Vogue to black people: "Suck it"

Did Vogue magazine purposely set out to make Lebron James look like King Kong, or was there no way they could take a picture of him and have him not look like King Kong? Racist bastard that I am, of course my tendency is to want to say the latter, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was the former.

You'll recall that the new issue of Vogue first made the news a week or so ago because Lebron James is the first black guy and only the third guy in general to grace the cover of the magazine in its 115-year history. At the time, this was mostly presented as a positive both for Lebron and for Vogue.

Then of course there had to be rumblings from the kind of people who live to sniff out contentious race issues - as jimbrah izrael might put it, the kind of people who could find a race issue in a ham sandwich.

I'll admit, when I first saw it, I thought, "Wow, they got him on there with Gisele Bundchen!" I figured the suggestion might be that Lebron is big-time enough that he could probably hit that if he wanted to. (Which I would of course have to take as a positive.) The whole didn't King Kong angle didn't even occur to me until someone else suggested it.

(Am I losing my edge or what?)

I probably should have known better. The high fashion industry's relationship with the black community has been ridonkulously antagonistic as of late, which is why I wouldn't be surprised if this cover really was meant to be some covert racial provocation.

As I broke down in a story for XXL last year, the fashion industry has been under fire from critics for not using very many black models at all on the runway and in magazine shoots. The thing is, these designers don't have to sweat using any black models at all if they don't want to, since fashion design is considered an art. They can legally discriminate against black women all they want.

I suppose if we wanted to, black people could figure out which clothing lines use a representative number of black models and only buy clothes from them, but you know how black people are better at complaining about shit than actually getting anything done. Besides, these clothing lines are probably all owned by the same few TIs anyway.

In that sense, I wouldn't be surprised if Vogue was aware of the King Kong resemblance all along, and that the purpose of this cover was just a big eff you to its critics. What do you fruits think? Is Vogue purposely fucking with black people? And if so, is there even anything we could possibly do about it? Or should we give a shit either way?

Checkit: Is Vogue's LeBron Cover Offensive? [ABC News' Screen Shots blog via The Message]