While walking through the cyber-neighborhood yesterday, I came across an article regarding a magazine cover's depiction of an interracial couple kissing. No big deal, right? Wrong. In a historic time, when we have the first African-American president at the helm of our American engine, who is also the product of an interracial union, the above cover (of a real life couple) appeared to incense some of the mag's readership. Interestingly enough, as a conservative, I am actually very progressive when it comes down to matters of basic humanity. I also detest the term "interracial." I used it several times in this piece for specificity but it does not really connote any sort of reality, since race is more of a socio-political construct than a biological one. But take a look at this snippet regarding the racial hoopla, courtesy of the Chicago Tribune:
Interracial couple kissing makes readers hot
Cover_kiss My Monday column is about the challenges facing news organizations trying to maintain conversations with readers while keeping the discourse civil and thoughtful.
Consider what happened recently when the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s weekly magazine, Go!, ran an article about the best places to smooch and featured a picture of an interracial couple kissing on the magazine cover.
Kurt Greenbaum, who moderates the Post-Dispatch’s online blog “A Conversation About Race,” told me that readers’ comments about the black man kissing the white woman got so ugly---- for example: “Haven’t read the story but dont (sic) like to see blacks and whites kissing”---- that editors decided to close the article’s comment board and move the ‘discussion’ to the race blog. You can take a look at the blog entry here. The Poynter Institute also has an online story regarding the uproar.
The magazine’s production designer chose Chris Spencer and Emilee Murphree---who have been together for 2 1/2 years----because he knew them and believed they would make a great model for illustrating the story. Greenbaum said nobody gave it another thought. Click here to read a story about how the couple felt about being the subject of such disdain.
Greenbaum said that comments were pretty bigoted until the website Gawker.com picked up the story and readers from that website signed on to his blog to rebut the bigots.
Greenbaum shut down the thread at 362 comments. He said he didn’t pubish about 150 because some of the responses were either too incendiary, way off point or from trolls repeating themselves. Still, Greenbaum was criticized for allowing so many of the negative comments.
“My feeling was that on balance most [of the comments] were supportive,” Greenbaum said. "But which comments are and aren’t allowed “should be something we continue to debate. It becomes a slippery slope if you start to feel that you can’t publish a point of view because it’s repugnant. In the end, who gets to decide? I think you have to be careful to let people know these points of view exist.”
I agree.
And then there are the comments....click on the link and then scroll downward:
Check Out the comments
Heck, this has already been treated matteroffactly by animators-hence the Justice League:
Oh and least we forget.....40 plus years ago in Star Trek-The Original Series:
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