December 2000

Did you know that clip-art is racist, sexist, all those "isms" we've been trying to eradicate in our own lives for decades (if not longer)? I sort of knew this, because of classes on teaching technical writing where we were urged to encourage students who were making manuals not to use clip art because it rarely represented any world other than the white, European, often male world of popular advertising prior to the 1960's.

Why is clip-art still such a white world? Clip art is art that is in the public-domain. That means anyone can use it for free, without paying what can sometimes be prohibitive costs for anything anyone would want to protect (or keep making money off of). An awful lot of it comes from old commercial advertising, from companies that have let the permission on the images lapse. But other art is often too expensive for the average user-- and hence, we reproduce the -isms because we have no other choice.

For example, for a conference in which I am involved, we considered using a famous image by a great artist as our program logo. It seemed to perfectly fit our theme, and was just plain cool. We managed to track down the people who held the copyrights (not an easy task, I promise) who then agreed to let us use the image. However, the cost was incredibly high for us-- in the thousands. What we wound up using was a little more diverse than a lot of clip art, but was still mostly white people.

The point of this is that recently, to try and promote a wider group of readers and writers for this zine (headed up mostly by the white feminist academics who are critiqued as being "in charge" and repeating the domination of the patriarchy for women whose color and class are not as privileged) I was looking for images of women of color to put on the site. I've tried this before-- the fact that I can't seem to find any is why mostly I try for colors other than realistic (the green and purple women on my sites) and for neo-classic type of images. But I thought I'd try again-- and with my specific intent heightening my awareness, I was amazed. Running through an incredibly large collection (over 300,000 images included) I found repeated over and over again the white, smiling, mostly blue-eyed women of 1950's advertising. (Why the image of the housewife is so over-represented is troubling too, in a different way). According to clip art producers, the ideal of beauty, it seems, is still one of the happy suburban housewife, aproned, pulling a cake from the oven and grinning a perfectly lipsticked (vacant? valiumed?) smile.

A lot of the art I find is great-- showing flapper-esque women with their hair bobbed, grinning confidently, legs akimbo-- I love the self-confidence and flamboyance of this 1920-30's era stuff-- but they are still almost exclusively white women and I want to use something that represents a wider world of women.

When women of color did appear in the clip art, they were represented either in stereotypical ways or in "exotic" costume. African-American women rarely appeared, but often Asian, Hawaiian, Native-American and Latina women were shown. But they were invariably dressed in exotic "native" costume. While white women were shown in a variety of activities, from the previously mentioned cake baking to dancing and smoking cigarettes, women of color were (mostly) only shown posed, like the covers of National Geographic, as the "Other." One image of a presumably African women showed her, cartoon-like, carrying a big bunch of bananas on her head and grinning a gap-toothed smile.

This is shocking to me-- and distressing. How can I show diverse images of women of color, who I would like to feel included in the community I am trying to build here-- without reproducing the conditions of bias and negative stereotypes, of "the exotic other," that I am trying to combat? I certainly cannot do this using clip art, apparently.

SO-- If you know of, or are, an artist who features women of color in your work, please contact me to be featured on the website. I would like a few images, spread here and there, aesthetically blending somewhat (perhaps in a neo-classic style?) with what we already have, but I am open to suggestion.

Women Writers, Editor

p.s. after getting a defensive letter from someone who makes clip art, who said basically "hey, it's free, and I can't publish free words in my art without getting sued, so get over it"-- I want to say that I am not necessarily bashing the artists who make these collections. I realize that the art that is collected there is subject to its time period, and the specific desires of whoever commissioned the original work, etc. etc. And I realize also that a simple picture of a woman in a kitchen does not a sexist make.... but, realize, that in accumulation, as a collection, you must look at the general observable trends--- under which my argument bears out.