Photo: Obama "Oreo" Costume Spotted In Park Slope Thrift Shop

Desiree Barron

With all the Hurricane Sandy madness taking over the news cycle, you may have forgotten that we have a pretty important national election coming up NEXT WEEK. But one thrift shop in Park Slope is here to keep "silly season" alive. And by silly, we mean "offensive"; tipster Desiree Barron sent us the above photo of "Oreo" Obama, which she spotted in a thrift shop in Park Slope this week. Here's what she had to say:

This mannequin is located just inside the door of a vintage/thrift store on 5th avenue and 15th street, called "Versus". It is next to a rack of random costumes, including the perennial favorite sexy-everything. Aside from the "sexy Indian maiden," nothing on the rack looked particularly racist, or at least calculated for the effect of the Obama-Oreo man. The store was manned by two very nice Latinos speaking Spanish and wearing cowboy costumes, but they said that the owner wasn't available.

As an American Indian woman, I'm pretty desensitized to race-play in Halloween costumes, even those that are clearly calculated to suggest my sexual promiscuity/savagery/general inhumanity, but this stopped me cold. Upon inspection, one could maybe conclude the mask wasn't necessarily the President, but I'll bet five dollars it was sold as such, and it is already super tasteless to make a "generic black guy mask," much less pair it with an 'Oreo' costume.

When we first saw it, we definitely thought it was Obama with a KKK hat on—then we picked up on the whole Oreo "white on the inside/black on the outside" stuff. So does Brooklyn have its very own Bill Skuby, the NJ owner of Skuby & Co. who proudly displays a racist anti-Obama Halloween display? Or does everything pale in comparison to his Obama witch doctor?