This Was Not Tone-Deafness
When you think about it, the now-infamous editorial cartoon from Murdoch’s New York Post is pretty stunning in its brazenly racist content. Only part of it is that the writer of the stimulus bill, commonly identified as Obama, is portrayed as a chimp. To at least some degree, it’s not hard to understand that chimpanzees are often used in pop culture to refer to someone stupid; but not to see the racism inherent in using the chimp to portray Obama, that’s pretty mind-boggling. After all, throughout the campaign, many people of clearly racist intent used “Curious George” with Obama’s name or likeness to make an outright racist point. Some conservatives have even tried to make the point that Bush was often portrayed as a chimp, so there should be no offense taken when Obama is similarly portrayed. That, of course, completely misses the point of racist stereotypes: if someone like Bush is portrayed in cartoon form with buck teeth, that will not register the same way as if, say, Daniel Inouye were portrayed in the same manner.
However, the inappropriateness of the cartoon goes way beyond portraying Obama as a chimp; it portrays him as a chimp just shot dead by the police. In a cartoon published in New York City. One has to ask, why? Is the idea that the chimp wrote the stimulus bill and then went on a violent rampage? That makes little sense unless you associate the stimulus bill with violence, and virtually no one does that. Even if you could get away with the Obama-as-chimp thing, the police shooting the chimp dead goes beyond any sensical analogy, comic or otherwise. Now, if the cartoonist had set up the scene with a chimp sitting at a typewriter, holding an empty gin bottle and passed out drunk as one of two onlookers say the exact same caption, that would get the message across even more clearly and with greater humor–again, aside from the racist content of the chimp in this context. Change it from a chimp into some dumb-looking guy, add elements to paint him as stupid and/or crazy (tinfoil hat, messy hair, dressed like a child, passed out drunk, etc.), and again you’d get the message across without any racist content at all.
But the chimp and the police shooting, that goes beyond being tone-deaf. I find it impossible to believe that anyone could have missed this. Add the element of the humor and meaning being expressed better with non-racist elements, and it suggests that racism was the clear intent of this cartoon.
Obama did not write the stimulus bill, Nancy Pelosi did. And George W Bush was routinely depicted or referred to as a monkey.
The cartoon is stunningly in bad taste and way beyond the pail. I’m sure that paleo-movement-conservatives like to think of the stimulus bill as crazy as if it were written by chimpanzees. I get that. But it’s the voilent component that strikes me. Lots of effective liberals have been shot dead by conservatives nut-cakes: FJK, RFK, MLK and Walter Reuther died in a strange plane crash. Shoot a liberal for acting out of (law and) order is a natural thought process for some conservative wing nuts, who act out there fantasies with their own guns hunting wild animals or shooting on ranges. You know there are some guys out there thinking, okay so whats the big deal about shooting another one.
Okay that takes care of the violence side of the equation. Then there’s also the racial side of the equation. I recall Howard Cosell’s infamous remark “look at that monkey run.” He didn’t survive that comment. In Rwanda, before the massacre there, talk radio there consistently referred to the other tribal groups as ‘cockroaches”. The Nazi’s referred to Jews as ‘vermin’. For conservatives to consistently balk at the civil rights of black and homosexuals, they have to remove the context of the humanity in these persons to succeed in their thought process. So I think that many look at blacks and homosexuals and see an animal or something other than human. Once you recognize the humanity in someone, no matter who they are, you cannot object to their having and fully sharing in human rights. In fact, once you recognize their humanity, you can at worse, only pity the unfortunate.
On so many levels, this cartoon is just in bad taste.
Anon:
Actually, David Obey is identified as the chief author of the bill and was the one who introduced it, not Nancy Pelosi; she is often identified as the author by right-wing smear sites. However, Obama is probably most responsible in terms of genesis if not direct authorship as he has been calling for a bill exactly like this for months, and you can be certain that he dictated the general shape of the bill and that his people worked closely with Obey.
As for your second point about Bush, it suggests that you did not read beyond the fourth sentence of the blog post before blindly replying. I learned this lesson some time ago: when commenting or replying, check out the entirety of what you read first, lest you find your comment obviated or made to look foolish by what you were supposed to have read first. Helps a lot.
Tim:
I think that the police shooting and the fact it was published in NY are key points; NY police are somewhat infamous for shootings involving racial divides, and that seems to me to be the only good explanation of why it was portrayed this way.
“I find it impossible to believe that anyone could have missed this.”
Then I defied the impossible. When I first saw it, it did not occur to me that it could be referring to Obama, because whether or not Obama is “generally” identified as the writer of the stimulus bill, I KNOW he didn’t write it. That said, I do find it hard to accept that the connection didn’t occur to the Post’s editors. What were THEY thinking?
Tim Kane and Luis, do you know why a chimp shot by the police was depicted in this cartoon? Judging by your comments, it doesn’t appear so.
Steve: Looking at what you’re referring to, I can see that when I typed that, there was a thought process in my head that did not find its way as clearly into the post as I wanted. My intent was to say that anyone responsible for creating/publishing the cartoon would have seen it. Obviously there are a lot of people who would miss it just by looking at it, especially people not concentrating on the meaning very deeply. But if you re-read that paragraph and keep in mind the context, it should be fairly clear that I was speaking of intent, which implies the people putting the cartoon forth, not the readers. I simply did not express it clearly enough.
