It’s officially butt season.
With Nicki Minaj’s poetic ode to her own voluptuous behind topping the charts and Butt Selfie Queen of Instagram Jen Selter scoring a photoshoot in Vanity Fair, butts are having a moment. 
Vogue attempted to legitimize this trend in an online article published early last week entitled, “We’re Officially in the Era of the Big Booty.”
The magazine, which is notorious for using mostly white, adolescent, 90-pound models and photoshopping anyone who doesn’t resemble a flat board into oblivion is now trying to capitalize on the butt trend. 
Yeah, you read that right. 
My first problem is I’m not even sure about the logic behind having a “trendy” body part. Will legs go out of style soon? Are we all going to be pressured by fashion magazine to hack off our limbs in an attempt to be stylish?
Acting as if butts only recently came in to style is a huge error as well. Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back,” which is heavily sampled in Minaj’s  butt banger, is over 20 years old. Kim Kardashian and her backside have been famous for almost a decade. Since when were butts a brand new trend?
This article shows how removed Vogue is from reality. Declaring a body part to be trendy is a slap in the face to those who had larger butts before Vogue told them they were now acceptable.
Vogue, like many other beauty and fashion magazines, is undeniably white-centric. It values white bodies, and the traits that normally come with white bodies, as the most beautiful and worthy of inclusion in their magazine. So why are they just now deciding that butts are praiseworthy and not just Photoshop-worthy? 
As Jezebel writer Kara Brown summed it up, “Black women — and most women of color — are invisible to Vogue until it is in their financial interest to pay attention.” 
Large butts have been praised by black and Latino cultures for years, while mainstream white culture has been telling women what exercises to do to get rid of a too-big booty. 
But now that it has become popular for non-black women to be recognized for their rear ends — think Iggy Azalea,  and the ubiquitous Kardashian clan — Vogue can now talk about large butts being a desirable trait. 
The article clearly follows in the current trend of “Columbusing,” which is when white people claim to have discovered something that had already existed in non-white communities and cultures.
A glaring example of this is when the author celebrates Miley Cyrus for starting “the…bootification of pop music.”  Yes, the same Miley Cyrus who continually uses actual black women with actual big booties in her performances and treats them like objects is being praised for practically inventing butts.
I’m not the only one angry about this. Soon after the article was published, Twitter users responded with #VogueArticles of their own. 
One tweet read, “How Paula Deen Invented Soul Food #VogueArticles.”  Another read, “How Macklemore Made Rap Cool Again: The Rise of the Socially Conscious Rapper.”
Next month, Vogue will still include booty-less models in their magazine and continue to otherwise discourage anyone from thinking a big butt is an attractive characteristic.
Right now, however, they will exploit a trait normally associated with black women when it is profitable and attention-grabbing for them. 
SidneyRose Reynen is a 19-year-old film and media arts and art history sophomore from New Orleans. You can reach her on Twitter @SidneyRose_TDR.