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.

Therefore, in a way, I find it more offensive, though mostly hypocritical, that anyone, regardless of that person’s race, should be calling out Vogue on this issue. Oftentimes it is the spectator’s own perspective that is imposed onto a text, rather than the creator’s conscious intent. While that may not make the creator completely innocent, it does nonetheless incriminate the spectator as being part of the problem. Is Kong black because you think blacks look like apes? And is James Kong because you think he looks like a giant ape who is supposed to represent blacks? Okay, I’ll admit that you can see parallels when you post photos like this and this, but can’t we find some other similar photos from Dracula, The Phantom of the Opera, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and many other films involving pale-faced monsters grabbing hold of white women, too? Not all savages are dark-skinned, you know. And African Americans displaying anger while holding white women can be just African Americans displaying anger while holding white women.