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)
Loading ...
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. 
Obama did not write the stimulus bill, congress did. I think it is a slap at bad legislation and congress, not Obama. But we always seem to jump right to victimhood in this country.
I see everyone’s point about who wrote the bill (even though you could argue that Obama was the leader of it, and therefore the ad hoc writer), but it is a valid point nonetheless. In that light, calling this racist would be a stretch…
Didn’t Nancy Pelosi & co. write the stimulus bill?
I would say it is definitely insensitive. The cartoonist might have meant the stimulus bill was so lousy it was written by the chimp in Conn. However, if that is indeed the case, it was really poor judgement at the very least since there is a clear history of comparing Africans and African-Americans to apes. Given that the president is of African-American decent, it is easy to see how one can question the motives behind this cartoon. I cannot say for sure regarding the motives of the creator, only that it was either a poorly thought out decision or was indeed a backhanded racial attack.
To several of the posters immediately above this one:
Two reasonably intelligent people can see the same thing and come to diametrically opposed opinions. The quality of a meal, the appeal of a house or car, the beauty of a particular piece of clothing. You see the cartoon your way, I see it mine.
You bring a set of underlying presumptions that lead you to believe the cartoon is not racist. I respect that, but I come with a different interpretation.
I am a black man raised in the United States. There has been no more common portrayal of those of us who are not white (colored, Negro, Afro-American, black, African-American, whatever the current vernacular) than that of a simian, one step lower on the evolutionary ladder than whites. There are long pseudo-scientific treatises and a long common cultural use of that image. Durng the O.J. Simpson murder trial, it was revealed that members of the L.A. police department referred to inner-city black neighborhoods as Gorillas in the Mist in reference to the movie about Dian Fossey’s pioneering work with mountain gorillas.
It is either dishonest or naive to not acknowledge the baggage that image brings.
Then, it has been clear for the past few weeks that Barack Obama, though not having written the legislation for the stimulus bill, was the public driver behind it, dictating what he wanted it to contain, championing it, and becoming the public target of those who say the elements of the stimulus will ruin this great democracy of ours.
Third, in a New York newspaper, this cartoon has another overlay from the string of high-profile killings of unarmed black men by NY police, who were exonerated of any wrongdoing.
It took me about a nanosecond to put those together to see the offensiveness, including the troubling invitation to violence against the president, who has been the target of a significantly high level of threats simply because of his race.
Does my reaction make the cartoonist a racist? I have no idea what’s in his head. Do people have the right to express their offense? They do. This freedom of speech that so many call to mind in such cases extends both ways. You can say what you want within some reasonable bounds depending on the forum, and others can say they don’t like it. Then the debate can play out.
But I reject the notion that I or other blacks go around looking for racism. It’s out there, it cuts in many ways both personal and institutional. It is embedded in the very principles of the founding of this nation, with the decision to use the color of a person’s skin as the determining factor in deciding who should have certain rights and who shouldn’t. The racism cuts both ways, of course, but it has from the beginning and, I would argue still does, favor those who are white more than it does those who are not.
Not talking about racism will not make it go away. Nor will lambasting those who call it out, or take offense at things with underlying racist themes.
You can always count on a goofy liberal to be shouting at someone:
“YOU’RE AS RACIST AS HELL!”
Goofy liberals think themselves the gatekeepers of truth and moral superiority.
Tim,
Its true and it is NOT rhetoric AND there are exceptions to everything and you appear to be one of them as there are others. Yes, the Religious Right has made an extreme unholy alliance with Conservatism (Republican) politics and has become entrenched in all the racism, ugly and evil that comes along with such alliances.
Ron Wade,
Hopefully your explanation will open the eyes of people who do not know better and at the same time shine light onto those who PRETEND to be stupid and ignorant of the truths that you have shared.
Walker and Mr. Wade,
Race hustling works with the gullible and effiminate, but your arguments have no merit on the street.
Why don’t you admit that slavery and Jim Crow were the best things to ever happen to modern black democrats? I mean what a perfect excuse for hedonism.
O,
Wouldn’t it be more accurate to state that our arguments have no merits with FOOLS?