When I saw this Vogue cover in the Safeway check-out line last night, I was too occupied taking umbrage at the sexism (because, truly? three decades into Title IX, and the closest you can come to a female athlete for the "Shape" issue is Tom Brady's girlfriend?) to even notice the, if you'll pardon the pun, 800 lb gorilla.
I was a little skeptical about the LeBron = King Kong criticism on sports/race blogs at first, but if you look at the side-by-side of this cover and a promotional film poster for the monster movie (over at Jezebel, ESPN Page 2, and guanabee), it becomes a little hard to swallow that the similarities didn't strike anyone during the photo shoot or editing process. Even a little bit.
Not that Vogue, or the women's fashion industry, has ever been bastion of racial progress, but you'd think they could do a little better by the first black man to ever appear on their cover. The really disappointing thing is the photo credit- one would think Annie Leibovitz, with her gift for making art that exposes the "isms", might have considered whether a century-old vicious stereotype of an animalistic black male desire for white women was the best artistic inspiration here. Especially since LeBron James is actually pretty damn dapper out of uniform.
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