Racism 101 for White Cartoonists
In recent weeks white political cartoonists have created controversy in ways they most likely did not intend, mostly because they did not seem to have much awareness of the racist implications of the images they were using. Two of the most controversial are included within this cartoon.
Exhibit A is “Post-Racial America” by David Cohen, who likens President Obama’s inclusion of salary caps on executive pay in the bail-out legislation to a generic black criminal mugging a white guy. Please note the same white guy appears in both panels of this strip. After pissing people off, Cohen has since taken his cartoon down from the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists site, but you can still see it full size at PopeHat, which gave him their Second Golden Asshat Award.
Exhibit B by Sean Delonas drew the ire of none other than the Rev. Al Sharpton, mostly because it was in the New York Post (Cohen’s paper, the Asheville Citizen Times refused to run his cartoon.) Here Delonas was making a cheap gag about the unpopularity of the stimulus package and the recent sad, but weird news of police shooting a pet chimp. This is a very common political cartoonist technique: take one part current event (gas prices, mortgage crisis), add a dollop of random trivia (a popular movie, a celebrity scandal), and — voila! — instant political comedy. Well, actually, no. It is rarely ever funny, but mainstream political cartoonists do it in their sleep (or so it seems.) This time one of them stepped in it. Here’s Sharpton’s criticism:
“The cartoon in today’s New York Post is troubling at best given the historic racist attacks of African-Americans as being synonymous with monkeys. One has to question whether the cartoonist is making a less than casual reference to this when in the cartoon they have police saying after shooting a chimpanzee that “Now they will have to find someone else to write the stimulus bill.”
“Being that the stimulus bill has been the first legislative victory of President Barack Obama (the first African American president) and has become synonymous with him it is not a reach to wonder are they inferring that a monkey wrote the last bill?”
I should note that there is no consensus opinion among political cartoonists about how to interpret Delonas’ cartoon — certainly not at the Daily Cartoonist. Most agree that it is total hack-work, but whether the racist implications of ape imagery to Obama’s sponsorship of the legislation really hold is another matter. I think Delonas’ intent is irrelevant here, because readers cannot see inside his mind, they can only interpret what appears on the page. If he is sloppy and they are offended, then the responsibility still rests on his shoulders.
(Total aside here: despite calling his cartoon “hack-work” I really like his ape drawing. Poor little critter.)
February 19th, 2009 at 12:07 am
[...] Contempt Racism 101 for White Cartoonists February 18, 2009Idiot Designer Takes Darwin to School February 17, [...]
February 19th, 2009 at 3:01 am
[...] Brilliant cartoon by Kevin Moore, commenting on some recent, racist political cartoons (including the Delonas cartoon Jeff critiqued here). That’s just one panel — click through to read the whole thing. [...]
February 19th, 2009 at 3:19 am
Full of win. Thank you.
February 19th, 2009 at 3:43 am
[...] directly related to this controversy, Kevin’s newest cartoon, “Racism 101 for White Cartoonists,” which is [...]
February 19th, 2009 at 9:11 am
It’s not just the reference to a black man as a. Delonas took a black man — who’s critics have been caught comparing him to monkeys in the past year by the blogosphere and some mainstream journalism such as Maddow and Olbermann –, and specifically compared him to a specific chimp that had assaulted a woman. This was invoking the fear of the black man as the raper of white women and the taker of white money.
As a political satirist, the idea that he didn’t know the impact of the cartoon isn’t just dubious. It’s ridiculous.
February 19th, 2009 at 9:33 am
[...] Kevin Moore has a great primer. [...]
February 19th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
This is brilliant.
February 19th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
What did you expect?Put a black man in the WHite House, endure 4+ years of andry black men (and women) trying to get even.
Its going to be a long four years…..
February 19th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
I am so sick of all this”get even” crap.
WE ALL have a story for gawds sake. America is made up of millions of people from all over the world and from every ethnic situation there is !
I am sick of all the tiny little brains out there…………OMG!!!!
Sharpton is a goon……….a bigot….a racist……….a showboater! I woulb be embarrassed to have him and others like him furthering the “get even” thinking blah blah blah crap if I were a black person. He holds them all back .The black community need to get it together ..stop blaming and rumbling and start claiming their own human dignity.
February 19th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Mr. Rick Sanchez, I watch your program all the time. And today, Ms. Amy Holmes made very angry about her comment about the racist cartoon ad! I know that she is an intelligent educated woman. And I’m applauded by her comment about the out right disrespectful, distasteful thinking about minorities! And for Amy to be blind to the visual cartoon, She forgot about our Great Grand Parents and our ancestors that were badgered and beat, brigandage ( raping and burning homes) called names made fun of, portrait as animals, beast. And let me tell on to you Amy. This world has problems and I know we have other problems as well. But, this is one thing that we cannot have on the burner! This is a problem that we as Americans need to tackle the important problems that will haunt us forever! Amy we understand about looking beyond the drawing its the content of words chosen.
February 19th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
I am white and read the “news” news, not the news-of-the-weird. I wasn’t aware of the chimp-attacks-woman story – all I could ever see in this cartoon was a “(heh-heh) ‘Oops, shot the President’” snicker. Add the common occurrence of white cops shooting black men for minor reasons (traffic ticket warrant) or no reason at all (Oakland commuter train/subway), the frequent use of monkeys in both general racist slang and in the past campaign, and the words about stimulus package – this looks like a cartoon for Hal Turner (author of novel about bloody white power takeover of USA), Stormfront, or the local KKK newsletter.
