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"Thanks for making me a model" - by Katrina Fleming
Growing up in a multiple race family, everyone was a unique beautiful tapestry woven out of features from almost every race. My grandmothers were strong: one of a Irish red head mulatto, the other French, Spanish, Indian and Black, My grandfathers both Native Americans one a black foot and one a Cherokee. All give birth to the most remarkable. My Aunts each a painting of beauty in completely different ways: My aunt Rachell, a beauty queen winner, and artist the looks and charisma of a beautiful Dominican woman black, curly hair and deep eyes and a dancers body, My aunt Zaneta, her face a portrait of African American beauty, chocolate skin, big round eyes and full lips with a Europeans frame, and than my mother at all strong slender 5'10 with the look of a bi-racial woman with strawberry blond hair and green eyes and skin with the hint of olive, the picture of a model. All these woman were strong, smart, and with degrees and business; uniquely beautiful when I was growing up in this macrocosm of beauty and strength. It almost embarrasses me to say that it took me till 15 years old to realize that people hated each other for being different. Growing up, the thought never crossed my mind that my caramel skin and Asian eyes were not beautiful or that my intelligence and strength were not beautiful until I became a part of the industry that doesn't value neither.

I actually did some modelling when I was a young student, I worked as an artist model. In truth, I was not interested back then in becoming a model, I just wanted to be on stage, as anyone who studies dance dreams of, at that age. Also, let's face it, I did not have the typical model look - those were the days of the amazon model, so even if I had wanted to model , no model agency would have been interested. Today public perception of beauty is changing, in line with the fact that we live in a diverse society and therefore we can no longer uphold only one standard of beauty. But in my younger days the idea of diverse beauty did not yet have any currency.
Despite the fact that my mother is a model and my aunt a performer, beauty queen, dancer and singer. I became a model quite by accident, cutting through a building on Ohio State University campus and signed up for a model call. The next day I got a call from Glamour magazine - poof !!! So imagine my surprise the first time I sat down in a modelling agency and was told, they already had enough black girls, not because I wasn't beautiful, but black. I went home and instead of believing something was wrong with them, I cried over what was wrong with me. Offices telling me to my face "Black woman are too strong for our clothes" or "Blacks don't sell". On a runway show the hairdresser could not do my hair, so they cut it into strange shapes and pieces and pulled and yanked on it until I cried. That night I went home and laid down sobbing out of pain, out of frustration. I readied myself for the agency every time with a notion that it wouldn't be there, but there were the stares, the whispers and the outright favoritism. Sometimes its downright rudeness, other times its the stares around pictures on the walls of mostly curve less Eastern European models. I starved and purged, weaving myself into as close as I could be to the image of the European models but all the weave in the world wouldn't make me a different color, a more "beautiful" one. At times I hated myself, and other times I hated them for there ignorance. Either way I had lost myself. It wasn't until my fiancée, a person outside my race reminded me of how beautiful my curly hair, caramel skin, and Asian eyes really were, and that I was a working model even when they said whatever they wanted to say. That not only was I a good model, but I was a smart strong woman who graduated from pictures to feature films. I had lost who I really was in the rush to be someone else.

I realized that if you sit around and wait for someone or something to change, you will wait a very long time. Change can only be within: know that your beautiful the way you are, and the color you are; but don't sit and wait. If you don't see yourself on Vogue why don't you make your own. Your pride cannot be based on what someone else thinks of you. What makes a real model, is not a rail thin body of a 14 year old. It is the ability to not only endure but to smile through it. There are people in the industry that have only the short sightedness of archaic dinosaurs clinging to the past, to stereotypes, and sometimes just plain trying to live vicariously through thin and beautiful Eastern Europeans teenagers. They even begin to see the semblance of themselves in the strong frames and minds of the many shades of gorgeous woman of color and different sizes, all to validate their own fear and frustrations. I would love to say that as I try to work my way up as a model, that there is no staring, no whispers, no unequipped hairdressers, no clueless makeup artist or shrivelled up magazine editor with the short sighted notion that the only dollar is the white dollar to her consumers to or money hungry agency's. I want to personally thank each and every of them for their bigotry, and hatred, you made me a force to be reckon with, brighten my passion, me smarter, made me much wiser.

Thanks for making me a model.