Meet the De Blasios!

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 this year’s 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 Dad!

(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)