Generally speaking, white Americans don't take kindly to having their racism made manifest - which is precisely, and quite cleverly, what the New Yorker cover is doing.
I am an avid reader of the New Yorker magazine. I subscribe for a lot of reasons. I love the cartoons. The writing is elegant, insightful, and witty. The are a myriad of perspectives that always both inform and expand. This remains true in spite of the accusations of those with ever narrowing confinements who see the entire world as either compliant (with them) or complicit (in a conspiracy, that is - out to undermine their way of thinking) that the New Yorker is a tool of liberal elites.
And I love the covers, each a rebus or puzzlement or commentary that tickles the witty or tackles the weighty. This week's cover does the latter.
The portrayal of Senator Obama as an urban-clad terrorist fist-pumping his gun-toting wife in an Oval Office replete with a burning flag is most certainly NOT an admonition to white Americans to fear this black man. It is instead a mirror held to their faces, mimicking what many whites believe while fewer by far have uttered: fear the black man.
Whites don't like it when their racism is made manifest.
The New Yorker often uses it's cover for political commentary.
Some recent examples include:
This cover depicts Iranian president Ahmadinijad receiving the illicit invitation of one Sen. Craig, the president having uttered a blatantly obvious and discrediting untruth: that Iran had no homosexuals.
Then there was this cover:
A portrayal of President Bush as an oblivious Nero who fiddled while his empire burned, and went down in infamy because of it.
And if one needs further evidence of the New Yorkers willingness to disturb our sensitivies, try this one on for size:
This latter one finds its power not only in its commentary about a world out of balance, but in its vision of a city that comes awfully close to producing an ethos not of conformity but of equanimity yet to be discovered anywhere.
They got away with all of those. But not this one. Charged with undertones of and overtures to race, this one offends the sensibilities of white men who will not allow any intellectual/elite/liberal/progressive/establishment voice to imply racism. The white establishment must cry foul, or admit that they have not yet come to terms with their inherent fear of the black man - and their embarassment that white elites cannot produce a better leader.
And they are just not ready to do that.
