Politics & Power Quote by Tyra Banks

Banks is doing something sharper than a complaint about “bad stereotypes”: she’s naming the narrow casting call that America keeps handing Black women, even when they’ve already “made it.” The phrase “have always been” compresses centuries of cultural scripting into a weary inevitability, as if the stereotype isn’t an accident but an inheritance. Then she stacks descriptors - “vixens,” “animalistic,” “erotic” - like a rapid-fire montage of roles the camera loves because they’re easy, profitable, and dehumanizing. “Animalistic” is the key word: it pulls the conversation out of mere sexiness and into the history of racial pseudoscience that framed Black women as closer to instinct than intellect, bodies before persons.

The turn is the question. “Why can’t we” is collective, not personal. Banks isn’t asking for her own rebrand; she’s demanding access to an entire category of cultural legibility. “Sexy American girl next door” is deliberately loaded. It’s not just about being attractive; it’s about being allowed innocence, relatability, and mainstream desirability without the exoticizing surcharge. The “girl next door” is a national fantasy coded as safe and familiar, which in American media often quietly means white.

Context matters: Banks built her career inside fashion and TV industries that monetize difference while policing which kinds of difference feel “marketable.” Coming from a supermodel who has performed multiple personas for cameras, the line doubles as insider testimony. She’s exposing how “representation” can still be a trap when the options are either hypersexual spectacle or erasure, and she’s asking for the most radical thing in pop culture: to be seen as ordinary on her own terms.