By: Tonyaa Weathersbee
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.
COMMENTARY....
No comments:
Post a Comment