Racialicious’s AJ Plaid talks about “hipster racism”, in the context of the New Yorker Obama cover debacle:
I define hipster racism (I’m borrowing the phrase from Carmen Van Kerckhove) as ideas, speech, and action meant to denigrate another’s person race or ethnicity under the guise of being urbane, witty (meaning “ironic” nowadays), educated, liberal, and/or trendy.
AJ goes on to explain:
Well, some of the New Yorker editorial staffers, in trying to demonstrate these traits, showed themselves far more closely aligned to some of those “hardworking white folks” who may hold these beliefs that the Obamas aren’t true Americans, who will use the White House to carry out the collective and international people of color revenge against white people, as the high afro-wearing Black militants (think 6os era Black Panthers) and non-Western garbed folks seem to signify in the popular consciousness. The editorial staffers also must not have heard the ad nauseum arguments of their fellow media workers employing racist and sexist stereotypes of presenting the Obamas as “angry”—especially presenting Michelle as an “angry, vengeful Black woman,” as the cover more subtly conveys with the framed picture of Osama bin Laden over the fireplace, which has a burning flag in it. In other words, the New Yorker cover isn’t hip at all; it’s damn tired.
I agree. But I have to admit, I’m less incensed by hipster racism on the part of the New Yorker, which at least tried to be satirical even if the satire fell flat as a three-day-old Coke, than I am by more local examples of hipster racism that are just flat-out stupid.
When a 25-year-old Manhattan graduate student who was assaulted Tuesday night got dressed that morning, she probably didn’t anticipate that her T-shirt would provoke four teens into shoving her, pulling out her earphones and spitting in her face.
Then again, with a shirt sporting the slogan, “Obama is my slave,” it may have been wise to consider the possibility.
Now she’s suing the $69 shirt’s designer, Apollo Braun, for “all he’s got,” the designer claims.
I have only one thing to say about this.
She paid $69 for that?
Isn’t it just amazing how we (and that means me, certainly) can forget something important about a work we studied so frequently and extensively while a student? :)
Oh, in all honesty, I’d never read it that closely. I read it years ago because I’d seen it mentioned a number of times, and it seemed like something I should be conversant with. But obviously I ought to read it again.
how bout the 30-something white hipster who sent me an evite to her birthday party where the theme was: GHETTO FAB. Come like the hot ass mess you know you wanna be!
or something along those lines…
i no longer interact with this person
i no longer interact with this person
Wow, I can’t imagine why not. She sounds so lovely, and not at all, you know, incredibly fucking stupid.
Nojojojo, I second your opinion about the New York TImes. With that said, hipster/progressive/colorblind racism can be as annoying , silly,and restrictive as conservative colorblind racism which makes it as tired as the latter-especially when they perceive themselves as being “oh so much more” enlightened, hence superior, than everybody else. The words, stated thoughts, and actions(which to me is more annoying that the two examples aboves) of these enlightened radical bigots is proof positive of their often unconscious bias. They fail to realize that there is a vast difference between being genuinely antiracist and colorblind-and to be an effective progressive hipster you should be anti-racist and progressive /left leaning. Then again these people tend to be sex-blind, gender-blind, etc. and only progressive-sometimes only moderately progressive-in class-based issues-if that at times.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080807/ap_on_el_pr/obama_threat
This would be why the New Yorker cover isn’t funny.
Thanks for the post, nojojojo. I agree with your reaction to the New Yorker cover, and I think the other reactions I see in the comments here are revealing. People, the best satire is often, even usually, tasteless and offensive. So those of you who think that the New Yorker Obama cover fails as satire because it’s tasteless and offensive are way off the mark.
It’s possible for people to miss this in Swift’s Modest Proposal partly because they’ve never read it (that 18th-century prose is, like, so hard to get through), but mainly because it’s so distant from us. If an Iraqi, say, were to suggest today that Iraqi babies be fattened up for American tables, I doubt that most American liberals would get it. (And “fat” is so insensitive! The babies would be big-boned, not fat! How can I say such awful things?) Someone in the comments said that the “comfortable” don’t do satire. Dean Swift was pretty comfortable, especially for an Irishman in his day, so that fails as a criterion too.
I discussed this at some length at my blog, so see http://thisislikesogay.blogspot.com/2008/07/strike-while-ironys-hot.html if you’re interested. To make my position clear, though, like nojojojo I thought the New Yorker cover wasn’t hip at all, just tired. I’ve never liked Barry Blitt’s work anyway. But the visual responses to the Obama cover that I saw were no better; I’ve linked to Vanity Fair’s and The Nation’s in my blog entry. The positive feedback they got from some Obama fans just confirms my feeling that a lot of liberals don’t understand what satire is supposed to be. That would be okay if they didn’t think they so were so much smarter than their opposition.
Satire also has an element of mocking something, which this doesn’t really have. Satire can make something problematic into something so totally ridiculous, such as fattening up and eating Irish children, or anything by Dave Chappelle, but, at the same time, it talks about our own issues in the process.
Not much was ridiculous about that. It’s exactly how a sizeable amount of people in the US view the Obamas, and our media continues to push it. It’s a lot more different from things like Hitler being interviewed by Warhol and things like that.
Remember, A., I’m not defending the New Yorker cover. I think it was meant to mock something, but the artist didn’t make it clear enough what he was mocking. I suppose it was meant to mock the inflammatory caricatures of Obama and his wife that so many Americans are willing to accept as fact. It was very much “about our own issues.” Since the New Yorker is a liberal magazine, I don’t see why so many people reacted as if the image had appeared on The National Review instead.
It still sounds as if you want the satire to be too easy. The fact is that a sizeable number of English people considered the Irish to be subhuman when Swift wrote “A Modest Proposal.” That’s a view that persisted well into the 19th century, and can be seen in American political cartoons from that period too.
Serious satire, satire with teeth in it, takes on topics that aren’t “ridiculous.” In some ways, it seems to me that Blitt’s satire may have been more successful than he could have hoped: it revealed how many Americans see Islam (so that it’s a “smear”, in Obama’s word, to suggest that he is one) and African-American anger as bad things, and those are very much our issues.
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