"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Democratic nominee wears a white thawb and sandals, and the future First Lady appears in the clichéd garb of an outdated Black radical: black shirt, camo pants, a rifle slung across her back.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."
In 2008 a Politico-linked controversy centered on a New Yorker cover by Barry Blitt that portrayed Barack and Michelle Obama in the Oval Office wearing stereotyped, racialized attire. The couple were drawn in clothes suggesting Islamist and Black radical stereotypes—a thawb and turban for Barack, camo pants and a rifle for Michelle—with caricatured features and an American flag burning in the fireplace. The image referenced a televised controversy over a knuckle bump mischaracterized as a 'terrorist fist jab.' The depiction recalled persistent racist rhetoric during the campaign and highlighted how visual media can condense multiple charged symbols into a single, provocative image.
Read at The New Yorker
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