Kevin — maybe this is a new Salon series? The Michelle Obama author had an earlier piece on the backside of Jennifer Lopez:
Being a black woman with a similar (all right, bigger) endowment, I felt an odd mixture of pride and panic. Was this a passing Hollywood fancy or a giant step for butt-kind? A racially steeped fetish wrapped in the glitter of celebritude, one of the chief bibles of which is Vanity Fair? Would my own butt, which I have alternately embraced and lamented and written about extensively as a metaphor for tortuously unrealized black assimilation in America, finally get its aesthetic props? Would James Brown be called out of retirement to record a ’90s version of his signature new-social-order anthem titled “Say It Loud, I Got Back and I’m Proud”?
The short answer is it’s far too early to tell.
You’ve come a long way, baby.