It's notes from America, I'm Kai Wright, and I want to share something with you.

My WNYC colleague, Tracy Hut, has been trying and failing to get people in her life to

allow real talk about something kind of hard.

It's one of those things that really illustrates how these big social concerns that we talk

about on this program, they actually show up in our innermost lives.

Here's Tracy.

Let's have an honest conversation about beauty.

Not about fashion or makeup or anything like that, but what it means to be beautiful,

you know, why are some bodies considered beautiful while others aren't, and how do these

standards shape our destinies?

And to start off, I'm going to go somewhere you might not expect.

The 2013 MTV Video Music Awards.

One of the big performers that night was Miley Cyrus.

It might be hard to remember now, but back then, Miley was a huge deal.

She was in full, good girl, gone bad mode, a young white pop star eager to shed her

kid show cuteness, and so she got up on stage and started twerking and strutting all

while surrounded by these thick, bucsum black women dancers.

At one point, she smacked the butt of one of the women repeatedly and pretended to bite

it.

The whole thing was really cringe and kind of offensive.

In the aftermath, several black women writers called out Miley for cultural appropriation,

using hip hop aesthetics to recast herself as sexy and dangerous.

...