Dear Miley,
Can we have a talk?
Listen, I know you are under a lot of pressure. You are a former Disney star with a squeaky clean, good girl image that worked well for you when you were a teenager but has become bothersome now that you are a young adult. I get it. I would want people to know that I was more than one-dimensional too.
The first few times I saw references to you twerking, I never bothered to click the link. I figured you were either going the Amanda Bynes crazy route or the Lindsay Lohan drugged out route, and I knew that eventually you would either figure it out or die trying. At least I hoped.
The night of the MTV VMA show, my entire Twitter timeline was buzzing with your name. Everyone was talking about the racy dance you did with Robin Thicke and the crazy outfit you wore while doing it.
I will admit to becoming genuinely curious at this point. It was the topic of discussion on my timeline for hours after it occurred, and I had to see for myself what all the hype was about.
What I was greeted with was images of you gyrating your posterior against a married man, lolling your tongue out of your mouth, sexually objectifying black women while simultaneously obscuring their faces from view, making them into anonymous sexual entities (I mean bear masks? really?) for you to use as props during your downward spiral into longbacking (because there is nothing back there for you to twerk, girlfriend).
Listen, Miley. I mean this in the nicest way possible. Accessorizing blackness in order to legitimize your debut into the world as a sexual adult is wrong.
Blackness is something that real black people have to deal with daily. They can’t put it on for 30 minutes to perform at a music award show and then take it off when they get into the limo.
Black women have struggled with body image for years, much longer than you have been alive on this earth. Big butts, big hips and big breasts have not always been accepted by the legacy media or the mainstream, and now that we are reaching a point where differences in body types are receiving more recognition and acceptance, here you come to exploit that in an attempt to build some street cred for yourself. Girl, bye.
Perhaps you can find a different way to break out of that Disney candy-coated shell. There’s always shoplifting at Neiman Marcus or spitting on your neighbor. You could even have a very public meltdown and shave your head.
The point is, stay in your lane girl. That lane, my dear Miley, is the one that is as far away from twerking as you can get.
