I thought my liberal rage might be busted.

[thisficklemob]

Then I saw this forthcoming New Yorker cover of Michelle and Barack Obama.

Ah, there it is.

(x-posted from my journal)

ETA: The Obama campaign's response. (And some of the comments on that post only prove that people really believe this shit.)

Comments

[kimbari]

*is fucking boggled*

[thisficklemob]

Me too.

[kimbari]

The comments on the response are equally boggling.

Obama is not a Muslim terrorist but he is a black man and therefore not presidential material. Michelle is also not a terrorist but can you really stand a black woman walking with her big black feet on the white house carpet?

This is the kind of shit black people have been hearing since our ancestors were pushed off the slave ships. Black = ugly, unworthy, ignorant... yet white people are *afraid* of us. Is that what "cognitive dissonance" means?

[thisficklemob]

I stopped reading comments when I ascertained it was going to make me despair for this country.

Racism is cognitively dissonant all over the place. If black people really were all those things, would the racists have to worry about their "daughters marrying one"?

And to answer their question, I will cheer the day the Obamas walk onto the White House carpet as its residents. (Though one wonders if this person has registered the fact that Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell and Martin Luther King, Jr. and probably Shirley Chilsholm and countless other black people have walked on that suddenly hallowed carpet.)

[delux_vivens]

Michelle is also not a terrorist but can you really stand a black woman walking with her big black feet on the white house carpet?

up until now, we've always been at least good enough to *clean* the white house carpets....

[koljeff]

Oh god, yeah, I saw that one. What the FUCK.