Big, Expressive Lips = Racism?

Above is last week's EW cover (featuring a portrait of Erykah Badu by Steven Lopez). Below is a letter we printed in this week's issue.

RACIST IMAGE

I was horrified by the cover of last week’s issue. Initially baffled that EW would publish such an openly racist image, I subsequently found myself wondering what sort of cocoon of self-congratulation, insouciance, or just plain ignorance one would have to be swaddled in not to recognize that that image of a black woman, her expression dominated by grotesquely exaggerated lips overshadowing the rest of her features, resonates with a painful history at least as old as minstrelsy, a history rife with white performers in blackface, ceramic statuettes of black folks featuring every exaggerated feature and stereotype in the book and triumphal postcards of lynched “coons” freely circulated in the U.S. mail (check out the book Without Sanctuary if you don’t believe the latter).

If any of this seems fuzzy, you could watch Bamboozled; Spike will break it down for you. Do you folks believe that we live in some sort of post-racist wonderland where we no longer need to be aware of our sad collective history, and to be vigilant lest that history reassert itself? Are you not aware that a scary number of Americans are making jokes that, if Obama is elected, we will no longer be able to call the presidential residence the White House, while others are absolutely convinced that he is a radical Muslim and closet “Islamofascist,” all evidence to the contrary be damned?

I’ve recently heard all these statements; haven’t you? Are you folks at the EW paying any attention to these issues at all? I’ve tried to write this without dissing the artist, whose work I would have otherwise felt free to ignore, but I have to wonder why you chose this particular artist, and this particular image, to “celebrate.” Shame.

Michael McDonald, Eugene

While I don't deny that these are important issues still relevant today, as proven by the candidacy of Barack Obama (as Mr. McDonald notes above), I also don't see how emphasizing the big, luscious lips of Erykah Badu "resonates with a painful history" of racism. Sexism, maybe (like an artist augmenting Angelina Jolie's breast size in a movie poster). But the thing is: Badu has big, bold lips.

If we'd run the above image on the cover, would that have been racist? Imagine if Lopez painted this same portrait, only using Angelina Jolie, would Mr. McDonald object to that, too?

Another point Mr. McDonald brings up is that the image evokes blackface minstrel shows (a popular subject for anyone who's ever taken an American Literature class in college). Again, I'm just not seeing that in Lopez's painting, where he paints Badu's face in the warm, yellowy light of a nightclub stage rigging. Generally blackface performers apply dark resin makeup to truly make their face blacker, along with bright red lipstick. Initially white performers did this, but soon black performers applied the stereotype to themselves (whether they co-opted the stereotype or were victims of its own pitiful success is still being debated in academia).

Mr. McDonald refers to those who "joke" about renaming the White House. Apparently those jokes came from a Republican state convention in Texas, where these buttons were for sale:

Besides making those who wear such buttons look like racist imbeciles, it's hard to take such right-wing buffoonery seriously, but Mr. McDonald sure does.

I close this blog entry with a citation of the film, Ghost World, where the main character, a high schooler, reproduces an ad from earlier in the century that uses the blackface stereotype to sell chicken. The art work infuriates the white, middle-class yuppies in the film, but wins praises from the art teacher (pictured below) for daring to challenge the status quo. My only question to Mr. McDonald (and our lively blog audience) is: Should EW censor such potentially disturbing images out of sensitivity, or should we put these images out there for people, like Mr. McDonald, to react to with personal embarrassment?

I know Suzi will at least weigh in here to correct my blundering thoughts. :)