But that’s just what I’ve been saying – we can only guess what the intent of this poster was. We all seem to agree that it doesn’t have a clear message, and the designer isn’t talking. We don’t even know who the designer was, so we can’t make guesses based on his or her known views. So what’s so unreasonable about some people having a different interpretation of the poster than you do?
I don’t think the people who said it reminded them of a minstrel show performer were lying. The exaggerated big red mouth of the Obama image does resemble the exaggerated big red mouths seen in many racist caricatures of black people. We have no way of knowing whether this association was intended by the poster designer (I consider it unlikely but not impossible), but I don’t think the designer’s intended message matters that much when the message was expressed in such an incoherent way.
I have no trouble believing that some of the people who passed by this poster sincerely thought it was Obama as a whiteface minstrel show performer. Others probably thought he was supposed to be a zombie or something. If they’d thought it depicted Obama as a beautiful fairy princess then that might have been unreasonable, but “minstrel” or “zombie” do not strike me as far-fetched interpretations of the image. Even if someone knows that the image was created by combining a picture of Obama with a picture of Heath Ledger as the Joker, they might still reasonably believe that the designer of the poster had some intent beyond “Here’s Obama as the Joker”. Since the caption is unrelated to The Dark Knight or Batman, it’s not clear that the poster designer even realized that the image was of Obama as the Joker and not a minstrel, zombie, etc. IMHO, Zombie Obama makes the most sense with the caption (Cold War era zombie films have often been interpreted as commentary on Communism), although still not an awful lot of sense.
I just remembered that incident back in 2001 where a pro-Osama bin Laden demonstrator used a picture from the “Bert is Evil” website in a collage on a sign. He probably didn’t realize that the picture had originally been intended as humorous commentary on a children’s TV show character. He almost certainly didn’t realize that the intended message of the image was “Bert is evil, just like bin Laden!”, and probably wouldn’t have used it on a pro-bin Laden poster if he had.
I have no idea whether something similar is behind the Obama poster, I bring it up just to show that it’s not unheard of for someone to make a political poster using a picture they got off the Internet without fully understanding what the image is depicting.
Again i am not saying that it was intended to be a racist poster. Again i will say I doubt that it was. But that does not mean a thing.
If I showed a five year old kid the poster , he would likely say it was just the joker. I would not tell him he was wrong and it was a racist poster. In his life ,with his experiences ,it would not be. I understand that it would not seem to be to people who do not have the experiences and references that I do. The ignorance comes in when someone simply declares it is not racist because it is not racist to him. It is not racist to me, therefore it can not be racist to you. If that is what some people think is debate, I worry about them. This has never been a debate.
Miller brought up a good point about your double standards on this. See, I agree with what you’re saying here, but in that “faggy dog” thread (I wonder if there’s another called “The Faggy D.A.”?) you held the opposite position.
It’s unreasonable because only part of his message is unclear. Other parts, like “Obama is like the Joker” and “Obama is a socialist” could only be clearer if they were written out in full. Those are the parts Gonzomax is ignoring.
Well, honestly, I don’t want to fight on both eastern (faggy dog) and western (Obama Joker) fronts at once, so I’ll just say that from this vantage point it looks like pretty much the same thing.
Those are in your dreams. That is why we are not debating that. We are discussing whether it is racist. Whether it is socialist, is irrelevant is not part of the discussion. Also, there is no debate. The OP was about whether it was racist. You are ignoring the theme of the OP. I am not.
Those parts also have nothing to do with each other, and indeed contradict each other. The Joker isn’t a Socialist or anything close to it. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for someone to look at that poster and see some meaning other than or in addition to “Obama is like the Joker” or “Obama is a Socialist”, because those two messages together don’t make any sense to begin with. If we add in “Obama is a black man foolishly trying to be white” then the poster doesn’t become any less logical than it already is.
I feel I’ve been pretty clear here already, but in case anyone is still confused I am specifically arguing against the following ideas:
The only correct interpretation of this poster is the one intended by the designer. Any other interpretation is ignorant or unreasonable.
We can determine the true intent behind this particular poster just by looking at it.
