Wanna know how I know I’m not racist? I’ve been staring at the cover of the latest Vogue magazine for weeks and I didn’t once link the image of LeBron James and Gisele Bundchen to King Kong and Fay Wray. But plenty of other people have been making the connection, calling the Annie Leibovitz-photographed cover offensive. Sure, maybe the pose makes James, who is apparently now the first African-American male to appear on the cover of Vogue, look too violent, but I wouldn’t necessarily claim he’s made to ape Kong (pun intended).
Then again, it took me years to find out/realize that King Kong was as racist a film as they come. Perhaps I’m more ignorant than racist, at least in the way NAACP spokesman Richard McIntire puts it: “some younger folks who don’t have that exposure may not even know what the King Kong movies were, may not get that.” (quoted by Women’s Wear Daily). However, when I finally did watch the 1933 original in its entirety as an adult, the colonialism allegory was clear as day. And I believe the film is pretty racist in retrospect, as are so, so many early films. Yet for all the places that have been colonized in history, I think it’s even more racist to claim that Kong is necessarily metaphoric of black victims of colonization.
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