Vinson Cunningham on Barry Blitt’s Obama “Fist Bump” Cover
I was in a yellow taxi in the middle of summer when I saw him. At the time, twenty-three years old, I sometimes browsed articles about politics on my bulky BlackBerry as I walked through Central Park on my way to my first real job, raising money for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008. Usually the ride was quiet. This time I opened a link to an article in Policy (still an upstart media outlet at the time) about a controversy that was quickly gaining momentum. Apparently the latest cover of The New Yorker It was crazy.
Barry Blitt’s already famous illustration, which appeared in the July 21 issue, shows Barack and Michelle Obama in the Oval Office. The room’s carpet, flat and ornate like a coin, suits its surroundings perfectly. The same goes for an old, carelessly designed chair. But look at the Obamas! Instead of their usual J. Crew-style presidential outfit – thin lapels, sleeveless dress – the charismatic couple wear clothes that look like parts of a big racist joke. The presumptive Democratic nominee wears a white thaw and sandals, and the future first lady appears in the cliché costume of an outdated black radical: black shirt, camouflage pants, a rifle slung across her back. He wears a turban in the shape of a Guggenheim; she has a scribbled Afro. His face looks cruelly happy while hers is impossible to read. In the fireplace, an American flag is consumed by flames. Osama bin Laden’s face sneers on a portrait hanging on the wall. The couple bumped fingers, a reference to a recent bout of hysteria over an identical gesture in real life, sparked by a Fox News host who called it a “terrorist punch.” It is an image, to say the least, filled with complex meanings.
Nearly two decades later, it can be difficult to remember how blatantly racist the rhetoric against the Obamas often was. During the primaries, Hillary Clinton aide Mark Penn spent an entire television interview testing how many times he could mash the words “cocaine” and “Obama” together. Right-wingers insisted not only that Obama was born outside the United States, but that he was also educated in a Muslim “madrassah.” Michelle Obama’s throwaway comment that she hadn’t felt fully “proud” of her country until recently was pilloried as if she had shouted, “Kill Whitey!” Speaking of “Whitey,” someone started a false rumor that she was recorded using that word.
Blitt’s coverage was, at heart, a work of media criticism, aimed at this web of shit. Here’s a big risk a public satirist of racism takes: by displaying an array of crude tropes and images, he reveals how well he knows them and can deploy them himself. It’s a generous act: assuring the rest of us — just as obsessed and poisoned by this stuff, whether we recognize it or not — that someone else is equally burdened by it.
Once I got to the office, I found that a lot of people were furious. Or at least they acted that way. Some of the uproar had a touch of gleeful condescension: there were people who wouldn’t get the joke and would take the coverage as just a statement on their part. The New Yorker– from every joint in the world – regarding the attitudes and ideologies of the Obamas. Another trend, a little more reasonable, still rang with a prudish fear of images that I could never identify with: to reproduce these images, for whatever reason, some said, was to add to its total volume and, over time, to increase its dark power.
I admit, I laughed in the taxi. I still do it when I see the cover now. I view 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. ♦
