Call it patronizing all the way down to the typography. If NY Mag chose to frame the family, and the likely next first family of New York City as a biracial flavor-of-the-moment, as the hands-down winners of the 2013 Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa mailbox double-take contest, the stereotyping of:
is worse than that. It’s not just the white-accented cameo-style portrait in the fashion of a primetime promo, each gaze designed to introduce and imprint that character into your heart/infotainment diet, it’s the Hollywood-style titling and typeface, as if branding The De Blasio family as a show. It might as well read: Meet The Jeffersons … with a White!
(Plausible perhaps as a greeting card, the illustration logically voids that format with the word “meet.”)
If this cover is anything — as the sub-head questions whether the foursome can even make it to Sweeps Week as mostly a visual novelty — it’s as a cringeworthy reminder of white media’s two gestures when it comes to celebrating African-Americans. Option A: they’re athletes. Option B: they’re in entertainment.
(photo: pending. Design Director: Thomas Alberty)
