DREAMSCAPES

WHEN HAITIAN IMMIGRANT Abner Louima was brutally attacked and sodomized
in 1997 by white police officers, many New Yorkers were angered by the mayor’s reluc-
tance to investigate the police. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, portrayed in a sketch by Harry Bliss
(opposite), barely hid his prejudices. In November 1999, the actor and political activist
Danny Glover filed a complaint with the Taxi and Limousine Commission, saying that, as
a black man, he had a hard time getting a cab in New York; the following Martin Luther
King Day found the great man himself stranded on a street corner, in a cover by Barry
Blitt (bottom, left). For a later MLK Day, Blitt offered a riff on styling white suburban
teenagers (below; middle, left). In a sketch that Art Spiegelman proposed during George W.
Bush’s first term, King’s dream becomes a nightmare as black leaders like Colin Powell and
Condoleezza Rice provide cover for George W. Bush (below). In the summer of 2009, a
white Boston cop, responding to a 911 call about forced entry, arrested Harvard University
professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his own residence. President Obama convened a White
House “beer summit” among Gates, the policeman, and himself. Blitt sketched what he
saw as the conclusion of that “teachable moment” (left).

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