This collage is inspired by a talk show segment I watched years ago, a moment that has stayed with me: A group of children from different racial backgrounds was shown an image of a Black woman and a White woman side by side. Almost every child was fixated on the White woman. The segment ended with a young White girl declaring something close to, “I think White women are better looking than Black women.” Her words revealed not malice, but the lessons she had already absorbed from the world around her.
That moment exposed a persistent truth: Eurocentric features continue to be upheld as the dominant standard of beauty. This is not accidental. It is the long shadow of racism, colonization, and Western imperialism—forces that shape our perceptions long before we are conscious of them.
In this collage, the image of a girl eating a slice of white bread is fused with the idealized figure of a “beautiful woman.” The bread becomes a metaphor for the beauty ideals we are fed from childhood—plain, normalized, and rarely questioned. This work is my abstract interpretation of how those ideals are consumed and internalized.
Artwork Title: The Problem No.1
Medium: Digital Collage
© Tamiko Greene. Artworks cannot be reproduced and distributed without permission.
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