What was Iman thinking?

I just discovered the "I Am African" campaign website, which features images of celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker, Richard Gere, Elizabeth Hurley, and Elijah Wood in tribal makeup. Sure, it's for a good cause (i.e. raising money for AIDS victims)... but as neurotica said in response to my post about Regina Spektor's video for "On the Radio," it's the impact and not the intention that really counts.

The impact here, in my opinion, is the exotification of African culture. The face paint creates a false image of Africans as primitive. My friend who spent the last two summers in Africa says she has never once seen anyone there in tribal makeup. To make matters worse, it's not even an "authentic" representation, since Iman has said that it's something along the lines of a "modern reinterpretation of the African aesthetic" (okay, she didn't exactly phrase it that way, but that's the jist of it). I'm also struck by how "sexed up" the images of women are. Whereas David Bowie, Lenny Kravitz, Alan Cumming, Richard Gere, and Elijah Wood have shirts on, all of the women are completely naked, except for the occasional necklace or headdress. They also wear tons of makeup, and their hair has that studio-produced windblown look to it. They seem like sex symbols to such a degree that the humanitarian message gets completely lost. The pictures comprise most of the advertisement, and the phrase "I AM AFRICAN" appears in large text at the bottom, but the actual message of the campaign is in such tiny print that it would probably not even catch someone's eye as they flip through a magazine. In short, pretty much everything about this campaign seems flawed to me. Our common humanity is a positive message, but it just doesn't come through when it's depicted through such naive and offensive imagery.

(I remember seeing something in the blog a couple months ago about Gwyneth Paltrow's ad in this campaign, but I searched and wasn't able to find the post. If anyone could direct me to it, that would be great... I'm curious to find out what other people think!)