I’m not denying, and I don’t think anyone in this thread has denied, that the image of Obama in the poster was based on Heath Ledger as the Joker. But we have no way of knowing for sure what the poster designer meant by using this image, and even if we did that would not make all alternate interpretations unreasonable. Reasonable people can look at this poster and have different ideas about what the image means.
I think you’ve got this pretty backwards. The poster creator’s intent is not the license for its interpretation. That assumes that he has 1) the ability to communicate his intent accurately and 2) that there could not be, by accident, some other reasonable interpretation.
Even if they agree that it was based on Ledger’s Joker?! That would mean that The Joker character himself must have some association with racism. Or Ledger. I don’t see how someone can be of the mind that the image was, in fact, based on The Joker AND that it is racist. Not without the either The Joker or Ledger having a pre-existing association with racism.
To make it easier for you. The Joker has nothing to do with racism. Nothing at all. As far as I know Ledger had nothing to do with racism. So eliminate that from your thinking processes and try again.
Again, no one is saying that YOU don’t see what you insist on seeing. The question is how reasonable is it? It’s one thing to say “The poster, based on a set of experiences that I’ve had, and not shared by the public at large, is racist”. It’s an entirely a different thing to say that just because it may appear racist to you, that it is fair to characterize it as racist without the qualification.
Ha! Now you’re trying to imply that everyone, or a good chunk of those, 66 year of age are older share you’re assessment of the poster. I’ll have to ask for a cite for that. Even if people are older than you, and have a more reasonable claim to having minstrel show imagery being ingrained into their psyche, my guess is that they’ve allowed other information to enter their brains. For instance, "Oh, they turned Obama into The Joker from Batman, just like they did to Bush.
No it hasn’t. In a debate people usually answer questions asked of them. Which you haven’t done. And the question is one of reasonableness. You have failed to demonstrate why anyone should consider your insistence that this poster is racist to apply to anyone other than a person other than you. You attempted to, by posting some footage from 50 and 75 years ago, but that has failed miserably. I questioned you on the specifics of that but you came back with squat.
This, combined with the fact that you haven’t responded to questions or commented on the cites offered to you, probably is an answer in itself. ::shrugs::
I don’t think it does. But I am tickled that you were able to digest a few morsels of what I offered. Now try responding to the questions I asked in my posts to you.
You can deny it all you’d like and make yourself look more ridiculous, but Miller nailed you like an entymologist pins a moth to a piece of wood, your hypocrisy and poor ability to reason on display for all to marvel at.
The creator of the image intended to conflate the Joker and Obama.
The creator of the image almost certainly intended no racist overtones to the image.
Some images of minstrels depict black men with extra-wide smiles. (The images I’m more familiar with depict black men with extra-wide lips, but at least some such images go for the big smiles).
Someone who is unfamiliar with Heath Ledger’s Joker may mistake (note the emphasis) the artist’s intent as racist.
Do we all agree with these?
I think Lamia, jsgoddess, and gonzomax are suggesting that a poster can be racist even when the artist does not intend it as such. This is where I have difficulty: racism, as I see it, does not exist independently of a human brain. If someone perceives racism in a poster, the only way that makes sense is if they’re perceiving a racist intent on the part of the artist. Finding racism in a piece isn’t like finding, say, a good metaphor for the Nazi invasion of Poland when you read A Wizard of Oz, where the interpretation is cool and its validity doesn’t depend on authorial intent. Racism is a statement about authorial intent.
If racism is not such a statement, then what does it mean to call the poster racist? How should we respond to such an accusation? What should we do about it?
I find this claim to be meaningless. A very similar claim–that the poster mirrors some aspects of racist stereotyping–is a much stronger claim, one that doesn’t get into authorial intent in the way that a straight-up claim of racism seems to do.
I’d agree with most of this. I disagree with your last line. It doesn’t mirror it. All we have is 1) a face covered with make-up, and 2) an exaggerated smile (and even that is a stretch (as you mention). That’s it. It shares two characteristic, at best. If an artist wanted people to see the minstrel show connotation, why didn’t he make it look more like it? Why not have more of a smile, the big bug-eyes of surprise, the smile filled with white teeth.
