Michelle Obama depicted as KKK victim...by a supporter?
by Kim PearsonWhat does it tell us when an ostensible defender of Michelle Obama creates a graphic that plays on the deepest racial and sexual fault lines of the American psyche? If you saw the now-removed post at the Daily Kos that depicted Obama's critics as a KKK-robed lynch mob stringing her up, you know what I'm talking about. Not only were they stringing her up in the image, but Obama is depicted in pearl earrings and a strapless red gown that has been ripped open to expose her back -- a back that is about to be branded "Uppity Liberal" by a poker wielded by one of her tormentors. Take a look at it -- I'll wait.
There are lots of layers here. Start with perplexed disgust. BlogHer Contributing Editor Megan Smith, who first alerted us to the post and the controversy it's engendered, has some questions
How is it that someone decided this was something acceptable to post? Could it be because whoever decided to post it isn't a black woman, and possibly doesn't know or care about any black women? Is it possible they thought the message was so important that the controversy was worth it? Or did they crassly decide the controversy would stir up more hits and that was all that counted?
Megan first read about this image at What About Our Daughters? Here's part of their take:
I get the point they were trying to make, Michelle Obama is being criticized by the GOP for numerous things, but really what was going to your mind when you imagined Michelle Obama being tortured by the Klan? SECURITY CALLING SECURITY! To be clear, REPUBLICANS did not create this,a liberal "progressive" blogger created this foolishness.
Mrs. Grapevine thinks it's a case of liberal excess. Racewire thinks it's specifically a case of white liberal cluelessness (although I haven't come across any definitive identification of the race of the image's creator.)
Of course, it isn't only black women who are attacked online. Last year, when tech blogger Kathy Sierra disclosed the online harassments and threats against her, BlogHer co-founder Lisa Stone noted that misogyny is alive and well across the Internet:
I have no idea how many women have emailed and telephoned me about attacks via IM, IRC chat, message boards, email and blog comments. These attacks use language that describes detailed rape, dismemberment, profanity and indescribably sick images. The goal? Abuse and humiliation of women.
But don't miss this -- many of the African American bloggers commenting on the image say that the image frightens them. Megan described "a grapefruit-sized knot in the pit of my stomach." Others see a real and present danger in the historical ignorance reflected in the image. In an online chat with me, Spelman College history professor William Jelani Cobb commented:
No one who has an iota of understanding of the history of lynching, rape or violence in general could think that this was appropriate -- even to make an ironic point about racism.
For example, commenter msladydeborah at What About Our Daughters notes the significance of the red dress in the image:
A black woman in a red dress symbolizes the traditional belief about our sexuality. We are loose no matter what station in life we hold.
Princeton University political science professor Melissa Harris Lacewell explains why the image "terrorizes" her:
After September 11, African Americans mourned along with the rest of the country. But many black Americans also harbored a secret knowledge that this was not the first time that Americans had faced terrorism.
We remember Emmett Till’s broken body and distorted face. We remember four little girls murdered in a church basement. We remember grandmothers who dared to register to vote being visited in the dead of night by masked white men bearing torches and crosses. We remember slain leaders and know that strange fruit hung from American trees too recently to be discounted as archaic history. While the memory of racial terrorism is fresh for many, it has been completely absent from public conversations about terrorism over the past seven years.
University of Pennsylvania professor Marc Lamont Hill adds:
Although the site was attempting to critique the recent onslaught of Republican attacks, I worry that the normalization of such images will have a dangerous impact on the public imagination. The last thing we need is the normalization of images depicting the abuse of black female bodies. Furthermore, I find it hard to believe that such tactics would be used against any of the other potential First Ladies. Can you imagineBill O'Reilly talking about lynching Nancy Reagan?
It doesn't help that this image hit the blogosphere not long after a Roswell, Georgia magazine published a cover showing Sen. Obama in a rifle's cross-hairs. And Sen. Clinton's unfortunate reference to Sen. Robert Kennedy's assassination as part of her explanation for why she's staying in the race for the Democratic nomination further poisons the atmosphere in the minds of many. (BlogHer CE Erin Kotecki-Vest condemns Clinton's comments here.)
Two final layers. This image flips and merges two of the most emblematic images in our tragic racial history: the black (usually) male victim suffering unjustly at the hands of white racists, and the fragile woman (historically white) being violated by brutish (black, and often imaginary) men. In a provocative 2001 book, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White From Uncle Tom to OJ Simpson, UC Berkely professor Linda Williams argued that racial melodrama sets the terms of our debates over equality. What we may be witnessing in part, is just how poorly those terms fit our current situation.
