![\"Before](\"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/lebron_as_brute2.jpg\" "\\"Before")
<\/a>\nEverything but the helmet: LeBron James meets his doppelganger<\/em><\/p>\n
“Vogue spokesman Patrick O’Connell said the magazine ‘sought to celebrate two superstars at the top of their game’ for the magazine’s annual issue devoted to size and shape.<\/em><\/p>\n “‘We think Lebron James and Gisele Bundchen look beautiful together and we are honoured to have them on the cover,’ he said.”<\/em><\/p>\n “But magazine analyst Samir Husni believes the photo was deliberately provocative, adding that it ‘screams King Kong.” Considering Vogue’s influential history, he said, covers are not something that the magazine does in a rush. <\/em><\/p>\n “‘So when you have a cover that reminds people of King Kong and brings those stereotypes to the front, Black man wanting white woman, it’s not innocent,’ he said.”<\/em><\/p>\n \u2014“Vogue cover starring LeBron James is called racially insensitive by some,”<\/a> Megan Scott, The Associated Press<\/em><\/p>\n Perhaps knowing this is why both Leibovitz, right, creator of VOGUE’s controversial April 2008 cover photo, above right, and Anna Wintour, VOGUE editor-in-chief, below, both 58, have remained absolutely mute since accusations began to fly, over a week ago, that their coy image\u2014featuring Cleveland Cavaliers point forward LeBron James, 23, and supermodel Gisele B\u00fcndchen, 27\u2014was a less-than-subtle piece of racist indoctrination.<\/p>\n The study\u2014actually a set of six\u2014ran in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology<\/em>‘s February 7 edition. The monthly is published by the American Psychological Association.<\/p>\n Titled “Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization and Contemporary Consequences,”<\/a> the paper argued, apparently a little too soon, that “historical representations explicitly depicting Blacks as apelike have largely disappeared in the United States.”<\/p>\n An accompanying Stanford press release says that this white, subconscious, imaginary link between Black people and apes<\/p>\n has devastating consequences for African Americans because it “alters visual perception and attention, and it increases endorsement of violence against black suspects.” For example, the paper’s sixth study showed that in hundreds of news stories from 1979 to 1999 in the Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em>, African Americans convicted of capital crimes were about four times more likely than whites convicted of capital crimes to be described with ape-relevant language, such as “barbaric,” “beast,” “brute,” “savage” and “wild.” “Those who are implicitly portrayed as more ape-like in these articles are more likely to be executed by the state than those who are not,” the researchers write.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Facts or knowledge do not blunt racist intent. This is a truth daily and ancestrally familiar to Black people. Ewen & Ewen quote journalist Walter Lippmann, who “observed [that] ‘any disturbance of’ deeply ingrained stereotypes constitutes, for most people, ‘an attack on the foundations of…[their] universe.” Ewen & Ewen then add that “one of the most unrelenting exemplars of such highly pliable symbols is that of an animalistic and alien enemy ravishing a helpless white woman.”<\/p>\n As such, many white bloggers were initially skeptical of the VOGUE cover racism charge. (This suspicion is also wearily same to Black people.) “Vogue Cover (Mini?)-Controversy”<\/a> read the N.Y. Observer<\/em>‘s online space. “Media ‘racism,'”<\/a> read another. “LeBron James Vogue Cover Is Racist, According to Racist People,”<\/a> read another.<\/p>\n Even the sight of the gorilla propaganda poster left “mcgeorge” unmoved on Gawker.com. “It is supposed to represent, GERMANY, people. … the idea that it is racist is pretty laughable.” mcgeorge should take this up with Stuart Ewen, who, earlier than almost anyone, except Jezebel.com<\/a>, linked the two images<\/a>, arguing VOGUE’s artwork “resuscitates time-worn race hatred as a fashionable entertainment of the first order.”<\/p>\n In February 1988, Fleming Companies, a food wholesaler based in Oklahoma City, distributed a poster depicting a ruddy-looking blond cowboy to its stores. With the caption, “America’s Meat Roundup,” the poster was the lead edge of company’s attempt to market meat-eating as a patriotic pastime.<\/p>\n The graphic was put together by an outside agency, and all went well for a few months, until, out in New Jersey, a college student thought that the image looked strangely familiar.<\/p>\n When the company got wind of the rumor that their meat roundup poster was lifted, down to the pixel, from a Hitler Youth poster out of the Nazi Third Reich, the first thing the executives did was say that the image had come from a live model. So, someone floated over the original image. As you might imagine, from comparing the two paintings, here, the jig was immediately up. Fleming offered a maroon-faced apology, destroyed all the images, fired the ad agency, and made other efforts to repair the damage from this grotesque incident.<\/p>\n That is what Conde Nast needs to do, right now, but cubed<\/em>.<\/p>\n What they potentially have on their hands is something that could make the Rutgers “nappy headed hoes” controversy look like a sunny day out in the park.