Are You Offended By the Photo of LeBron James on the Cover of Vogue?

So Vogue magazine has, for the first time in its history, featured a black man on its cover (in fact, they’ve only had three men total on their cover ever). That man is basketball superstar LeBron James, pictured with supermodel Gisele Bundchen.

The photo has writers and bloggers up in arms.

Say the girls at Jezebel: LeBron “seems to be embodying ugly stereotypes about black men: The wild, savage, white-woman-obsessed beast.”

And over at Feministe, they’re saying that “I see a scary animalistic black man, a primal scream, and a beautiful white woman. Google image King Kong for a comparison.”

I dunno. Personally, I don’t see a problem with this image, but, personally, I’m not black. Gisele doesn’t look particularly concerned to be there (as the girl does in the King Kong image), and LeBron looks like an athlete about to kick some ass. Why do we see a world-class black athlete looking like he’s ready to throw down and think to ourselves “That’s an animalistic black man” rather than “That’s a fierce athlete”? Why is he a black man first and an athlete second? For chrissake, the guy has a basketball, not a switchblade. If that were Jason Kidd, no one would be all like “Oh look at the brutality of the white man,” they’d be like, “Oh, yeah, that basketball dude’s on the cover of Vogue. Gisele’s face looks fat. Wanna go to the mall?”

All the fuss surrounding this photo, to me, is just further evidence of racism.

I thought it was way more offensive when they used that horrendous photo of Jennifer Hudson. I think the big fuss is just because it’s the cover of Vogue, and Vogue has not exactly been known historically for embracing, ya know, other races.

What do you guys think?

Offensive? Yes or no?

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Gisele Bunchen, LeBron James. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.