Last thing. As I pondered the image, I thought about Sen. Obama's recent call for an end to the attacks on his wife. Bowling Green Daily News columnist Kathleen Parker derided his comments, along with his recent gaffe when he called a woman reporter "sweetie." But look at that image again, and think of another historical echo. During and after slavery and Jim Crow, black women were routinely sexually violated by white men -- and their husbands, fathers and other family members were powerless to defend them.
And indeed, in this image, Michelle Obama's husband is nowhere to be found. As I pondered the image, I could not help but be reminded of "On the Coming of John" WEB Du Bois' short story from his 1903 landmark work, The Souls of Black Folk. In his definitive biography of Du Bois, noted historian David Levering Lewis said "Of the Coming of John" described the dilemma of the black intellectual. That dilemma, essentially is that an educated black person would natuarlly assume the full privileges of citizenship. In the story, that assumption leads an educated black man to kill a white man who is trying to rape his sister. While a white man who did the same thing might have been found to have committed justifiable homicide, the protagonist in this story decides to take his own life as a lynch mob bears down on him.
In many ways, we are clearly a long way from 1903. However, it is equally clear that we are struggling to assimilate and articulate the new reality in which we find ourselves. And in moments such as these, one can be forgiven for fearing that we have not come as far as many of us would like to believe.
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Comments
Where's The Respect?
Thank you Kim for a very thoughtful post.
After spewing online and then to a couple of friends, that grapefruit has started to disappear from the pit of my stomach.
What still makes me angry though is the sense that humanity and decency are now ridiculously quaint notions that are no longer relavant in our public consciousness.
Did I miss something? When the hell did everything become a free for all?
Too many crass, cruel and deliberately humiliating elements of our culture have become the norm, and personally I'm sick of it.
And I agree with Professor Hill, if anyone dared to publish an offensive
depiction of Nancy Reagan like that, the world would just about spin off
its axis the uproar would be that loud.
Megan
BlogHer Contributing Editor, TV/YouTube
Megan's Minute
Video Runway
That nearly made me vomit
Seriously. I cannot think of anything to say. No words. But I really gagged, literally, physically, when I saw that image.
___________
Alyssa Royse
JUST CAUSE: A Web Site To Save The World
Start Her Up: A blog for Women Entrepreneurs
Alyssa, that may be the best thing that can
be said
The heartening thing is that so many people saw that image and realized that it was disgusting. Why the creator of the image didn't realize that is beyond my imagining.
Kim
BlogHer Contributing Editor|Professor Kim|
Michelle Obama graphic image....
Just as the liberal feminist bloggers have been shown to be hyporcrites, and blind to their priveldge, the case is made for "progressive bloggers" who in reality are not progressive, but so tightly woven into their limited agenda and ideology they can see nothing outside the rim of their glasses.
The privalede of being able to ignore the racial history belongs to those who do not suffer from it, not using such images and understanding immediately why such images should never be used would indicate we are where these people like to pretend we are. Sadly their actions continue to show otherwise.
cooper
siggh
shudders. I literally gasped just reading your description. Thanks Kim for always presenting things so helpfully/clearly, making me think and hurt and gasp. Comfort the afflicted and afllict the comfortable, right?
washy || http://washwords.wordpress.com || washwords.dc@gmail.com
Comfort the afflicted and afflict the
comfortable
Hi Washay,
Thanks for the kind words. Funny thing about that phrase. It turns out that it was coined by Finley Peter Dunne to criticize the power of 19th century newspapers. I'll admit though, that it's a credo that I absorbed early in my life, as it resonated with the Calvinist and Quaker influences in my own background. In 2002, the columnist for Poynter Institute that I linked to above described what he felt were the appropriate limits of a journalist's mission:
Because a truth claim so often has (or is accorded) moral weight, I think that the distinction gets lost in the mind of journalists and their publics. But I have come to the conclusion that the basic job of people who do something like journalism in a democracy is first, to keep looking for and sharing the best available version of the truth. The second task is to encourage us to think and talk about it in ways that are premised on a fundamental respect for each other's humanity. In the final analysis, I think that is the only thing that will allow us to achieve any measure of unity in our diversity - E pluribus unum.
Kim
BlogHer Contributing Editor|Professor Kim|
wow, thanks again
washy || http://washwords.wordpress.com || washwords.dc@gmail.com
sorry, took me so long. i just saw this again... thanks for the journalist/history lesson. I love poynter. Like you, this phrase resonated with me (though for different reaons, resonated with my Jewish - question everything, learn everything, liberal, touchy-feely upbringing, and then, later, my journalist heart)
anyway, thanks for the lessonS! interesting stuff.
Whenever I find myself
Whenever I find myself getting too comfortable, feeling like progress is being made, things like this happen that make you realize that I'd better not get so comfortable that I think we've reached the promised land.
