I was in a yellow cab in high summer when I saw it. Twenty-three at the time, I sometimes skimmed articles about politics on my clunky BlackBerry while cruising through Central Park to my first real job, fund-raising for Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign. Usually, the ride was placid. This time, I opened a link to an article in Politico (still an upstart outlet at the time) about a quickly growing controversy. Apparently, the latest cover of The New Yorker was a doozy.
Barry Blitt’s already infamous illustration, which graced the July 21st issue, shows Barack and Michelle Obama in the Oval Office. The rug in the room, flat and ornate as a coin, looks proper to its setting. So does an insouciantly drawn old chair. But look at the Obamas! Instead of their customary J. Crew-ish Presidential attire—thin lapels, a sleeveless dress—the charismatic couple are outfitted in clothes that look like the loose parts of one big racist joke. The presumptive Democratic nominee wears a white thawb and sandals, and the future First Lady appears in the clichéd garb of an outdated Black radical: black shirt, camo pants, a rifle slung across her back. He wears a turban shaped like the Guggenheim; she’s got a scribbled-in Afro. Her face looks cruelly joyful while his is impossible to read. In the fireplace, an American flag is being eaten by flames. Osama bin Laden’s face sneers from a portrait on the wall. The couple bump their knuckles together, a reference to a recent bout of hysteria over an identical real-life gesture, sparked by a Fox News host who referred to it as a “terrorist fist jab.” It’s an image tightly packed with complex meanings, to say the least.
Nearly two decades later, it can be hard to remember just how flagrantly racist the rhetoric against the Obamas often was. During the primaries, Hillary Clinton’s aide Mark Penn spent a whole TV interview testing how many times he could smoosh the words “cocaine” and “Obama” together. Right-wingers insisted not only that Obama had been born outside the United States but that he’d been educated at a Muslim “madrassa.” Michelle Obama’s throwaway comment about not having felt fully “proud” of her country until recently was pilloried as if she had cried, “Kill Whitey!” Speaking of “Whitey,” someone started a spurious rumor that she’d been recorded using the word.
Blitt’s cover was, at heart, a work of media criticism, aimed at this latticework of horseshit. Here’s one big risk a public satirist of racism takes: by displaying a panoply of tropes and crude imagery, he reveals just how well he knows and can deploy them himself. It’s a generous act: assuring the rest of us—just as fixated on and poisoned by this stuff, whether we acknowledge it or not—that someone else is weighed down by this, too.
Once I got to the office, I found out a lot of people were furious. Or at least they acted that way. One strain of the uproar had a touch of blithe condescension: there were people out there who wouldn’t get the joke, and who would take the cover as a straightforward assertion by The New Yorker—of all the joints in the world—regarding the attitudes and ideologies of the Obamas. Another strain, somewhat more reasonable, still rang of a prudish fear of images to which I have never been able to relate: to reproduce this imagery, for any reason at all, some said, was to add to its total volume and, over time, to augment its dark power.
I’ll admit, I laughed in the cab. I still do when I see the cover now. I regard it as important evidence of the darker edges of a promising moment, a portrait of a nation that too often sees cartoons when confronted with flesh and blood. ♦
