Via Pickled Politics:
A particularly typical example of liberal guilt “we-feel-sorry-for-you” racism. You see they would have liked to to put a black model on the front but she just would not have sold as many copies. So they used a druggie.
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Maybe it is worth noting that similar controversy erupted around Ali G a while back (“is it cos I is black“). Where the point was made that in Britain blackness is most definitely cool and edgy amongst the young. There is a similar frisson here. From the Guardian article I just linked to:

“Is he a white man impersonating a black man or a white man impersonating a white man impersonating a black man? One could reasonably be interpreted as a joke on the black community which conveys black male culture as misogynistic and ignorant; the other is a joke on that section of the white community who over-identify with black culture and make themselves look ridiculous in the process. One feeds a long-established prejudice against a minority; the other highlights a relatively recent phenomenon among a majority.”

But the potency that you associate with the edginess is perhaps the real point here. The traditional celebrity causes are seen to be passe, overwrought, middle-aged dull, post Live-8. It’s all too safe, and too easily ignored.

What does it mean to be African? Shouldn’t we be debating the meaning of race and ethnicity rather than slagging off clueless ivory tower celebrities?

Iman (born in Somalia) is behind the campaign – her take is that it is a play on modern human origins and shared DNA (see: http://www.keepachildalive.org/)

“As we live our lives in the West, perhaps we forget our origins. It is well known that each of us originated from Africa from our African ancestors. Indeed it was these incredible people who traveled far and wide and whose genes are in all of us…I have appealed to various celebrities to show their African roots in the I AM AFRICAN campaign…to appear in a modern take of African tribal make up.”

I dont really have much of an opinion yet – still thinking about it. But the power of images sure is interesting.

And indeed this must be what the nice people at the Independent must have thought – sticking Kate Moss on the front page and relegating their “stories from a continent in turmoil” to the inside of the newspaper, with portrait of Moss’s ‘alter ego’ Lentenk’iel of Eritrea on page three.

Now, honestly, what does shiny, blacked up Moss tell us about the plight of HIV/Aids in Africa? Through the act of ‘blacking up’ how much better did she understand ‘their’ conditions? The very need to remind us that this is “NOT A FASHION STATEMENT” makes me think that in fact this IS a fashion statement and nothing else.

If there’s one thing that lies at the heart of the anthropological enterprise is the fundamental assumption of the human capacity for cross-cultural understanding. Empathy to use a word much in vogue at the moment. I doubt that people in the ‘West’ can only connect through their own ALLEGED cultural co-ordinates (and Kate Moss certainly does not feature in mine).

I shall point you then in the direction of an article published on the Guardian the day after the Indipendent’s ‘red’ issue and that calls into question the use of ‘blacked-up’ Moss on the front page:
“What exactly is this picture of Moss-as-African-woman supposed to portray? I suppose it is meant to be subversive, but what does it say about race today when a quality newspaper decides that its readers will only relate to Africa through a blacked-up white model rather than a real-life black woman?”

The article also provides an interesting brief history of ‘blacking-up’ in British media and can be found at http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1878299,00.html

On the other hand, from a marketing point of view I can kinda see the logic. There are studies which show that when a non-white person appears on TV, somebody like Fareed Zakaria, people switch channels. Similarly, Hollywood movies about non-white people invariably feel a need to have a white person mediate the strangeness of the “other.” That is one reason why films set in the third world always have a white character who is either the hero or a close friend of the hero. In this case, such images of “virtual” Africans are really a way to mediate the strangeness the target white audience is expected to feel when looking at a real African.

At the same time, one can make a good argument that the best way to combat such reactions is to acclimate the audience to seeing real Africans on a daily basis. Maybe if we did that, people would be less willing to sit back and allow another Rwanda or Darfur…