It is hard not to be provoked when people - however they identify themselves - do to a black woman or person's image what they would not do and do not do to white peole's images. It's clear that the people at The Daily Kos have no diversity on staff. When I used to do diversity training, I used to tell white people that they needed to get a cultural ambassador with whom they could check whether certain things were offensive or ask the questions they wanted to ask but shouldn't ask anyone but someone who'd agreed to listen to them and help them filter.
So many white people, including politicians, live in a world where they only seem to talk and listen to themselves. I also think a lot of people on the net and in the media go for the sensational which ranges from sophmoric to offensive ro violent. The various media dogs have learned that they can provoke and get noticed and don't give a damn about the fresh wounds they inflict or the damage to existing scar tissue that their missives create.
I, for one, don't want apologies. Somehow, we've become a culture where, instead of standing behind what we say or thinking thoughtfully before we say things, we just put it out there with the fall back strategy "I can always apologize." I want people to begin to think deeply, question and change their images and notions of people not like them, substitute their mother's image for the one's they have of us brown people and say, "would this image be okay if it was my mother or wife or daughter's?"
People need to learn to put things in draft form, think about then carefully, and screen. Once they put it out there - it says to me that they meant what they posted, wrote, or said.
Can you say, "arse-holes."
Well Said
Hi Candelaria,
Very well said.
Megan
BlogHer Contributing Editor, TV/YouTube
Megan's Minute
Video Runway
So true.
We do indeed need to get back to the idea that people are responsible for their words and actions. Thanks for the thoughtful comments.
Kim
BlogHer Contributing Editor|Professor Kim|
Just. Wow.
I have been feeling extremely politics-weary lately and so have been weaning myself from as much election coverage as possible. But this caught my eye when I saw it in my RSS feeder from one of the blogs you linked to. I think this is yet another example of POC/WOC issues and imagary being exploited to advance the agendas of others. I cannot recall the details, but didn't a progressive blogger do something with blackface a while back? Prompting another blogger to do a very clever "When should I use blackface on my blog" flowchart?
Perhaps we should do another flowchart: "When is it OK to depict lynching on my blog."
I searched the Daily Kos blog (one of your links above, BTW, is not correct) and could find no discussion of this removed post. I would hope that they use this gaffe as an opportunity for a teaching moment, given the blog's high profile and large readership.
As always, Kim, thank you for your thoughtful and thought-provoking commentary.
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast
When to use blackface on a blog
Hi Yvette,
First, if you could let me know which link is wrong, I'll gladly fix it. I clearly missed that when I went back over the post. Thanks.
Megan is trying to get a response from the folks at DKos about this. I'm looking forward to what she finds out.
Second, thanks for bring up Gary Dauphin's brilliant piece on using blackface on a blog. Here's the link.
Kim
BlogHer Contributing Editor|Professor Kim|
Kim, the first Daily Kos
Kim, the first Daily Kos link ("dkos") took me to a different page.
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast
My apologies
I should have caught that. It's fixed now. Thanks!
Kim
BlogHer Contributing Editor|Professor Kim|
No words - Just Disgust
Hi Kim. This is an excellent post, but there are no words for the amount of disgust I feel over this.
Did the person responsible for this disgusting image consider the fact that Michelle Obama is the mother of two young children? Did they consider the emotional impact of children seeing their mother depicted in this way? It's SICK and very, very sad.
Contributing Editor Catherine Morgan at catherine-morgan.com, The Political Voices of Women, Care2 Election Blog
One has to wonder
Hi Catherine,
Thanks. It does seem clear that the creator of this lost sight of the fact that this is a real human being, a mother, daughter, sister, wife.
The irony of this too, is that the creator was trying to point an accusing finger at Obama's critics, but instead has drawn it to hm/herself.
Kim
BlogHer Contributing Editor|Professor Kim|
Like Catherine, kind of speechless
From some backchannels around me, Obama supporters I know say that they think this could only happen because of Hillary Clinton and that Hillary's RFK comment is far worse. How everything comes back to her is beyond me - talk about not taking responsibility.
Honestly, the extremes of both candidates are really wearing me down. It's as though they have completely forsaken ANYTHING remotely like an internal moral compass that isn't tethered to their person winning.
And the failure of liberal bloggers who do patronize Kos (and I'm not one of them) to not call this out angers me as well.
People wonder how leadership would be different with women in charge - I cannot IMAGINE a woman sanctioning this graphic. Now - I could be proven wrong - weirder things are happening all around us for sure. But I do believe that a woman editor of some type would have said no to this immediately, and if she didn't, well - I can't imagine the excuse.
