If you have not heard yet, last month Sean Puffy Combs, P-Diddy or whatever he goes by these days had a promotion casting call for Ciroc Vodka, a brand he will be promoting for up to $100 million in compensation. The casting call asked that models be “white, Hispanic or LIGHT-SKINNED African-American women, 5 feet 6 inches or taller and no larger than a size 7. Notice the blatant exclusion of dark-skinned sisters? Obviously, this caused an uproar and Puffy released a clean-up statement saying “He loves women of all shades” and that his camp had nothing to do with the ad. I can’t prove whether he had anything to do with it or not but it doesn’t seem far-fetched for Puffy. The fact that a Black man could send out a casting call for women who are supposed to be perceived as beautiful and appealing and exclude an entire portion of his own race is troubling to say the least. Notice there were no restrictions on the white or Hispanic women.                                                                                   

What’s even more troubling is that Puffy does not stand alone in such idiotic statements in the hip-hop…no make that rap community. Last year rapper “Yung Berg” caught flack for referring to dark -skinned sisters as “dark butts.” I honestly cringe as I write this. He went on to say that he doesn’t deal with dark butts and that he has a pool test that says if a woman doesn’t look the same or better after she comes out of the pool then she’s not attractive. That is awful. These are words Black men use to describe their own women. These are words coming from our “brothers?” Wow. He got a lot of negative responses as a result of this and of course he tried to clean it up. Kanye West made a reference to his love of mixed women who he referred to as “mutts.” Pharrell was accused of not having dark-skinned sisters in his videos. Need I go on?

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