, Price’s bronzes honor everyday people by granting them the grand scale and material finish long central to Western traditions of monument making, a genre and medium historically reserved for members of the social, economic and cultural elite.
In Posing Modernity, Dr. Denise Murrell argues that the study of modernism is incomplete without full consideration of the Black female models that were featured in important works, beginning with Manet’s Olympia (1865). Laure, the Black woman in the corner, undergirds Dr. Murrell’s work. She writes that for 150 years, Laure was ignored by art historians as irrelevant to Manet’s perspective on gender, class, and law.
Dr. Murrell describes this history of ignoring Black women as “…institutional silence, or blindness, [which] can be seen to render depictions of blacks…as unimportant, unworthy of attention; seeing is both the physical act of looking and the cognitive processes that construct attention. The figure, therefore, in the absence of narratives that animate viewer curiosity and interest, becomes invisible even while in plain view.”
But what happens when people come into contact with such a figure, and are forced to see her? At 12 feet tall, she towers over them, her bronze cast gleams from every angle, and she looks past them unsmiling and beautiful.
How do people respond when such an image demands their attention and cannot be ignored? They get angry. Given what we know about how dark-skinned, fat, Black women are treated, are we truly surprised?