On the other hand, we have not only The Joker and all his iterations from Batman over the decades, the popularity of the movie franchise, the depiction of Bush in the same way, and the genesis of The Joker: the world of clowns. Heck, I even found a picture of black men in white face outside the clown world that do not show those people in a racist light.
Of course, gonzomax ignores all of this. Shocking, I know.
On preview, as far as your #4, I’d say that anyone that has so insulated himself as to not have a passing familiarity with The Joker cannot speak to what may or may not be a reasonable interpretation of it.
That’s not really my point. My point is that you can’t control how someone else sees an image, and in this atmosphere just saying “This other explanation is plausible” isn’t necessarily enough to be convincing if it struck you in another way to start with.
Oh, and I think people can be unconsciously racist, so I have no difficulty imagining a scenario in which an artist puts that unconscious racism into a picture. I don’t think this is such a scenario, but they exist.
One way the picture might be working (because it does seem to be popular) is by emphasizing the alien “otherness” of Obama. He doesn’t seem “other” to me, but he seems like a denizen of another world to Freepers and, frankly, a lot of that has to do with his race. Freakish, inexplicable, completely alien and foreign, infuriatingly exotic, there’s a lot about him that pinging some serious xenometers and a picture of him as a creepy, freakish villain–a near bogeyman–plays right into that.
Sure, people can be unconsciously racist–but if you’re positing unconscious racism in the image, you’re still imputing a motive (an unconscious one) to the artist. As such, it’s not your own aesthetic interpretation of the piece; rather, it’s an objective claim about the state of mind of the artist.
And while some people are certainly freaked out by Obama’s otherness, I think you have to be very careful when applying that in cases like this. You run the danger of declaring any satirical picture of Obama to be a racist one, and that’s no good. I’m the opposite of people who think it’s bad form to mock the president: I think our leaders should never be above mockery.
Consider one of the most common ways of mocking W: drawing him like a monkey, with big ears and exaggerated simian features. That form of mockery, if applied to Obama, would almost certainly be criticized as racist, and I’d have a hard time disagreeing: it’d draw on a typical racist trope so strongly that I’d be hard pressed to believe that the artist was unaware of the resonances. Drawing Obama as a monkey is pretty much off-limits, even though it was par for the course for the last president.
But I want to be careful that we don’t similarly set other forms of mockery off-limits, unless the resonances are overwhelmingly strong. In this case, I think the resonances are pretty weak, and while it’s shitty satire, it’s also bad form to treat it as racist.
I don’t understand why you’re restating what I just said if you think I have things backwards. Did you skip over the word “against” in the phrase “arguing against”?
*I can tell by looking at the poster that the image shows Obama painted up like Heath Ledger as the Joker in the movie The Dark Knight. What I cannot tell by looking at the poster is whether the person who designed it knew that (the image could have been yanked off the Web by someone who didn’t understand it), or what reason the designer may have had for either selecting or creating this particular image.
One of the few things that is clear to me about this poster is that it wasn’t the work of a particularly brilliant mind. No one here has been able to come up with any good reason for associating an image of the Joker with a caption reading “socialism”. My personal suspicion would be that this is because whoever originally designed the poster didn’t put much thought into it at all, but a viewer struggling to make some sense out of this juxtaposition might conclude that there is something more to it.
Maybe the poster designer wanted an image of Obama as a minstrel but, not being an artist, had to go with the closest thing s/he could find online. Maybe Obama is depicted as the Joker rather than, say, Two-Face*, because the Joker painted his face white and the poster designer thinks Obama is a black man foolishly trying to be white. Or, since Heath Ledger famously died before The Dark Knight came out, maybe it’s a call to kill Obama before he can bring about socialism in this country. That’s just what I could come up with off the top of my head. All these potential explanations are convoluted, but I can see why they’d be more appealing to some viewers than a more straightforward interpretation (“Obama is the Joker is a Socialist”) because the straightforward interpretation doesn’t make a lick of sense.
*Which would IMHO be a much more clever choice, if one were determined to create a Batman-themed anti-Obama poster.
That is not what I am suggesting. My position is that it is not unreasonable for someone to look at this poster and interpret it as being racist, regardless of what the designer may have intended. If the designer didn’t want people to interpret this poster in different ways then s/he should have tried a little harder to express a clear, direct message.