I have been thinking about an essay Field Negro wrote about the magazine cover shown above, especially in the light of Barack Obama’s quote about small towns. Someone had pointed out that LeBron James’ pose evokes unsettling racial stereotypes. To prove the point they attached a strikingly similar image from King Kong.

Field wrote:

Now I must be getting soft with my racial sensors (See what you did “O” man? It’s all this talk about rising above race), but I really don’t see the racism in this shot. It’s Le Bron, a basketball player, posing for pics with a super model. No harm no foul from where I sit. The picture itself I really don’t have a problem with, now Vogue Magazine, well, that’s a different story. Couldn’t someone like Denzel Washington, or even the “O” man grace their cover first? Why did it have to be a scowling athlete? Boy next to their pets, A-merry-cans sure love their athletes. I bet good old Tiger wouldn’t be slipping in the polls if he were running from President. But I seriously digress.

Hey maybe some of you see something different, but I am going to take a pass on slamming this particular pic. Not Vogue Magazine, just this pic.

As a white male who wears the label Liberal, that image has become a kind of personal Rorschach test. Credit Field who always makes me think. I must confess I had seen the cover in Sports Illustrated or on ESPN and frankly it blew right past me. All I remember thinking at the time was that it was just one more piece of LeBron hype.

Field’s essay appeared before Obama’s small town remarks. At the time it had me asking did I miss something? Did I blow off the image too easily? Then again was I obsessing about this because white Liberals are supposed to feel guilty, especially over symbolic things as opposed to real things? The classic stereotype of the white Liberal dates back a long time, but its latest incarnation took off in the 1960s when white Liberals decried Southern segregation but got a bit uneasy when Dr. King came to Chicago. And then Civil Rights was eclipsed by Vietnam.

When I read Field’s essay the Vogue cover in part left me uncomfortable because there is a similar image in The Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith’s cinema tirade supporting the Ku Klux Klan. But for me the main trigger of discomfort did not have to do with the outward similarity between the two scenes, because underneath the contexts are so different.

There is too much in the Vogue cover that is tongue-in-cheek. You can see it in James’ eyes and body language. James almost seems to be having fun messing with our minds, the way my favorite rapper Common does.

So why was I uncomfortable? Because at the time it all appeared too easy. White folks say, let’s show we can vote for an African American President. Let’s express guilty consciences about a magazine cover. Let’s rant about the Don Imus of the moment, but meanwhile let’s not talk about the hard stuff, like Field’s home town of Murderdelphia where African Americans are killing each other at alarming rates.

Well, this week even the easy got harder with Obama’s remarks about small town Pennsylvania. Here is what he said:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate and they have not. “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

The topic is suddenly out in the open again and like that LeBron James magazine cover has become yet another Rorschach test. And that test again has to do with race, for the question no one wants to raise is about the racial dynamic in the reaction to Obama’s comments.

However, some had no inhibition about raising the race issue. The Yahoo! Answers page asked, “Were Obama`s “Small Town” Comments More Of The Same From Barack The Racist?” The answer:

Of course they were….Completely directed at white America.

The Weekly Standard would write:

Orthodox, secular liberals like Obama tend to explain religious fervor as a symptom of fear and bitterness. Likewise the irrational racism, xenophobia, and attachment to firearms of the “typical white person.”

After reading these words and others like them that magazine cover takes on a different perspective. What did you as a reader think when you saw it below the title? Even I wondered about using it in this context.

Michelle Malkin, who has earned her stripes as one of the leading voices of the right by her verbal cleverness, found a wonderful way to sidestep the race issue by referring to Obama as “Snobama.” A clever PhotoShop user and Malkin reader produced a graphic that is now all over the Internet:

Graphic: Tennyson

Obama’s words are what they are. No amount of spinning or “this is what I meant to say” can take them back. He has reopened the fault lines that have run through American Politics for the entire history of this republic, lines of race, class, geography.

Racists have sought out a way to take on Obama without putting on the contemporary equivalent of hoods and bedsheets. The Counterrevolution has sought a way to play the wedge issues it has used for decades. In one speech, Obama handed all that back to them. Leave it to someone as clever as Michelle Malkin to figure out a way to frame it: Snobama.

For some time now, I have pointed out two concers about Barack Obama: his need to reach out to working class voters and his need to deliver an equivalent to Franklin Roosevelt’s “Forgotten Man” speech. In virtually every primary, Obama has failed to energize the poor and the less educated. Those voters have consistently voted for Hillary Clinton. Once they went to John Edwards.

The irony of all of this is that Obama was trying to reach out to the voters who have eluded him thus far, stumbling over his own feet as he attempted to do so. What has made these words especially damaging is that coming in the YouTube age, they are a convenient soundbite that can be played again and again, which is exactly what the media has done. Unlike Obama’s speech on race, which is one of the few speeches in the last half century that amounts to a complete speech–and hence not reducible to a soundbite–these remarks make for the perfect clip. So the race speech is now already forgotten.

Curiously, there are words in Obama’s race speech close to those that have stirred up so much controversy, but they are not a soundbite.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

What is missing are the wedge words:

Cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

So now Field’s essay and the Vogue cover suddenly acquire deeper resonance. If I excuse Obama am I giving in to white liberal guilt? If I don’t am I playing into the hands of the Michelle Malkin’s and worse? I can only come back to the same conclusion I reached with the LeBron James cover: it’s all too easy.

Maybe that is the flaw that runs through the Obama campaign, he made it seem possible, easy. But the experience of an African American running for President against the formidable and unforgiving political machine that has divided the Democratic Party was not going to be easy. Nor would running against a Counterrevolution that has stayed in power for a quarter of a century by dividing us against ourselves.

Obama himself still will have to figure out a political solution to his problem. What Obama needs now is for someone to deliver for him a speech like he delivered for Reverent Wright. As for the issues his campaign raises for me, I am taken back to words from Obama’s own speech which now seem eerily prescient:

We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

The fate of this campaign, and America, hinges on whether we truly believe those words, regardless of what we might feel at the moment about the man who said them.

Tagged with: America • athlete • Barack Obama • basketball • blog • Chicago • counterrevolution • D.W. Griffith • Don Imus • Dr. King • FDR • john edwards • King Kong • klan • liberal • Michelle Malkin • murderdelphia • Pennsylvania • Photoshop • polls • racial attitudes • racism • small towns • Vietnam • Vogue