Meet Zoe Saldana, Hollywood's Token Brown Girl

If there's any situation that personifies the media's continued dismissal of all people not white, it's the case of Zoe Saldana. The fierce Dominicana is everywhere these days, including on the covers of three national magazines: Nylon, Glamour, and Essence, thanks to her leading role in Avatar. I say dismissal because she's been around for over a decade and appeared in popular films like Guess Who? and Star Trek, but until now hasn't garnered the mainstream media attention of her white peers. But even amongst all the warm and fuzzies of her success, there's an ugliness to the media coverage she's receiving.

Just peep at the differences between her interviews with the three pubs. First up, Essence, a mag for African-American women, went the traditional route and asked her about love, sex and power in Hollywood. Standard lady mag fare, really. Her second cover, Glamour, did things a lot differently. First off, she shared the cover with two other women: Gossip Girls star Leighton Meester and Big Love's Amanda Seyfried. This, in itself, is weird. She's the star of the highest grossing movie of all time and she can't even get her own cover? It's pudding proof of what older Black women always told me growing up, that non-Whites have to work twice as hard for half the benefit in our fair nation.

In the measly sidebar the magazine allotted her interview, they accused her of being defensive about race, asking, "In the past, you've bristled on the topic of race. Why?" to which she replied, "Because ethnic is a word that doesn't exist in my vocabulary ... So when [someone says] I look 'dark,' I say, 'Dark compared to whom? This is just my skin.'" Can I say how much I love that answer? Mainstream media and Hollywood are so used to everything being skewed through the lens of white-ness that it's about time someone shook things up.

And over at Nylon, a fashion magazine that hasn't featured a non-white cover girl in seven years, they asked her similar questions about being brown, and she replied with similarly fantastic quotes. The ladies at Jezebel pointed out what I'd been thinking as well: that all of the mainstream media attention continually paints Zoe as an other: someone exotic and non-normal. Per the media, she's the token brown girl of the young Hollywood set.

It's similar to the treatment America Ferrera constantly receives regarding her weight. Being somewhere between a size eight and a size ten, she's smaller than the average American, yet she's paraded out as some sort of female anomaly because she's larger than some of her peers. But what confuses me is these magazines, especially hypocrites like Glamour, that constantly champion themselves as some sort of real-women-self-esteem vehicles, have the other completely wrong. America's demographics are rapidly changing, not just in regards to ethnicity and culture, but also body size and worldview, so the usual magazine cover girls are the real others, not Zoe.

Photo credit: uvw916a