Political cartoon of chimp is being called racist
A political cartoon in today’s New York Post is being called racist. At the least, it would seem to qualify as tasteless.
St. Petersburg Times media critic Erics Deggans writes in his blog:
Is this cartoon racist?
Riddle me this: the New York Post, a famously combative, conservative newspaper owned by Fox News proprietor Rupert Murdoch, runs a cartoon implying that a crazed chimpanzee wrote the recent economic stimulus bill, which was actually championed and developed by our nation’s first black president.
Is that a racist joke?
Longtime civil rights activist Al Sharpton thinks it might be. New York Gov. David Paterson, who is that state’s first black chief executive, has said “an explanation is in order.”
As a media critic, this is where times get interesting. Because our leaders have been aging white guys for so long, pundits, cartoonists, comedians and journalists have had a relatively narrow scope of concerns when it came to pointed political satire.
But we live in a new age. We have a black president; a woman came within a few hundred primary votes of snagging the job, too. And jokes that might have rolled off the back of a typical politician now take on new resonance when levied against someone from a race of people who were stereotyped as ape-ish animals for hundreds of years.
Frankly, I doubt the Post was smart enough to craft such a ham-handed cartoon to serve such a subtle agenda. Instead, the Post seems to be referencing this awful story of a chimp shot and killed by police after attacking and seriously injuring the owner’s best friend.
I think they made an awful joke that had a resonance beyond what they planned — a lesson, perhaps, in jumping too gleefully on the train of in-your-face parody. A friend online just called it “unintentional racism.”
But, as any person of color can tell you, it’s tough to know what someone means when they say something like this. And if you really don’t mean to be racist, do you really want some people thinking that you might be?
The New York Post stands by the cartoon, Boston.com reports.
“The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut,” editor-in-chief Col Allan said in a statement. “It broadly mocks Washington’s efforts to revive the economy. Again, Al Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist.”
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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Steve Parker is the deputy managing editor for news, and oversees the Post-Dispatch's front page. STLtoday's online news editors are on his newsroom team. Parker has been at the paper since September 1980. 
And what is the New York Post’s solution to the economic crisis? More of the tired old republican drivel that precipitated the problem to begin with?
For the record, I am a conservative and generally can’t stand Obama.
That cartoon is definitely racist. In fact, that is so blatantly racist that I can’t believe a liberal rag like the Post let it through. This was one of the worst attempts to tie two stories together (Porkulus package and the chimp attack) that I have ever seen by a political cartoonist.
I will be interested to see if the outrage over this equals the great swelling of anger that the liberal media had at those two dummies who hung Obama in effigy down in Kentucky (or whereever that was). Will the media attack one of their own? We will see.
Al Sharpton is a media whore, but I can’t blame him for being mad on this one.
…I still can’t get over that they published this….how stupid can someone be?…
That’s not a “clear parody,” it’s an attempt to compare a political figure with the shooting of an animal. At the least, it’s totally despicable to come up with a thinly veiled reference to assassinating politicians. At worst, that reference is made by drawing upon some of the worst prejudices out there.
And of course, in typical Rush Limbaugh style, the NY Post comes out with a “what, who me” type non-denial. Pathetic.
I love a good joke, I love a good cartoon, this one step over its boundary more than it should have.
Im sure the artist didnt mean it to be to be what everyone thinks. But he sure could have thought more thought into it
Definitely Racist….
That cartoon was in really bad taste.Is the media really stooping that low to trash Obama?Cartoons like that are something that seem more in place in a publication like Hustler marazine.
Here are some other possible captions:
“Great, now who is the GOP going to handle their PR?”
or,
“At least it wasn’t Bernie Madoff.”
or,
“Too bad it wasn’t Bernie Madoff.”
or,
“I recognize him from the ‘Scopes’ trial.”
or,
“I didn’t know Cheney was in town.”
or,
“Great you shot (fill in your “favorite Senator/Representative) (ie, Mitch McConnell’s speechwriter, Rep. Kanter’s press aid, Bill O’Reilly’s researcher, Sean Hannity’s brother, etc.)
By my knowing that Obama didn’t write the stimulus bill, I place no relationship between him and the dead chimp.
If anything, this is insensitive to the lady that had her face ripped off by the chimp.
Another idea: Maybe the writer thought the bill was so bad it was written by a monkey in Congress?
Bad taste? Yup but not for being racist…for being insensitive to a lady that had her face ripped off.
Well if Al Sharpton thinks it is racist, it very well must be. The newspaper will have to pay a fine…I mean, give a donation to the Rainbow push coalition in order to no longer be racists.
Wow, it seems like most of the posters here have something in common with that race-baiting buffoon Sharpton- you apparently see racism everywhere with no logical thinking behind it. It should be readily apparent to any intelligent human being that the cartoonist is making the point that the stimulus was crafted by a room full of monkeys(ape in this case) because it is so screwed up. If any of you had actually read any portion of the bill, that should be the only conclusion you can come to because the whole thing is 1000+ pages of worthless gobbledygook that could have only been accomplished by chimps randomly hitting keys on a typewriter…
I am certainly not a fan of the Obamassiah, but there cannot be an Obama comparison here simply because he did not sit down and write the bill himself, that stinking dead fish is the child of an out-of-touch House and Senate. I also have to agree with Amazedbythelunacy, it is quite insensitive to the poor woman who had her faced literally ripped off by a crazed chimp. Her life is forever altered(if she even survives…)