Thanks for calling attention to this Kim and providing great links to help understand it - if thats possible.
Jill
Writes Like She Talks
Folks got issues
People just need to calm down. I read some of the comments you've received on your blog and it's crazy. There are partisans for each of the candidates that seem to have become too lathered for constructive conversation. We won't get anywhere that way. Praying for sanity.
Kim
BlogHer Contributing Editor|Professor Kim|
Thanks Kim
The weird thing is, it all started with someone asking me, a pro-Obama person, sincerely asking me, how do we get to the core-HRC voters? And I answered sincerely, and now that's being used against me? I am totally flummoxed.
But you are right - people need big ole chill pills.
I did write this evening that I think part of this is that primary voters typically are thought of as the base - they would be the most vocal party people, yes?
AndI don't think of myself as a party person so I think that's why their insistence had been so out of whack for me. In the context of how primary voters can be, though - I think maybe it makes more sense - even if it's still not acceptable treatment.
As for them writing off that graphic - they continue to do that. It is absolutely nuts.
Jill
Writes Like She Talks
Wandering in
What this diverse world creates is an environment where we might support efforts to overcome discrimination, efforts to achieve equality, but we do so from a position of not experiencing life as part of whatever group we are talking on.
I can set here and fully support everything you write Kim. I might even be able to take any given scenario and *imagine* what it is like - but imagining and experiencing are two very different creatures.
I'm a gay woman, or for the purpose of this discussion, trannie dyke. Any given person reading this might be able to picture any given incident in my life, perhaps even feel inside what that moment in time is like - but that is different from the round the clock existence of my life.
And hosting a feminist board - and even me, as that trannie dyke, who will never be pregnant - I might imagine what it might be like, but putting my imagination to work for say... 20 minutes (and that is long) is quite different than actually experiencing pregnancy full tilt for 9 months.
So all of us congregate and share our experiences. We interact and express our support, or our opinion, or we disagree. In this interaction, at any given time, it might be my experiences under discussion, it might be your experiences, and as that shifts from your story to my story or whatever, so too shifts who experienced and who tries to get a feel for that experience.
Small wonder in that dynamic that someone will post something that triggers backlash ( a student at Keene State College, an artist working with metals, created a metal sculpture of a black woman who was lynched, and she parked it square in the middle of the campus. Controversy. But damn, that image was powerful, and it really made people think. She took a lot of heat, but not from this one.) and do so because they have only a bit of knowledge and an overall view of support for another community - but will not necessarily know what might be insensitive, or silly (what do you give a gay couple as a wedding present? Which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago.)
I find these discussions to be immensely helpful, because we are sharing more of our experiences, and more of our outlook. We learn from each other about our own unique lives and the issues of those lives. The key is to learn about, and not to trod all over, dismiss, or suppress, those experiences.
nelle
yesyesyesyes
You are so wise. I love to read you and value the attention and intention in every word you write. Thank you, Nelle
Kim
BlogHer Contributing Editor|Professor Kim|
I need to comment but am struggling
...with how angry I am -- both at HRC and at dailyKos. For now I'll be brief: Great post Professor Kim. I like Candelaria's answer over here on BlogHer: In response to Artpax's question about whether an apology makes up for any of this, Silva says no.
I
Lisa Stone
BlogHer Co-founder
Surfette
Thanks, Lisa
I struggled too, and even with the post, I still struggle to get at the full dimensions of this madness. Glad to have a place to work this out in conversation with others.
Kim
BlogHer Contributing Editor|Professor Kim|
It's not just Mrs. Obama
It's happening everywhere. Have a look here as well.
Bros not Hos
I'll wait as well.
I think it's horrible what is going on with this campaign.
Wonder how that statement on that shirt makes Hillary feel. Oh right, that's just a distraction, let's get to the real issue.
Yes, those shirts are horrible.
A distraction from what?
And what are you waiting for?
For what it's worth, I've been toying with a post about media constructions of Hillary Clinton, and other women in positions of power. The germ of the idea is a comment I left on this post at Elisa's blog:
Kim
BlogHer Contributing Editor|Professor Kim|
Looking forward to that
And although I am upset with my own level of cynicism these days, I ask myself when I read what you wrote, "And who wrote that narrative? Men. With their linguistics and definitions."
Ok - so maybe it doesn't always end up being our parents fault, or men's fault, but even so - well - I can't help feeling that way when issues like these are raised.
And what should our role be - what must it be - now?
Jill
Writes Like She Talks
very thoughtful
I think it also gives creedance to the outrage of Muslims over the depiction of their religious leader in graphics. I think setting aside these "freedoms of speech" people have no common decency to what can be offensive.
http://her-christian-blog.com