Race, sex, and Obama

I’m quoted in the cover story of this week’s New York Press. The article is about the sexualization of Obama.

Sigh… the cover image makes me roll my eyes. They’re trying way! too! hard! to! be! salacious! Which is too bad, because Nicole actually explores a lot of important and interesting themes throughout the piece. I hope people actually read the whole thing, not just the parts about big black swinging dicks.

Anyway, here was my take on it:

“I’ve always been a little perplexed around the media’s obsession with Barack’s looks,” says Carmen Van Kerckhove, co-founder and president of racial consulting firm New Demographic and head of the popular and salacious blog, Racialicious. “He’s good looking for a politician, but he doesn’t have movie-star good looks.” Van Kerckhove calls this overemphasis on the candidate’s looks trite. “People think, ‘I can’t be racist, I think Obama is good looking.’ I’ve always interpreted people tripping over themselves to say how good-looking he is as revealing a level of [embedded] racism.”

…Perceptions of Obama are complicated, however, and a number of the contradictory, racist and celebrity perceptions of the presidential hopeful reflect what Van Kerckhove describes as “a fine line between fetishization and finding something beautiful and unusual.”

MadTV ran a spoof of Obama sleeping with a white woman. Charges are pending over Obama T-shirts bearing the likeness of Curious George holding a large, phallic banana. An email chain circulated recently features a book cover mock-up of Obama’s face with the title Where all the White Women At?

“It goes to show,” Van Kerckhove says, “racism is well and alive in America. People like to pat themselves on the back and say we’ve moved beyond race—we’re really scared to go anywhere near it.”