<\/p>\n This isn’t college basketball players fighting Imus over ill-chosen words. This is the world’s greatest photographer making a white supremacy salute behind the back of arguably the world’s biggest athlete, employed by one of the world’s biggest advertisers, on the cover of the world’s biggest fashion magazine.<\/p>\n This is gutter, Five Points-level racism; worse than a politician ending a phone call with a Black supporter by saying, “Talk to you later, Buckwheat.”<\/a> This is the kind of thing that ends dynasties. Annie Liebovitz needs to call in her career at VOGUE and Vanity Fair<\/em>, maybe shoot some high school graduating classes for a while. Anna Wintour needs to go wherever Michael Richards is right now, and maybe let him run the magazine.<\/p>\n![\"Annie](\"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/2006-10-25-leibovitz.jpg\" "\\"Annie")
<\/a>“Lying,”<\/strong> photographer Annie Leibovitz’s late lover, Susan Sontag, famously said in an essay, “is an elementary means of self-defense.”<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"Anna](\"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/anna-wintour-from-modellaunch.jpg\" "\\"Anna")
<\/a>In other words, maybe they knew that an elementary self-defense\u2014a lie\u2014couldn’t cut it, so they’ve said nothing<\/em>. (“Time For Leibovitz To Confess”<\/a> prodded Gawker.com.) This, particularly, once it became clear through a trickle on Thursday<\/a>, then a flood on Friday<\/a>, that VOGUE’s cover picture not merely insinuated<\/a> LeBron “King” James play Kong to B\u00fcndchen’s Fay Wray\u2014MEDIA ASSASSIN readers remember we covered this on March 20<\/a>\u2014but was arguing something far more sinister: A relationship of kind<\/em> between James and illustrator H.R. Hopps’s topless-white woman-clutching, club-dragging, bloody-pawed, drooling ape, from his notorious, 1917 Destroy This Mad Brute\u2014Enlist<\/em><\/a> poster. (The image is rendered above, directly comparing it to LeBron James cover, and below on the newly-in-paperback Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality<\/em> by SUNY\/CUNY professors Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen.<\/p>\n![\"You](\"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/039_8892planet-of-the-apes-posters.jpg\" "\\"You")
Furthermore, as we reported on MEDIA ASSASSIN when the VOGUE story first broke, but seemingly few if any sites have also done, Leibovitz and Wintour’s calculated blurring of Black people and monkeys comes mere weeks after Stanford professor Jennifer Eberhardt, working with fellow scientists from Pennsylvania State University and the University of California-Berkeley published a paper, based on six years of research, concluding that many Americans subconsciously associate Black people with apes<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"Typecasting,](\"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/58322100749670l.gif\" "\\"Typecasting,")
<\/a>Good white people, whatever those are, might smugly mount that perhaps Leibovitz & Wintour should have read Eberhardt’s paper, or Ewan & Ewan’s Typecasting<\/em>, before embarking on their dark journey into mass mediated racist symbolism. (Or that James, the first Black male in front of VOGUE in its 116-year history, and initially “pleased”<\/a> by the cover, thinking the controversy was overblown, should have studied these texts.)<\/p>\n![\"Let](\"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/gorilla.jpg\" "\\"Let")
Even mainstream sites that addressed the issue open-handedly posted comments of incredulity by the hundreds. “The only thing offensive is people thinking this cover is offensive,” said “Tom,” typically, on ABCNews.com’s <\/span>“Is Vogue’s LeBron Cover Offensive?”<\/a> “Here’s someone else waving the race card. no wonder people have turned a blind eye to true issues of racial discrimination,” said “bree.” Both comments ran before Friday’s wide release of the Hopp’s poster image, but not long after a white art professor, James Rosenfeld, eloquently likened the VOGUE image to Emmanuel Fr\u00e9miet’s 1887 Gorilla Carrying off a Woman<\/em>, above. Readers were unmoved. “Mr. Rosenfeld,” said “DC,” “with all due respect, sir, you really need to find something better to do with your time.”<\/span><\/p>\n![\"Irving](\"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/penn1841gi450.jpg\" "\\"Irving")
<\/a>![\"Vanity](\"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/ma01_toc0605.jpg\" "\\"Vanity")
<\/a>It’s also interesting: This is not the first time Leibovitz has been singled out for what one site called “artful borrowing”<\/a>, but you might name biting<\/em>: Look, here, at her May 2006 Vanity Fair<\/em> cover portrait of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., George Clooney, Julia Roberts and Al Gore. Now, compare it to Irving Penn’s 1948 “Ballet Society” photo of artist Corrado Cagli, composer Vittorio Rieti, dancer Tanaquil LeClerq, and choreographer George Balanchine. Anything look familiar?<\/p>\n![\"America\u2019s](\"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/screen14.jpg\" "\\"America\u2019s")
However, when I first saw the direct evidence from Leibovitz’s pilfering of historical sources, it immediately reminded me of another like incident, almost exactly twenty years ago.<\/p>\n![\"Hitler](\"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/pt-2715-75dpi.jpg\" "\\"Hitler")
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