February 20th, 2009 at 12:27 am
You think this is bad now, just wait until someone of Asian descent gains political power in the US. We are more streotyped than any other group. Even in childrens cartoons where care has been taken to remove all black stero types, Asian streotypes still remain. We are not all a bunch of Ninjas wearing straw hats!!!
February 20th, 2009 at 12:55 am
Amazing…….! Here we gooooooooooooooooooo…………into 2009 with different races jocking for position. Gawd we are dumb.
February 20th, 2009 at 12:57 am
jockeying……..sorry for the typo
February 20th, 2009 at 1:07 am
Actually, Zelda, Bakugan has a point. While it is debatable whether or not Asian-Americans face worse stereotyping than any other ethnic group, there is certainly a long history of awful imagery against Japanese and Chinese Americans, especially, that has been fobbed off on other Americans of Asian descent. Why shouldn’t they be pissed about it? Why shouldn’t white people be pissed about it, too? Racism sucks. We should all fight against it. Insulting the intelligence of those who find offense does nothing to help that fight; it just gets in the way.
February 21st, 2009 at 5:15 pm
People who look for reasons to be offended find offense anywhere and everywhere. We all have groups of people we don’t care for, ie. Christians, gays, blacks, whites. We’re human.
February 21st, 2009 at 5:25 pm
That’s stupid. I’m human and don’t have a problem with any of those people. In fact, I make an effort not to offend them – although Christians are tougher, as there is a politically active conservative faction that insists on throwing science out the window and promoting homophobia, sexism, etc.
And are you saying that every time a person of color objects to a negative stereotype in a cartoon, they’re “looking for a reason to be offended”? Most people read the paper trying to find information about the world; there is an expectation to be offended somehow, usually by someone expressing an opposing opinion, or by reading about senseless violence (pretty offensive, IMHO.) But they don’t expect to get hit with demeaning crap aimed at them. And they have a right to get offended when it happens.
February 23rd, 2009 at 11:14 pm
Okay, so what happens now? Do we remove all chimpanzees from the country? Are cartoon characters no longer allowed to be primates in any way, shape or form? Or at least until this ridiculous tyrannical hysteria over perceived-racist implication clusterf*** goes away in four years?
Delonas made a mistake – as a cartoonist I can completely relate to him and see how why he did what he did. If an idea regarding a similar situation had occurred to me, involving something I found ridiculous and a crazy chimpanzee, I would be drawing it faster than you can say “slander.” Or least, I would be drawing it, and after this ridiculous deluge of stupidity regarding Delonas I would also be digging a fall-out shelter for the inevitable stench of psuedo-racism accusations to follow.
People get offended all the time. In this country, you do not have the right to not be offended. You have the right to not read or listen to or talk about something that offends you, but if you are exposed to it and are offended, that does not violate your rights in any way.
As for the “actual evidence linking racism and physical harm to the victims of racism” well sure, if you’re a racist to begin with. I saw the cartoon, now understand it to be perceived as racist, and have seen things I know to be racist. I am no more likely now to go punch my best friend, a black male in his twenties than I was before I know all of this. Am I an anomaly or does it take a person’s being raised racist, and that said person be provided with no positive counterexample to the way a person of a different skin color behaves to make someone snap?
And I understand the stereotyping of groups of people – I’m a male, and a muscular male at that, in college. I have a late class all week, usually ending at 10PM. Walking home, I have on countless occasions seen women, alone or in groups, either give me a cold shoulder or go to the other side of the street(from a distance) when passing me. I do nothing provocative. Am I offended? – slightly, I wish they would give me a chance, but I understand that our society promotes such idiotic behavior(the rapist won’t mind crossing the street, and normal guy will just lose some self-esteem.) and that some women do get raped, assaulted, etc.
If someone were to publish an article lambasting men and detailing how we are all pigs who only want to rape and beat women(and believe me, working at a college newspaper I’ve read my share of articles along those lines), or who say we’re all just a bunch of penises running around, waiting to find someone to screw over, I would be offended. I’d also be able to retort, or to talk to that person. If they did not mean it, I would drop the issue because obviously it was a mistake and they were misinterpreted on my behalf – the same thing that ANY intelligent person would do. For me to push intention down their throat is beyond stupid, it’s assuming thought crime, which is prejudicial in itself.
February 23rd, 2009 at 11:35 pm
Talk about overreacting, Brad. How the hell is this conversation about your troubles with women? Yes, Delonas made a mistake, but he did so, because he was a) sloppy, and b) relying upon hackneyed creative techniques to generate humor from a current topic. He stumbled into racially sensitive imagery because he wasn’t looking where he was going; he wasn’t taking the responsibilities of political art seriously; he was not being a self-reflective artist. His was just a knee-jerk combination of “wacky news story” and “hot political topic” to create a stupid gag. Yet he wound up evoking a few decades worth of negative simian stereotypes associated with African Americans (as well as other marginalized groups throughout American history; see Sorensen.) It is not the fault of the offended reader that the cartoonist is careless. It is not the reader’s job to read the cartoonist’s mind or “good intentions.” The reader can only judge what is on the page. And while the reader does not have a right to not be offended (I agree with you there), the reader does have a right to be offended and to vocally express it.
February 25th, 2009 at 7:26 am
[...] Racism 101 for White Cartoonists (In Contempt): Submitted by Liz Williams: “How not to draw a racist cartoon (and how to [...]