This fall ABC will premiere the remake of the popular 1970's series 'Charlie's Angels,' and the buzz is on about Nigerian-American actress Annie IIonzeh, who has been cast as one of the remake's three angels.
The 27 year-old 'General Hospital' alum hails from Texas and now her role as Kate - an ass-kicking former cop - has put her in the same iconic poster-beauty league as the late Farrah Fawcett.
The preview of the campy series return - with its lone 'black angel' - comes in the context of a straight-up media attack on black women. The controversial story recently published in 'Psychology Today,' 'Why Are African American Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?' (later changed to 'Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women, But Black Men Are Rated Better Looking Than Other Men?'), by Satoshi Kanazawa, with its shady attempts to make research claims based on faux objectivity that black women are less attractive in comparison to white, Asian and Native American women, has now been removed from the publication's website - without explanation or, umm, something like an apology - but still leaves a scarring impression in the blogosphere, and dances on the last nerve of black American women who continue to be a favorite target in the media (remember the whole "black women don't sell magazines" argument?).
I mean, it's not as if any of us are really tripping over what Kanazawa has to say. Dude is a college professor at the London School of Economics. Boo. But the casting of Ilonzeh presents both a fascinating and timely poetic justice in response to a dated and wack claim that black women somehow fail to rank on the 'who's hot' chart.
In the original 1970's 'Charlie's Angels,' the three angels shot to the heights of global pop culture and remained known (and some might argue, marked in a detrimental way) as classic beauties who had the tendency to kick some but all in the name of Charlie. In the newly released trailer for the series - one of eleven new shows in ABC's line-up - Ilonzeh wearing a housekeeper's uniform as her cover, emerges from an elevator and then proceeds to high-kick down a hotel room door and slam two beefy dudes to save a blonde tied up in the next room.
As something like a Halle Berry meets Pam Grier, Ilonzeh demonstrates what we already knew: Black girls are hot, and you all may not wanna test us.