This Washington Post article makes a deft case for the claim that the anonymous Joker/Socialist posters of President Obama are really racist:

Although Ledger was white, and the Joker is white, this equation of the wounded and the wounding mirrors basic racial typology in America. Urban blacks — the thinking goes — don’t just live in dangerous neighborhoods, they carry that danger with them like a virus …

Forget socialism, this poster is another attempt to accomplish an association between Obama and the unpredictable, seeming danger of urban life … Obama, like the Joker and like the racial stereotype of the black man, carries within him an unknowable, volatile and dangerous marker of urban violence, which could erupt at any time.

The charge of socialism is secondary to the basic message that Obama can’t be trusted, not because he is a politician, but because he’s black.

Well, maybe. Or is that an ingenious liberal interpretation too far? On that basis, any criticism whatsoever of President Obama will play to one or other subliminal or overt stereotype that ‘whites’ are said to have of ‘blacks’, and so has to be deemed racist and unacceptable. 

Oh, I see. That IS the point.

Meanwhile from the Right the poster is attacked on quite different grounds:

Now, you might be scratching your head and saying that the only people who would call this racist are brain-dead liberals who shriek “racism!” at every criticism about Obama as an alternative to thinking and only cause more problems by confusing the issue of racism and should thus be chased out of society and forced to live in the sewers, only emerging at night to feed on garbage and bugs.

And while that’s quite fair and probably true, we should still give the possibility of racism a fair hearing. Don’t you remember the long, racist history of black people being compared to the Joker? Of course not, because I just made that up — but it could be true in some alternate universe.

Also, the image involves white makeup on a black person. White on black — that has to be racist somehow. I’ll bet makeup places won’t even sell white pancake makeup to black people. They’d be like “No! Get out of here, black person! We won’t sell that to you! That’s racist!”

But there are similarities:

… The Joker is always telling conflicting stories, and so does Obama — such as whether the stimulus was supposed to stimulate the economy or not.

And both have mysterious pasts (personally, I’ve seen neither of their long-form birth certificates). Plus, I hear in the health care bill there’s a plan to put old people on one ferry and young people on another ferry and give each a detonator to blow up the other (it really is the only way they can make the numbers work).

That WaPo article makes one odd claim:

The image, which appears above the word "socialism," delights and distresses people roughly on the lines of the usual political cleavage, with wide agreement that the as-yet-unrevealed artist certainly intends it to be disrespectful. But there is little consensus about whether it is effective as political messagemaking.

Given that it must now have soared in no time at all from a few street corners in LA to be one of the most widely-known images on the planet, it must be one of the most potent ‘messagemaking’ posters ever?

The more so because everyone is chattering on trying to work out what the message is, and whether or not it is accurate?

Update: Lots more at Volokh Conspiracy (and the comments…):

Joker = "urban" = "inner city" = black. True, he’s white, Heath Ledger is white, but … But what exactly? All references to white "urban" criminals are actually secretly to blacks? The references to William Ayers were, too?

Also, if we’re looking for supposed racial connections here, wouldn’t the Socialism reference cut the other way? Karl Marx, François Mitterand, Bernie Sanders, no? Or does even Socialism (which to Americans is mostly a European phenomenon, with pockets of support among mostly white prominent American liberal academics) still become black when coupled with the Joker — who is white but of course black because he’s urban and a criminal?