By: Gregory Kane, BlackAmericaWeb.com
I’ll leave it to BlackAmericaWeb.com readers: Is LeBron James the spitting image of King Kong?
Those people who’ve appointed themselves official guardians of the racial image of black folks seem to think so. But I’m betting LeBron thinks he looks much better than King Kong.
The flap started when the April cover of Vogue magazine was released. LeBron was on the cover, along with Brazilian model Gisele Bundchen. LeBron is on the left, dribbling a basketball and showing his game face -- a scowl with his teeth bared. He’s holding a smiling Bunchen around the waist.
That’s when the guardians went into overdrive. The cover, the guardians howled, was racially insensitive. It stereotyped black men. And then there’s that King Kong guy. Fay Wray, the white actress that Kong went ape over in the original 1933 film, had her name dragged into this mess.
“It conjures up this image of a dangerous black man,” said Tamara Walker, a Philadelphia woman quoted in a story written by Associated Press reporter Megan K. Scott. Samir Husni went even further. Husni, a “magazine analyst,” according to Scott’s story (and boy, wouldn’t you like to have THAT job!) said the cover “screams King Kong.” Responding to claims from Vogue editors that the cover was innocent, Husni commented in Scott’s story:
“When you have a cover that reminds people of King Kong and brings those stereotypes to the front -- black man wanting white woman -- it’s not innocent.”
A bit of a reality check is in order. If the cover photo had been taken 40 years ago, or even 30 years ago, Husni might have a valid point about the “black man wanting white woman” stereotype. But the black man-white woman romantic hookup is pretty common these days. Not long after I heard about the LeBron-as-King Kong controversy, I read a sports story about New Orleans Saints running back Reggie Bush and his girlfriend, Kim Kardashian. Or the Bush and the Tush, as the story put it.
And Husni needs to speak for himself. Where does he get this “people” stuff? The truth is the cover reminds him of King Kong. Others simply saw the cover as a photo of nothing more than an athlete and a model. Christa Thomas, a black woman from Los Angeles, said as much in Scott’s story:
“James is a huge, black masculine statue, and Gisele is a feminine, sexy, gorgeous doll. I didn’t see any kind of racist overtone to it. I still don’t. I think there is such a hypersensitivity to race still in this country.”
Kudos to Thomas for not taking her marching orders about what to think on this matter from the racial guardians. Thomas, according to Scott’s story, is 36 years old. Her opinion may be unsullied because it’s not likely she’s even seen the original 1933 version of “King Kong” (Makers of the two remakes since 1933 went out of their way to be politically correct.). My experience is that most Generation X-ers, of all races, have an aversion to black-and-white films.
I saw the uncut original version of “King Kong” for the first time in 1967. I was in an Upward Bound program with about 40 other students, most of them black and all of them male. We all agreed that “King Kong” was indeed a racist film with white supremacist overtones (White racism is not the same as white supremacy. There are stridently anti-racist whites who may still have some white supremacist outlooks on life.).
We all understood that the big ape was supposed to represent black men collectively lusting after white women. We all understood that’s why the planes took Kong down in the end. But we knew we were watching sho ‘nuff science fiction about 30 minutes into the film, when we caught a glimpse of the sister who was supposed to be Kong’s bride before Ann Darrow -- Wray’s character -- opened the big gorilla’s nose.
I won’t go into details about how gorgeous this sister was. I’ll just say she had our teen male hormones raging and our mouths drooling. For us, Kong passing on her for Fay Wray was like passing on a filet mignon dinner with all the trimmings for a meal of Spam and hardtack.
So yes, the Vogue cover has racial overtones only if you assume two things -- one, that the photographer had seen the original 1933 film, which is a stretch, and two, that LeBron is the spitting image of King Kong.
Does anybody agree with that? Even more pertinent is this question:
Does anybody want to tell LeBron that?
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