Liberals think the cover of the new National Review is racist, but as Rich Lowry explains, they’re simply oversensitive and humorless:
You gotta move fast when you’re competing with your fellow hair-trigger PC cops on the left! I take it the theory is that we don’t think Latinas can be wise so we had to make her look somewhat Asian. Or something like that. What these people don’t understand is the entire concept of caricature (or of a joke). Caricature always involves exaggerating someone’s distinctive features, which is all that our artist Roman Genn did with Sotomayor.
He even includes what is, presumably, one of the reference photos Genn used. When someone else points out that it’s odd that they depicted her as Asian, Lowry shot back:
An outraged Huffington Post says we “perplexingly” depict Sotomayor in an Asian manner—apparently not entirely getting the Buddha reference, or Buddha’s association with wisdom. Can they really be this clueless?
The painting in the Google link is, I think we can say with certainty, the one Genn referenced for his cover. (Compare everything from the neck down.) In visual terms, then, Lowry’s argument is thus:
Keeping in mind that “[c]aricature always involves exaggerating someone’s distinctive features, which is all that our artist Roman Genn did with Sotomayor,” I think it’s obvious that the National Review didn’t insult Sotomayor. They merely exaggerated her distinctively slanted eyes—wait, can we compare the photo references for the cover again, only this time zoomed in on the eyes?
As I suspected, the “someone” whose features are being “exaggerated” on the cover is neither Sotomayor nor Buddha, but the man so grand they named a peril after him:
Wait—can I get another one of those closeups?
That’s not an exaggeration of the racist depiction of Asians like Yellow Claw, that’s a racist depiction of Asians. The logic—such that it is—of the National Review editorial board seems to be that since everyone knows Asians are better than Latinos, no one can call them racist if they compare Sotomayor to an Asian. That argument—such that it is—could’ve made more forcefully if they made it without validating the charge against them. ( “They think we hate the wetbacks! How can we prove otherwise?” “Compare them to the chinks!” “Brilliant!”)
16 comments
June 7, 2009 at 11:55 am
Erik Lund
Note that Yellow Claw’s nemesis on the cover, FBI agent Jimmy Woo, is the protagonist of this short-lived series. Not bad for a comic of the late ’50s, when Marvel was still Atlas.
That said, the character has been handled disgracefully since, and if anyone can remember the name of Yellow Claw’s daughter…
June 7, 2009 at 12:06 pm
dana
His caricature theory doesn’t explain the saffron robes. I can’t figure out what the picture was trying to convey. The Buddha imagery wanders in from left field.
June 7, 2009 at 12:13 pm
SEK
Tomemos’s comment at my place pretty much nails it, I think.
June 7, 2009 at 12:43 pm
Andy Vance
Step off, Tojo-hippie.
June 7, 2009 at 1:48 pm
kid bitzer
though, the yellow peril goes waaay back earlier than that, as do slanty-eyed caricatures of buck-toothed japs etc.
i mean, you know all this, i was just puzzled by the over-specificity of this claim:
“the “someone” whose features are being “exaggerated” on the cover is neither Sotomayor nor Buddha, but the man so grand they named a peril after him:”
when in fact, it is far from clear why the features should belong to this character from the 1950′s rather than to caricatures from the ’30s, ’20s, etc.
tomemos is right. and he is echoing an important point that yggles has been hammering on, namely that it’s characteristic of the wingnuts to belittle the existence of tons of racism against non-whites, while constantly hyping the world-threatening possibility of a microgram of racism directed at white people.
June 7, 2009 at 2:32 pm
SEK
when in fact, it is far from clear why the features should belong to this character from the 1950’s rather than to caricatures from the ’30s, ’20s, etc.
I used the picture of “Yellow Claw” instead of the cover of a Fu Manchu novel because the resolutions on all novels I found was so low I couldn’t do my little comparison effectively with them.
June 7, 2009 at 2:49 pm
kid bitzer
fair enough.
June 7, 2009 at 3:25 pm
urbino
Is it possible Lowry simply misunderstood the Sarah Silverman joke about trying to get out of jury duty by saying something racist like, “I hate chinks,” during voir dire? Having second thoughts about how that would make her look, she instead said, “I love chinks.”
June 7, 2009 at 4:51 pm
North
oh, please. you can’t ask a white dude to tell non-white people apart. it’s like the whole “All Asians look alike!” thing, except with everyone! I think women might be interchangeable, too.
June 7, 2009 at 6:51 pm
Daniel
This was simply Lowry wanting to get some attention and feroicy from the left so he could say “ah, look how rabid these libruls are. They can’t even take a joke.”
June 7, 2009 at 8:17 pm
max
That’s not an exaggeration of the racist depiction of Asians like Yellow Claw, that’s a racist depiction of Asians.
It seems to me that this WWII poster of the Tokio Kid is an even closer match stylistically.
max
['Found via Google.']
June 7, 2009 at 8:56 pm
saintneko
And, as always, controversy drives pageviews drives gettin paid by the man, son. :)
June 9, 2009 at 8:22 am
rewinn
National Review is like that kind in the back of the classroom, desperately pleading for attention by any means other than excelling at something.
June 9, 2009 at 8:25 am
robot
Some are comparing the cover to last year’s New Yorker cover that showed the Obamas giving each other a fist pound: http://www.newsy.com/videos/wise_latina_cover_to_cover
But to me, that was legitimate satire while this is just straight up racist. Somehow the National Review was able to be both racist and culturally insensitive by using a religious image. Its out-group homogeneity bias times ten!
June 13, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Fritz
Pedro X. Molina’s Sotomayor image used by the Friday, June 12 edition of the Los Angeles Times.
June 13, 2009 at 1:11 pm
Fritz
Sotomayor image