In the minds of not a few of my compatriots, Obama is to blame. After all, we all know he’s a secret Muslim agent sent from Kenya to destroy the America, the light and beacon of the First World. They have this all wrong. Obama was hatched in a secret lab run by the Democratic Leadership Council, from the same exact DNA centrist scientists had cloned Bill Clinton, but modified to be younger, smarter, less passionate and more disciplined. No drama. No blowjobs. This guy will not freak out in the face of the ginormous challenges the American Empire creates for itself. The problem is that the right views caution and deliberation as signs of weakness and fear, or even worse, the work of the Devil, he what planted dinosaur bones to fool scientists with satanic Darwinism. Failing to panic and to fan paranoia among the people provides aid and comfort to the enemy. Because Cheney said so. Or some shit.

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.)

Will Smith appeared on Oprah two days after the election and expressed almost exactly those sentiments expressed in the first panel of this strip. You can watch the whole thing at oprah.com. Here is the full quote of what Smith said:

The history of African-Americans is such that you want to be a part of America, but we’ve been rejected so much it’s hard to take the ownership and take responsibility for ourselves and this country. It was like, at that second, at that moment, all of our excuses were gone.

Smith is not alone among black liberal voters who have drawn this conclusion from the election of the first African-American president of the USA. CNN showed a clip of a young black voter celebrating in the streets on election night, exclaiming “No excuses!” And you can see a fuller explication of this meme on a subtly titled You Tube video “BARACK OBAMA WINZ! NO MORE EXCUSES 4 BLACK FOLK”:

Commenting on this video, “Ungodly Bastard” concurs:

I agree, as a black man and a Obama supporter I better never hear a black man complain about white America holding holding us down again! White America overwelmingly supported a black President. So you’re right, NO MORE EXCUSES!!!!!!!

The problem is: racism is not an “excuse,” it’s a condition of life, it’s built into the systems of finance, education, culture, and government that have evolved since Europeans brought Africans to North America and enslaved them, gradually displaced native peoples through invasion and genocide, and developed legal frameworks that excluded people of color from political, economic and social participation. People of color have fought back, they have struggled, and continue to struggle, winning rights, liberties and improvements in their lives along the way, educating white people enough so that, at the very least, a young bi-racial politician who didn’t act “too black” or “too angry” could raise $750 million dollars and fight for their votes.

I get what Smith, et al. are trying to do. Barack Obama is a role model, a positive representative of what young people of color can achieve if they work hard and make the right decisions. It’s a message that as a parent I try to impart to my own biracial daughter (as well as my “monoracial” son), because we worry about our kids, we want them to succeed, we want them to be tough and get back up when they get knocked down. We don’t want them making excuses when they don’t try, when they whine that they “can’t” or when you can tell they are just plain lazy. “Turn off the damn TV, read a book!” Every parent should have that command memorized. When they are confronted with racism, we want our kids to fight it, to confront “back” and to not tolerate it. And we don’t want it to affect their self-esteem.

But the election of Barack Obama did not magically undo the legacy of 500 years of racism and oppression. It was one more yellow brick on the road to Oz, to be sure; hopefully he will seize the opportunity to undo the social and economic affects of that legacy, while also addressing the class-based structure of our society that exacerbates racism. A few of the things mentioned in today’s cartoon — neglected neighborhoods, failing schools, predatory lenders and check-”cashing” establishments, poverty — afflict everyone in the working poor, a demographic that encompasses all ethnicities. Certainly people of color are hit harder by poverty and social injustice; and whites enjoy privileges that are more subtle yet no less advantageous. Nonetheless, as the middle class finds itself slipping into the ranks of the working poor, privileged folks like Will Smith or lesser privileged folks whom the economy has not (yet) punished should be wary of naiveté and assuming victim-blaming postures regarding the poor. Leave the “no excuses” lecture at home and keep fighting for social justice and equality.

And, really, why not? If you hire campaign advisers who were the same hell-spawn who spread racist and nasty rumors about you in South Carolina 8 years ago, well … chickens come home to roost. The post-9/11 fear and hate message doesn’t work anymore; only the most deluded, the most ignorant, and the most resentful will play into that crap anymore.

As for the recent – and awesome – news that the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay marriage, the fundie and homophobic backlash has already begun in the form of initiative drives to ban same-sex marriage in the California state constitution. Good luck to our queer friends and their allies in California in fending those bastards off. Fortunately, despite the joke of my cartoon up above, I don’t believe the GOP will get much mileage this election year out of gay-bashing. That doesn’t mean they won’t try, but it will be more difficult for McCain to seize upon the issue without alienating popular fellow Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose support of gay marriage is more progressive than either of the two Democrats (props to Senator Clinton for being so gay-friendly in her campaigning, however.)

Among my first thoughts (after a round of disgust, anger, outrage, then more disgust), was to wonder how anyone in the African American communities around our country can possibly seek justice against the police who routinely harrass them, brutalize them, victimize them and occasionally murder them. Think about it: black men are far more likely to get arrested than white men; incarceration rates for blacks are much higher than for whites. This largely affects urban working class African American communities. So how likely is going to be that among witnesses of a shooting at a strip club in a black part of the city one will find a few with criminal records? I’m not commenting on whether their convictions were justified or not. Some probably were. But it’s ridiculous to willy-nilly dismiss their testimony when as a population they are routinely treated as a criminal class by the authorities.

And, yeah, I’m none too surprised that their might be confusing testimony arising from a crowded strip club on a busy night when plain clothes cops start firing their weapons.