14 THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020
thirteen per cent of the black male vote.
It is pedestrian, at this point, to note
that there were differences between
Trump and Clinton. Big ones. Trump’s
racial cynicism reached a zenith with
his signing, in December, 2018, of the
First Step Act, which sets out to re-
dress the disparities of federal sentenc-
ing guidelines. But he is no reformer.
He pushed his first Attorney General,
Jeff Sessions, to crack down on low-
level drug offenders. Sessions also in-
structed U.S. Attorneys to seek the
death penalty in some drug cases, and
halted programs that sought to reform
chronically troubled police departments.
Nonetheless, Trump is courting the
black vote. He regularly touts a record
low unemployment rate among Afri-
can-Americans (while declining to point
out that it is sixty-seven per cent higher
than the national average). In Septem-
ber, he told leaders from historically
black colleges and universities that his
commitment to them was “bigger and
better and stronger than any Admin-
istration by far.” In October, he hosted
a photo-ready gathering of black con-
servatives at the White House. At this
year’s State of the Union address, he
introduced people of color who were
recipients of his beneficence—school-
children, veterans, a single mother—
even as he slipped a Presidential Medal
of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh. Most
pointedly, his campaign aired an ad
during the Super Bowl that featured
Alice Marie Johnson, a black woman
who had served twenty-two years of a
life term for a nonviolent drug offense,
before Trump commuted her sentence,
at the behest of Kim Kardashian.
He still has a ways to go. Last month,
the Washington Post reported that
eighty-three per cent of African-Amer-
icans believe that Trump is a racist, and
sixty-five per cent think that this is “a
bad time” to be black in America. His
strategy, though, seems designed to
persuade black voters not so much that
he is better than they thought but that
the Democratic nominee will be worse.
THEPICTURES
BUSYBODY
O
ne recent afternoon, not long be-
fore the première of “Emma,” the
first feature film by Autumn de Wilde,
the Los Angeles-based director and pho-
tographer visited the Metropolitan Mu-
seum of Art, in New York. De Wilde,
who is six feet two, wore a plum-colored
Borsalino fedora (“I was re-upping my
hats, and Bill Nighy helped me”), a
high-collared pink blouse, a dark A-line
jacket, a mango Prada Galleria bag, navy
trousers, pink socks, and black oxford
shoes. She carried an elegant cane (“I
have arthritis, and I decided not to hide
it anymore”) and resembled an amused
Edwardian flâneur. “My style icons are
two people: Oscar Wilde and Padding-
ton Bear,” she said.
She has a special memory of the Met:
her five-year-old daughter, asleep—“She
was like a long noodle”—on a bench
in front of Jackson Pollock’s “Autumn
Rhythm (Number 30),” the billboard-size
(Given the latest news reports, we can
expect this reasoning to feature in
Russian social-media disinformation
campaigns, as it did in 2016.) The no-
difference argument will still be false,
regardless of who the Democrats’ even-
tual nominee is, on every issue—crim-
inal justice, health care, education, gun
control, immigration, climate change—
that disproportionately affects people
of color. And no Democrat will ask
Hollywood to bring back movies like
the racist classic “Gone with the Wind,”
as Trump did at a rally last week.
It is undeniable that Trump stokes
the fury of voters who support him;
less recognized is his clear hope to in-
duce despair in those who do not. The
imperative for Democrats is to defeat
not only Trump but also the cynicism
that abides him. One calculation for
his reëlection isn’t how many Afri-
can-Americans will vote for him. It’s
how many will be dissuaded from vot-
ing at all.
—Jelani Cobb
action painting from 1950. “She looked
so amazing,” de Wilde said. “People
started gathering around to take pic-
tures.” Arrow de Wilde, now twenty, is
the lead singer in a band called Starcrawler,
and six feet three: a very long noodle.
De Wilde later re-created the Pollock
nap image in a photo shoot, with Eli-
jah Wood wearing Rodarte pajamas.
“We only got in trouble when he tried
to take his shoes off,” she said.
“Emma,” with a screenplay adapted
from Jane Austen by the novelist Elea-
nor Catton, comes out at a particular
moment, when a number of female di-
rectors and creators are reimagining clas-
sic girls’ stories (“Little Women”) and
biographies (“Dickinson”), and playing
up the boldness and independence of
their heroines in ways that feel new. De
Wilde’s artful whimsy—evidenced in
her short films for Prada, photographs
for Rodarte, and album covers for Jenny
Lewis, Beck, the White Stripes, Child-
ish Gambino, and Elliott Smith, among
others—makes Austen’s familiar tale of
youthful meddling in Regency England
look pleasingly strange.
De Wilde likes to “tell stories with
color,” she said. The film opens in a hot-
house bursting with orange and pink
flowers; Mrs. Goddard’s boarding-school
girls move in a flock, à la “Madeline” or
“The Handmaid’s Tale,” wearing red
capes and pale bonnets; the pink-and-
green décor of Hartfield, Emma’s home,
evokes a layer cake frosted with butter-
cream. “I wanted it to be like a pastry
shop,” de Wilde said. “I told all my de-
partments, ‘The colors need to feel ed-
ible.’” Amid these trappings, the humans
themselves can look almost plain.
De Wilde headed toward the Met’s
classical sculptures. “In my fashion re-
search for ‘Emma,’ I was fascinated by
the change in women’s fashion in the
Regency period—from corseted hour-
glass hoopskirts to, basically, nightgowns,”
she said.“The aristocracy was raping Italy
and Greece of their sculptures and bring-
ing them back to England; it seems so
obviously inspired by them.” She charged
past Pacific Island bis poles (“Incredi-
ble!”) and continued, “For the first time,
men could see the shape of a woman’s
body under her dress—the shape of her
butt when the wind blew.” She made a
curved-rump gesture. In the sunlit atrium
of the Greek and Roman Sculpture
Court, de Wilde admired the ancient
statues’ Austenian features: Empire waists,
tight ringlets, soft arms, muscled languor.
