Further Reflection On The Barack and Michelle New Yorker Cover
I retract my first response to the cover, rather instead of “disturbingly hilarious,” the following are more appropriate descriptors: unfunnily racist, journalistically irresponsible, nauseatingly self-congratulatory, predictably white-intellectualist.
So, the cover has lots of folks up in arms. Both the Obama and McCain camps have denounced the cover as “tasteless and offensive.” They’re correct. It is tasteless and ignorant. But, the ignorance of the choice lies not in its attempt at humor but in its obvious lack of awareness of its subject and the depth of the problems of perception facing Obama. New Yorker editor David Remnick said it was just a satire making fun of all the rumors. A dude from the Chicago Tribune said he found it to be ““quite within the normal realms of journalism,” adding that “it’s just lampooning all the crazy ignorance out there.”
Ugh! The problem is that most of the fears depicted are not outlandish or “crazy” at all. They’re very real fears held by very real people (despite the New Yorker’s apparent belief that they do not exist except to be made fun of in the privacy of their elite, discerning readership). That the fears are unfounded does not make them unreal. Attempting to assert that they are laughably incorrect is one thing, but treating them as if they are fairy tales of the uneducated masses and the evil Right that can be deftly tossed aside with one magical, edgy cartoon is just as ignorant as the thinking from which the comic derives its material.
Take away the turban and the picture of Osama, and you have a black woman with a black-power afro and a black man, with an American flag burning in the Oval Office fireplace, giving each other dap. That’s been the realest American fear of a potential black president since the 1960s. In their depiction of the Obamas–particularly that of Michelle– they were obviously going for ’stereotypical terrorist,’ somehow completely disregarded the existence of the Black Panthers and ended up with essentially Michelle Obama as Assata Shakur. They were too impressed with their own intelligence and gall to take into account that tons of Americans actually view Obama’s candidacy and potential administration in that exact light and the difficulty Obama has had (and will have, especially now) distancing himself from black radicalism.
The cartoon is really more hurtful than funny. And, don’t get me started on the drawing of Michelle Obama! She looks like a f***ing Fat Albert character! And, if they were going for black radical, they could’ve at least given her a decent afro, like she had some kinda sense– or a mirror. She just looks busted and crazy. Nigger-ish. She looks Nigger-ish–and not in a way I find at-all amusing.
The cover is indicative of a self-righteous publication that never bothered to take seriously or fully examine ALL the implications of or history behind the “fist-bump” comment or any of the other damaging perceptions of Obama. It smacks of a magazine that basically just wanted to look cool and sell units. Lampooning fear-mongers at the expense of the people you was not that hard to avoid, if they’d put forth any effort to keep their elite liberal ego in check. White people love crusading on our behalf but rarely bother to take into account the impact of their actions on us. Actually, the fact that it is a satire in defense of Obama is more infuriating in its liberal paternalism than a satirical cartoon directly making fun of Obama might have been. All of the white candidates that The New Yorker has made fun of in the past have at least been treated with the adult courtesy of direct ribbing; the underlying assumption here is that Obama and his supporter’s fragile black and black-sympathizing psyches are incapable of sustaining the same type of treatment. The previous satirical cover to feature Obama was direct joke but it had Clinton there to take half (or more like 70%) of the blow.
Theoretically, the cartoon is structurally sound. Concretely (as in sitting on Sen. Obama’s kitchen table in front of his daughters’ cereal bowls), it’s careless, in the worst sense of the word.
