By Erin Aubry Kaplan
A disclaimer: unlike many people who are fretting about the current New Yorker cover of Barack and Michelle Obama as a militant couple-in-chief , I read the New Yorker.
I’ve had a subscription for a good ten years. I have a huge, coffee-table collection of its cartoons and anticipate its satirical or, at the very least, tongue-in-cheek cover art every other week like some people anticipate crossword puzzles on Sunday.
I like the art because it often has more barb than the pieces inside, which are usually substantive and informative, but which have an emotional restraint that often feels gimmicky and makes me impatient. By contrast, the New Yorker art holds nothing back; it speaks loudly and immediately. And its intent is to be wicked without being savage, a rare sensibility in this era of media crudeness that considers Bill O’Reilly a newsman and deliberately confuses truth-telling with insult.
This Obama cover-- caricatures of Barack as a Muslim and Michelle as a mushroom-Afro’d, gun-toting solider in arms—is true to form. It is wicked.
In typical New Yorker fashion, it mocks not the Obamas, but the public hysteria surrounding their political ascension that ranges from stubborn accusations that Barack is a Muslim to speculation that Michelle is a closet black nationalist.
It trashes racism and intolerance, with a flag burning in the quaint fireplace to boot. I got it. But after I got it, I got worried. I looked over my shoulder and wondered what the rest of the world would make of such a purposeful exaggeration of not simply two black people, but two black people on the brink of a historical breakthrough in the American power structure.
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And I knew many of my fellow Americans would see the picture not as an exaggeration at all, but as an imminent truth: This is what could happen if you let the wrong kind of people in the White House. I don’t believe for a moment this was the New Yorker’s thinking, but the unnerving fact is that Karl Rove couldn’t devise a Swift-boat ad more effective (he or an acolyte is probably working on something very similar right now). Yes, I got very worried indeed.
But my concern has nothing to do with a lack of humor or sophistication, as many New Yorker supporters and pundits have theorized with more than a soupcon of elitism.
My concern is actually far more sophisticated than that, rooted in what W.E.B. DuBois called the “double consciousness.” Like every other African American, I know that all black images—whether they appear in the New Yorker or the Source or on BET—tend to be read literally, not metaphorically.
They tend to confirm the mainstream’s many preconceived fears about black people as outsiders or criminals or in any case, people unworthy or incapable of regular American life. Think of the so-called black memorabilia that was a pillar of American advertising for so long—grotesque and grinning Aunt Jemimas, Uncle Bens, Gold Dust Twins, big-lipped pickaninnies tucking into watermelons.
There was something sinister even in black images meant to be utterly harmless. It’s therefore not at all surprising that as the Obamas become powerful in an unprecedented way, they become threatening in an equally unprecedented way, with critics seeking to expose the sinister qualities or unworthiness they are sure are lurking just beneath the smiling facades of Barack and his wife.
Even with tremendous support, the couple has little to no context to work with when it comes to media images because that’s historically been the case: Whites create and control black images and blacks bear the fallout.
We can laugh at the images and applaud good satire, but, as my brother says, in the bigger picture it just ain’t funny.
Not yet.
Though let’s face it, these are very unfunny times for Americans, especially black Americans. We’ve lost our humor and have become seriously irony-deficient because we’ve lost economic ground, civil rights, standing in the world, lives in a war we can’t justify.
To make things even more precarious, we’re trying to elect a black man as president after decades of conservatism that’s been openly hostile to the very idea of racial progress past 1970 or so.
The New Yorker cover illustrated brilliantly and urgently what we seem to be done saying in words. I just hope people see that.
ERIN AUBRY KAPLAN, a contributing blogger with 3BAAS Media Group, is the first African American in history to be a weekly op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Her musings continue to appear in the Times, Essence magazine, and a host of other publications. Kaplan is currently working on her much anticipated book.