On Monday, we reported that LeBron James had become only the third man to be featured on
the cover of Vogue. The photo features a snarling James with his arms around supermodel Gisele Bundchen.
It seems like a run-of-the-mill celeb magazine photo. LeBron's looking like a basketball player, and Gisele's looking like your standard prancing model. But on the black heritage site
concreteloop.com, some readers went into high sphincter alert, seeing it as a play on age-old stereotypes...
“This King Kong capturing the damsel in distress is offensive,” wrote one reader. “Not only does this man look like an ape, but he’s got this good ole prize, a white woman on his arm. There are a number of black high fashion models they could’ve paired him with and other shots they could’ve used of him. At least put him in a suit. He carries a suit very well.”
“Lebron is straight up perpetuating a stereotype (that of the brutal, wild savage),” wrote another.
This isn’t the first time Vogue’s been accused of racism. The black blogosphere was also unhappy about last year’s cover photo of Jennifer Hudson, in which she was pictured with her mouth open wide and her breasts spilling out over the top of her dress. "Why did they pick that photo as the cover?” one blogger wrote. “That was messed up! Not one of these pictures are flattering. WTF was Annie Leibovitz smoking that day?"
-- Rebecca Meiser
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