Hell No!: The New Yorker and Hipster Bigotry

Cross-posted at Racialicious

[I also expanded the post from the original piece seen on Racialicious.--AJP]

Oh look! Hipster bigotry manifests itself at The New Yorker.

By now, you’ve seen—and probably commented on--the latest cover.

The Washington Post’s and CNN’s Reliable Sources’ Howard Kurtz said: “I talked to the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, who tells me this is a satire, that they are making fun of all the rumors,” Kurtz added. (Source)

Bill Burton, The Obama campaign spokesperson, responded: “The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.” (Source)

Of course, people at Michelle Obama Watch, Daily Kos, Politico, and other blogs have expressed rightful and righteous outrage over the cover.

My current live-in partner, who works at The New Yorker, just couldn’t believe that so many people responded so angrily at the cover at Daily Kos and other sites.

He “wanted to see [my] reaction.” When I emphatically told him that I didn’t find it funny, he said, “You’re so angry.”

“Of course I’m angry. What do you expect? This is my reaction is to your employer doing something so racist.”

“I’m trying to have some fun here.”

Humph, you gotta love hipster bigotry.

I define “hipster bigotry” (I’m riffing on Carmen Van Kerckhove’s phrase of “hipster racism,” which she hipped me to recently) as ideas, speech, and action meant to denigrate another’s person race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or practices, size, ability, etc., under the guise of being urbane, witty (meaning “ironic” nowadays), educated, liberal, and/or trendy. Hipster racism is committed by folks who’d otherwise identify themselves, whether overtly or through signifiers, as liberal or progressive.

It’s Saturday Night Live running a skit about a Black female character called Virginiciaca and her white “ghetto-cized” stepdaughter going to the Baby Gap for clothes for themselves.

It’s the Daily Kos running a story about the Southern Strategy being run on Senator Barack Obama with a graphic image of Michelle Obama’s hands bound by rope and hanging from a tree in a backless red dress and about to be branded by a Klansman.

It’s Shirely Q. Liquor, a blackface drag act done by a gay man.

It’s my partner’s statements, he who prides himself on coming from a California family of educators who taught him to be colorblind and on working at a magazine renown for being, well, urbane, witty, educated, liberal, and trendy yet likes to view me as the Angry Negress.

The New Yorker’s hot mess of a cover fits squarely into that definition.

The publication, in trying to show off its renown urbanity, showed themselves far more closely aligned to some of those “hardworking [read: non-hip, non-New Yorker reading] 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 revenge for people of color 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 the antithesis—damn tired.

Actually, the magazine actually wrote another pro-Obama article about a year ago. And, if you can believe it, the current cover actually corresponds to a story about how Senator Obama’s work in Chicago influenced his current presidential bid. This juxtaposition brings another reading: Obama learning the ropes in Chi-town and loving a South Side sistah makes him--and them--Black "radical terrorists.” There’s a stench of blame-Yoko-Ono-for-breaking-up-the-Beatles about it, the “powerful” woman of color exerting some imagined extraordinarily negative power through an intimate relationship over her otherwise likable—if not beloved—man. But I bet Remnick and Co. thought they’d get a pass on the cover because they did good by Obama (and, by the extension of this kind of thinking, Black people in general) with the articles and thought people would catch the wink and nudge of the visual joke because, hey, they’re all on the right side anyway.

No, the New Yorker is not. Truth be told, they’re not even on the right side of hiring practices. Having the opportunity of working and Condé Nast and the New Yorker’s advertising and editorial floors (I temped as a receptionist there about a year ago), I noticed that there were no senior editors of color; the people of color in editorial capacities were already superstar writers before coming to the magazine (Malcolm Gladwell) or they were writing for the entertainment section (Hilton Als, who writes the theater column.) The former PR director, an African American woman, left the position. In other words, there’s no one of color to at least talk Remnick off the ledge of this kind of glib bigotry. (Not saying that having a person of color necessarily guarantees a firm commitment to anti-racism efforts--i.e. Vogue’s Andre Leon Talley and the recent cover of LeBron James and subsequent controversy--but I do hope for a slim chance.) And whichever white folks prided themselves on being anti-racist or at least race-tolerant at the magazine either didn’t get to Remnick in time or simply chose to shut up, duck from the mounting fallout, and/or get their excuses/alibis ready.

And that’s the ultimate rub about hipster bigotry: as much as the people like to think they’re above it because they got degrees and live in the big city and befriend/sex up/marry/hire people of color, these folks really aren’t above it.

At all.