ACCUSED OF BEING RACIST

A cartoon by staff editoonist Sean Delonas that ran in the New York Post on Wednesday, February 18, has been accused of being racist. The cartoon shows two policemen, one of whom comments on the dead and bleeding chimpanzee the other had just shot to death, saying: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next Stimulus Bill.”  Visually, the cartoon references a newsstory on the previous Monday about a celebrity 200-pound chimpanzee named Travis who attacked and mauled a woman, mutilating her face and hands. Police, called to the scene, shot and killed the chimp. The speech balloon ties the image to another current event, the passage the previous week of the monster Stimulus Bill and Barack Obama’s signing the bill into law the day before, Tuesday, February 17. The opinion expressed here is pretty clearly disapproval of the Stimulus Bill and the Democrat-dominated Congress that brought it into being. The New York Post is part of conservative Rupert Murdoch’s communications empire, and Delonas is quite comfortable espousing the views Murdoch wants promulgated, and, judging from this example, the cartoonist promulgates with a sledge hammer, finding in any liberal idea a deserving nail.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, however, gave voice to an alternative interpretation of the cartoon. The chimp, he charged, stood for Obama in the racist tradition of linking Africans to apes and monkeys by way of asserting black inferiority — they are only animals, after all, barely out of the jungle. Moreover, it is possible, if Sharpton’s interpretation is accepted, to see the cartoon as urging the assassination of President Obama.

Cartoonist Delonas’ response: "Absolutely friggin ridiculous. Do you really think I'm saying Obama should be shot? I didn't see that in the cartoon. The chimpanzee was a major story in the Post. Every paper in New York, except the New York Times, covered the chimpanzee story. It's just ridiculous. [The cartoon is] about the economic Stimulus Bill. If you're going to make that about anybody, it would be [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi, which it's not."

Delonas’ incredulity is matched by that of his paper’s Editor-in-Chief, Col Allan, who issued a statement saying the cartoon was "a clear parody." Said he: "It broadly mocks Washington's efforts to revive the economy. Again, Al Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist," Allan said.

Although the Stimulus Bill has become, as Sharpton said, “synonymous” with Obama, thereby encouraging the inference that the chimp is the President, most political wonks and pundits, certainly including Delonas, recognize that the bill was not written by Obama or his staff but by Congress, mostly Democrats, who ladled pork into the basic recipe Obama gave them. It was the Democratic Congress that was Delonas’ target. The cartoonist’s mistake was in assuming that every potential viewer of the cartoon would see it from his perspective — that is, the perspective of a knowledgeable right-wing surveyor of the political landscape — rather than from the viewpoint of a casual citizen who, more than likely, would think the Stimulus Bill was wholly a White House production embodying just the President’s wishes.

Is Delonas’ cartoon racist or not? That’s the unanswerable question. Delonas says it isn’t. But a lot of people think it is. A lot of other people can see how it might be interpreted as a racist slur by some of those who are being slurred. As a white guy, I feel a little disadvantaged in this department: I not sure I can recognize every racist slur I encounter. When I first saw the cartoon, I thought that calling it racist was reaching: c’mon — it’s just a picture of a chimpanzee and a badly conceived cartoon. Pointlessly violent and inept maybe, but racist? I still don’t think it was intentional racism. But even if it wasn’t deliberately racist, it had the effect of an intentional racist statement. Consider all the people who were offended by its perceived racism.

The issue of racism with its implications for how Obama should be caricatured is discussed at Great and Tedious Length at www.RCHarvey.com, Opus 239, for which we have arranged Open Access: anyone with an Internet browser and a mouse can read the entire enchilada, including various other news bits, pieces, shreds, patches and scathing essays.