Keeping Up with the Kardashians is really a hegemonic phenomenon that is pop-cultural and it’s also crucial to understanding race, anti-Blackness, and desire in the usa today. Let’s turn to the first scene of the first episode of KUWTK. The family reacts to mother Kris Jenner’s (nee Houghton’s) remark that Kim Kardashian possesses lot of “junk into the trunk. with telenovela-style jump cuts from Kardashian face to Jenner face” Her remark jests, and it also reveals that Kim includes a photo shoot the overnight. Rather than eating from the fridge, perhaps Kim should fast and reduce her “jiggles.” Remarkable in this firstly 1000s of seductively unremarkable KUWTK scenes is the way the white, domestic parlor setting around Kim’s white ass secures Kim’s non-Blackness, which, through time, has guaranteed her and her sisters’ highly financialized ability to play with nonwhite racialization’s fleshy forms and profitability, especially for the consumption of those who find themselves non-Black.
This all-American, foundationally non-Black family members gathers around a provided hearth: Kim Kardashian’s physicality, her human body. Along with her human anatomy, she plays with flesh, but never ever risks a disfiguration of self that could make her not white, never risks putting by herself beyond the appropriate and agreement that is social she is, indeed, possessed of humanity. 1
Right Here, in the 1st easy moments for the show’s 13 several years of product, we see the fundamental—and morally sinister—emollients of this show’s racial palate. We also view a foreshadowing of the metamorphosing that is highly of Kardashian multiracialism: the family and the show’s multiracialism are, earnestly, anti-Black.
The Kardashians certainly are a prime exemplory instance of multiracial supremacy that is white. 2 a business venture posing as a family, the Kardashians are hell-bent on extracting economic gain from Black people and Ebony culture, even while they stigmatize, in particular, Black women through their task of multiracial whiteness.
To change “white supremacy” with “multiracial” could be the key to understanding the stakes regarding the Kardashian domestic kingdom, also its anti-Black physical violence. Simply speaking: they create raced reality and value for, perhaps not apart from, the homogeneous task of the (white) human. In addition they do so by aesthetically and biologically incorporating selective, “soft” variations on tropes of Blackness: be it in the form of an ass implant, a cheekbone restructuring, or even a mixed-race kid. They endlessly perform with competition. The siblings have completely reshaped their faces through surgeries to look like white, European stereotypes of different native people that are african and, simultaneously, Kim has recently become enthusiastic about social justice. For her 39th birthday, in October 2019, Kanye West donated $1 million in Kim’s title to four social-justice charities.
The latter just isn’t done to absolve the former, a lot less to “end anti-Black racism.” The kardashians profit from and play with the lived brutality of anti-Blackness for Black people on the contrary, from these simultaneous actions.
The numerous faces associated with Kardashians ( through which I also mean the Houghtons and also the Jenners) are, on their own, the many faces regarding the monstrous hydra of blackface. And these numerous faces should be critiqued up to a social halt. Any complicity (whether ethical or visual) in their personal accrual of Black social wealth—which is premised regarding the destruction of Ebony women’s vitality therefore the nefarious, distorting emulations of the forms—must be reckoned with.
Screenshot taken by the author
The Horror of Kardashian Multiracialism
What’s tricky concerning this argument is exactly how Kim’s physicality is really a non-Black formation that becomes multiracial, just as the final name Kardashian, into which the group of Houghtons, Jenners, and Kardashians congeal their public, domestic brand name. Such foundationally non-Black multiracialism is pivotal not only to your family’s billion-dollar enterprise, but also to modern anti-Blackness in america.
Revenue, in the show, is made of explicit types of white supremacy and anti-Blackness working together in a Western, white humanist project. Especially, this project positions people of African lineage as nonhuman and/or constitutively distinctive from white people, and dispossesses African down dating mobile diasporic tradition into systems of capitalist, generationally white value. Profit normally produced from liberalism—part of white supremacy’s dominion—and other guises that are harder-to-detect.
