This is where the rubbery screech of racial stereotypes meets the political road.
This week,
The New Yorker magazine featured a caricatured cover of Michelle and Barack Obama swathed in garb and surrounded by symbols designed to invoke more paranoia in post-Sept. 11 America. There’s gun-toting, Afro-wearing Michelle clad in combat boots and military fatigues and Barack in a turban and white robe. There’s a picture of Osama bin Laden on the wall and an American flag burning in the fireplace.
And for extra fear-mongering fun, the would-be First Couple is toasting their arrival in the White House with the Fox News-deemed "terrorist fist jab."
Magazine officials defended the cover, titled “The Politics of Fear,“ as satirizing the scare tactics and misinformation being used in the presidential campaign this year. It was intended to shine a light on the ludicrousness of those who insist on believing that Barack is a closet Muslim, and that there exists a video somewhere in which a militant Michelle is spewing all sorts of hatred toward whites.
Unfortunately, that cover will probably wind up being a gift to those who, when it comes to lambasting the Obamas, prefer the darkness.
That’s too bad.
It’s too bad because I get the point that the cartoonist was trying to make with the cover -- although I wish he had lampooned the yokels who still believe all that craziness about the Obamas instead of the Obamas themselves. I believe that columnists and cartoonists have the right to be edgy at times.
Since
The New Yorker is a magazine of analysis with an audience that is far more sophisticated than, say, the hordes who listen to Rush Limbaugh or who gravitate to The Drudge Report, I’m pretty sure that its audience got the point as well.
Problem is, we live in the Internet age now. So its audience won’t be the only people who’ll see that cover. Scores of other folks will see it as well.
And the problem with that is many of the people who will see it -- especially those who can’t quite let go of stereotypes and other stuff that scares them -- won’t get it. They won’t get it because they aren’t looking for any truth about the Obamas. They’re looking to affirm lies.
So now, this cover will wind up on anti-Obama websites not as satire about people who still believe nutty stuff about him, but as validation of their nuttiness. It’ll invariably wind up as part of chain-mailings to people who don’t know what kind of magazine
The New Yorker is and who aren’t sophisticated enough to go find out, but who are anxious to convince others like them that Obama isn’t who he says he is.
All of this points up the difficulties of dwelling in the unique place where we are today.
For the first time in American history, a black man has a real chance of becoming president. He’s spent most of his life playing by the rules and doing all those things that one ought to embrace in a presidential candidate.
But yet he and his wife have to spend time not clarifying their political stances or strategies and hopes for this country, but in fighting rumors that won’t die.
Whereas a white candidate who isn’t dogged by questions of trust and loyalty -- a test that always seems to be applied heavily to most black folks, regardless of what job they seek -- can laugh or shrug at a caricature of himself, a black candidate who, chances are, probably spent a portion of his life challenging the system, has to worry whether that caricature will be seen as real.
That alone makes for a situation in which the normal stuff of a campaign, like political satire, takes on a different resonance.
Ideally, a cartoonist ought to be able to use satire as a tool for enlightenment. But in today’s America, such attempts at enlightenment can easily morph into tools for fools spreading ignorance.
Especially when the fools who the cartoon was aimed at prefer things that way.
