US citizens already divided by Trump have a new issue to bicker over. V-P Kamala Harris' cover photo in Vogue

When Kamala Harris’ team agreed to do a cover story with Vogue, little did the US Vice President-elect or the magazine itself imagine that they would be raising a controversial storm and making a splash for all the wrong reasons. However, that is exactly what happened and now both sides are making counter-accusations about Vogue’s February issue. The trouble began when the magazine tweeted two photographs of Harris. The one on the cover shows Harris wearing her trademark Converse sneakers, standing in front of a pink and green drape. The other shows her in a powder blue suit, her arms crossed in front of a golden background. While the second photograph — which shows her looking confidently into the camera — has been appreciated for the sense of glamour and power it exudes, the first image came in for a lot of flak from the netizens, Twitterati, activists and the media alike for the fact that it was a badly clicked photograph that made Harris look washed out. It invited comments like: “I’ll shoot shots of VP Kamala Harris for free using my Samsung and I’m 100 per cent confident it’ll turn out better than this Vogue cover.” Some also pointed out that Harris, who is quite proud of being coloured, appears whiter in the picture than she actually is. Which is understandably offensive given that Harris will be the first Black woman and the first woman of Indian heritage to occupy the office of the Vice-President of the US. Any other time in the history of America, this image might have slipped under the radar of a nation that has, under US President Donald Trump, become highly polarised on racial lines. Consequently, as Harris enters the White House, she and President-elect Joe Biden will have to address a major threat to the nation’s unity as hate crimes are on the rise and White supremacists and other domestic extremists have been emboldened by the outgoing President.

But with the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, the race riots and the attack on the Capitol Hill by Trump’s White supremacist supporters so fresh in people’s memory, this “whitewashing” of a coloured woman by Vogue has not gone down well with a section of the people. Little does it matter that Tyler Mitchell, the person who did the cover shoot, is Black, just like the editor, Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, and writer of the piece, Alexis Okeowo. America is sitting on a tinderbox of overcharged emotions and anything can spark a racial storm. Plus, the fact that Vogue’s iconic veteran editor Anna Wintour has time and again courted controversy for being openly racist did not help matters. In fact, so sharp are the divisions in the world’s most respected fashion magazine that Tyler Mitchell actually made history as late as 2018 for being the first Black photographer to shoot a Vogue cover. So, it is no wonder then that the choice of the cover has raised hackles because it is being seen as an attempt by the editorial team at Vogue, under Wintour’s tutelage of course, to undermine the authority of a powerful coloured woman who has worked her way to the second-highest seat of power in the US and made history as the first woman to become the Vice-President of the US. Now, with the accusations of Harris’ team being “blindsided” by the magazine and counter-accusations by Vogue of the team agreeing to the pics that appeared on the cover, flowing thick and fast, one cannot help but wonder if this will be the face of things to come. No matter how much the Biden-Harris team tries to douse the flames of hate that have been fanned by the Trump Administration, peace and tranquility in the United States of America, which has of late become more divided than united, will be a long time coming.