Fear of a Black Breast: Ciara Causes Pearl Clutching at National Championship Game

R&B artist Ciara caused a minor uproar with the gown she wore as she sang the National Anthem ahead of the College Football Championship game. What is it about breasts that offends Americans more than violence?

We live in a society where millions can watch men batter and break one another week in and week out, but show some cleavage before the big game and people get aggravated.

But is there something more to the selective outrage?

During Monday’s College Football Championship Game, while millions tuned in to see college kids beat each other to a pulp, some ignored the violence long enough to take offense to the floor-length gown Ciara wore as she sang the National Anthem.

As gowns go, it was ornate and flattered Ciara immensely, but despite the look, which would’ve put many of the dresses worn to the Golden Globes one night prior, there seemed to be one area of contention: the sheer low-cut panel at the front of the dress that served up a decent-sized portion of Ciara’s cleavage.

For veteran sportscaster Bonnie Bernstein, Ciara’s cleavage drew a flag for unsportsmanlike conduct.

Dear Ciara. You're stunning. But this is a National Championship Game. Kids are watching. Cover up.

— Bonnie Bernstein (@BonnieBernstein) January 12, 2016

Not one to leave an opportunity to criticize anyone, particularly of color, unexploited, porcine sports gadfly Jason Whitlock felt the need to add his two cents, supporting Bernstein.

Appropriate, fair tweet. The dress was inappropriate. Her voice was more than enough. Why distract w/nudity? https://t.co/Fv93ioO7TM

— Jason Whitlock (@WhitlockJason) January 12, 2016

To consider what Ciara wore as nudity forces one to wonder if Whitlock has a solid grasp on the very concept of nudity. If we’re being nitpicky here, Ciara is fully clothed. That a section of the dress was sheer doesn’t equate to her being nude.

There are no exposed nipples or even the impression of nipples poking through the dress. If there’s anything Ciara might be guilty of, it might be that she’s a touch overdressed for the occasion. The dress is beautiful, but maybe it’s not befitting a College Football Championship game, as in she might be too classy for the surroundings.

But despite that, whenever John Q. Public gets his panties in a bunch over breasts, he has to do what comes natural…complain, as in the case of self-described “husband, father, pastor” Jeremy Fair.

When Ciara was singing National Anthem, Coop, our 3-yr-old daughter said, "I can see her bumps. That dress is inappropriate."

— jeremyfair (@jeremyfair) January 12, 2016

Maybe it’s too much to call a supposed man of the cloth a liar for claiming that a three-year-old can tell logically discern what’s appropriate and inappropriate, but it’s certainly not too much to assume that Jeremy’s little girl will one day grow up to have those same dirty bumps that were apparently so inappropriate on Ciara.

Beyond the usual body-shaming that inevitably turns into forms of slut-shaming, one has to wonder why it is that Ciara’s dress, of which there is nothing sexual about it, is so offensive when cheerleaders, a staple of college and professional sports, certainly have a tendency to dress far more provocatively than a woman in a ball gown.

Take the cheerleaders from Alabama, who played Monday night:

One could make an argument that these girls are every bit as inappropriate as Ciara, but no one is making that argument. The truth is, when it comes to body image, black women are viewed differently than their white counterparts, and much of the angst isn’t because any woman is wearing that dress, but rather a black woman.

In the Fall 2012 issue of Genders, author Brittany Slatton notes:

Historically, dominant and influential [whites] have constructed black female bodies in raced, gendered, and classed terms. This construction of black female bodies has been that of sexual licentiousness, natural immorality, disease, animalism, prostitution, and masculinity…Black women, in the past and today, are considered everything that a white woman is not in terms of beauty, sexual morality, femininity, and womanhood. 

So is the problem with Ciara’s cleavage more than just being inappropriate on face value alone? Are the knee-jerk objections to seeing the curves of a black woman a trigger of sorts that may not be intentional, but rather the product of generational conditioning?

While race does exist as this ubiquitous specter that no one wants to talk about, the other, more prevalent issue is that women as a whole are consistently shamed for their bodies. The female breast, when not used to market some product, is considered a great taboo, largely because men can’t seem to control themselves around a naked breast, much less a partially or mostly clothed one.

Whether it’s latent racism or inherent sexism, the double standards at play here seem completely hypocritical when it comes to the idea that a woman in an elegant dress is somehow offensive, particularly to children, while watching a game wear tight-fitting pants with nothing between them and the world other than a jockstrap.

They’re breasts, get over it.

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Hashim R. Hathaway (Uncle Shimbo) is the host of the Never Daunted Radio Network, and proud father to NeverDaunted.Net. You can reach him on Twitter @NeverDauntedNet