At the 40th Anniversary of a racial injustice, how far have we really come?

In the wake of the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, a cover has appeared on the latest issue of Vogue that is stirring some controversy. The cover, which features a demure-looking, dainty Gisele Bundchen alongside a savage looking Lebron James. The cover, while more than likely meant as an artistic display of the differences of what makes the “ideal” female and male body type ended up being taken as a comment on race by more than a few people.

Poynter Online’s Keith Woods comments on the cover, noting it as part of a long string of recent events involving race, King and the upcoming election:

And here, 40 years later, columnists are duking it out over whether Vogue magazine meant anything racist by putting a snarling black basketball star, LeBron James, and smiling white supermodel Gisele Bündchen on its cover. Cable television is still showing incendiary snippets from the dated rant of a politically connected preacher. And in the wake of Sen. Barack Obama's King-esque speech on the topic, journalists around the country are asking if we're ready to talk -- really talk -- about race.

Well, one columnist was not afraid to talk, Jemele Hill from ESPN’s Page 2 says,

Vogue's quest to highlight the differences between superstar athletes and supermodels only successfully reinforces the animalistic stereotypes frequently associated with black athletes.

And

Too often, black athletes are presented as angry, overly aggressive and overly sexual. Or sometimes, they're just plain emasculated.
The examples of this are endless. The 2002 Sports Illustrated cover that featured Charles Barkley chained like a slave. Ricky Williams wearing a wedding dress on an ESPN The Magazine cover in 1999. And while it didn't appear in a magazine, the Terrell Owens-Nicolette Sheridan intimate-encounter tease for "Monday Night Football" gave viewers a sexualized image of a black man.

The comments of these journalists, the Vogue cover and the Martin Luther King assassination anniversary come on the heels of a March 18 Obama speech in which he vocalized what called a “racial stalemate” he believes the country is stuck in:

This is where we are right now. It's a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy - particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

So was the Vogue cover a distasteful display of just how far we haven’t come as a country, or was it simply an artistic showcasing by a magazine known for its avant garde artistic nature? Does Lebron James’ pose signify the fact that, as a country, the racial lines are still very much drawn? Did Vogue have an ethical responsibility to rise above the option to push past racial stereotypes and instead present images that show racial progression in our country?