Dear Readers:
• ‘SI’ Goes for a Slam Dunk
MediaWeek.com, 3/11/02.
• Barkley Picture Gives SI Editor an Opening Foul
New York Observer, 3/13/02.
• Video: Barkley discusses the cover on TNT.
The Doc’s concern about the slave image is shared by Barkley’s biographer, Roy Johnson: “An image of a black man in chains clearly has strong implications,” Johnson told Mediaweek.com, “and those implications can touch people in different ways. It was an unfortunate use of imagery that will likely hurt a lot of people.”
Some images should not be use frivolously, to boost ratings or create a buzz. A lynched man hanging from a tree. Holocaust victims stacked like cordwood. A black man in chains.
It is true, of course, that members of oppressed groups can appropriate the symbols of their oppression. That’s at the heart of the debate on who should be able to use the N-word. Some African-Americans collect antiques that portray them in horribly stereotypical ways.
As a Jewish writer, Mel Brooks can spice “The Producers” with songs like “Springtime for Hitler,” and portray the Austrian house painter as a frustrated flower child, asserting comic control over genocidal evil.
But the SI cover does none of these things. It traffics in shock for its own sake, the very definition of sensationalism. On the ear of the cover is a tease to a story about another black athlete, Jayson Williams, who will probably stand trial for manslaughter. The juxtaposition of that story with the image of a black man in chains borders on the grotesque.
