PW Tight Fisted Afro Picks Sparks Racial Complaints

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The 1999 image, pickin', by Lauren Kelley

Am I missing something or are we becoming too overly sensitive. The 1999 image, pickin', by Lauren Kelley caused a spark on the blogosphere on Monday after the recent copy of Publisher Weekly (PW) used it on their magazine cover.

Pickin' is a photograph of a black woman whose hair is full of Afro picks, the famous metal afro hair-comb of the 1970s, complete with plastic handle in the form of a black power fist. The afro picks are arranged in an African American woman’s hair to create a kind of giant sculptural Afro hair-do and the woman is leaning slightly forward to give the viewer a better look at the quirky artificially created hair-pick crown.

The image was used on the front cover of a new book by Deborah Willis, Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, a collection of carefully chosen photographs intended to highlight the physical and cultural beauty of African-American life.

According to PW senior news editor, Calvin Reid, “The resulting response to the choice of that particular image and that coverline was not anticipated by the person most closely involved with this week’s cover. That person was me, I organize, edit, and oversee the annual feature story on black books. I chose the cover in collaboration with the magazine's creative director and I wrote the coverline, Afro Picks!, which was intended as a pun to highlight a story that “picked” new black titles of interest.”

The exact coverline text for the image is: Afro Picks! New Books and Trends in African-American Publishing and it refers to the feature story “African-American Books in Today’s Marketplace,” a look at the current marketplace for black books written by Felicia Pride.

Link to ChocolateCity.cc

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