handful-ofdust:

thepowerofblackwomen:

Laverne Cox as Leontyne Price and Josephine Baker for Cosmopolitan, October 2016

At least some of the criticism Cox has gotten for these tributes (especially the one of Baker) tends to collapse if we simply admit up front that Cox has a perfect right to dress like other women she admires because she is a woman. Not to mention that to reproduce Baker’s knowing parody of period-specific racism is not in any way to endorse it, any more than Baker herself seeming to cooperate with the image of herself as a “savage” and turning that into a way to triumph over her own period-specifically racist audience was entirely “about” endorsing their assumptions, rather than parodying them. To sum up: things are often just a little bit more complicated than we maybe want to think they are, both in these cases and in general.