So let me define that even further for effect: I find it impossible to believe that a professional editorial cartoonist creating the image, and an experienced New York City newspaper editor approving it could have gone through the process of creating, editing, and publishing this cartoon, with the thoughtful synthesis of understanding meaning and gauging readers’ reaction, without seeing that there was something excessively objectionable to this.
As stated above, I do not think that the elements of (a) a chimpanzee referring to the first black president and (b) NY police shooting unarmed suspects could have been created without knowing reference to racist themes. As I wrote in the post proper, outside of racist context, these elements taken together make little if any sense. I cannot imagine a thought process by a cartoonist that would have police shooting a chimp representing a black president on the streets of New York in a non-racist context. A chimp writing the bill, yes, though it would take a certain degree of tone-deafness for that to happen; but police shooting the chimp? Sorry, no.
Think about it: you want to express that the stimulus bill is badly written, and want to express that in a humorous context. You choose the course of disabling the writer of the bill so that someone can say, “We’re gonna need a new…” etc. You are cognizant of the fact that the author of the bill is generally regarded to be our first black president. So you naturally choose a chimp? How can that process be non-racist? A cartoonist in this situation would have to be completely and utterly out of touch to not see these connections being made. Such artists are chosen, in fact, for their keen sense of what readers will perceive. The decision to use a chimp and its racist implications simply could not have been missed, period. To then take the context of the NYPD shooting and killing unarmed people of color on the street–another context impossible for the cartoonist and the editor to be unaware of–only further clarifies the fact that the author intended to make this about race.
Tim Kane and Luis, do you know why a chimp shot by the police was depicted in this cartoon? Judging by your comments, it doesn’t appear so.
Kindly enlighten us, then.
Sure. A day or two before the cartoon, a 200 pound pet chimpanzee in Stamford Ct. managed to break loose out of the suburban home where he was being raised by a crazy owner. The chimp assaulted and mauled a neighbor, nearly killing her. The victim now needs a face transplant and probably will never be able to use her hands again. The owner called 911, and the police came down and shot the chimp to death in the middle of the street.
It’s a horrifying story, and one that gained national traction partly because the crazy owner (a 70 year old woman) has been appearing on television and conducting interviews. She raised the chimpanzee since it was a baby. The details of the relationship have been coming out in dribs and drabs, and they’ve been pretty disturbing, needless to say. We know that she and the chimp sleeped in the same bed and they often shared a bottle of wine together. So far, no one is outright daring to suggest that she and the chimp also did a certain activity that people often do when they share a bottle of wine in bed together, but most people are thinking it. Simply put, it’s one of those grotesque media sensations that pops up every once in a while and grabs the public’s fancy.
Anyway, this happened very recently and not too far away from NYC. When I saw the cartoon, it was obvious to me that it was just a tie-in, a mixing of two headlines together. I read it as “Well, the people who wrote the stimulus bill were a bunch of chimps or had chimp mentality.” And the police didn’t go after the chimp for writing the stimulus bill, it’s what they said after fending off an attack. That’s how I took it when I first saw it, and that’s how I saw the cartoonist’s intentions since this was in the white-heat glow of this weird media story. Even if this story didn’t pick up national traction, I think we also need to remember that the despite the Post’s somewhat national circulation – made even more accessable by the internet – it’s still a local paper and there will be cartoons that make no sense to people who don’t fully understand the context behind them. And Stamford’s pretty close to New York City, even if it is in another state. Look, it’s not funny. At all. And going by the cartoonists previous mean-spirited cartoons, I wouldn’t put it past him if he did intend something racist by it. But he gets the benefit of the doubt from me because I see what he was going for, and I absolutely believe there was no racist intention whatsoever. But again, this doesn’t excuse the editors who get paid for keeping an eye out for red flags. They should have been more on top of things, seeing things in the cartoon that the cartoonist himself may not have seen.
Just as an aside, this is a particularly touchy subject for me because Stamford, Ct. is the city I grew up in. How embarrassing to admit it now.
Finally got through a tough slog at work, sorry for the delay in the reply. Actually didn’t blog for a few days, longest I’ve gone for years.
Your explanation adds context to better understand what’s going on, to be certain. But I don’t really see it as mitigating anything I stated above. We still are left with a cartoon in which an average viewer would see a black president of the United States portrayed as a chimp, and the police just shot him dead.
The only thing connecting the Stamford chimp and the stimulus is the fact that there’s a chimp and the idea that the bill was badly written, and that really still isn’t enough to justify the joke–this chimp wasn’t stupid or silly, it was on a violent rampage. That doesn’t link it to the stimulus bill–it is, in fact, a disconnect instead.
Nor does it explain how the racist overtones in the cartoon might have been overlooked. What I said above stands: neither the cartoonist nor the editor could have failed to see how this cartoon would look, meaning the decision to run with it was a knowing one. I understand what you mean when you refer to what the cartoonist was going for–I just don’t see it as enough to explain away the alternate imagery. The black man/chimp/shot dead by NY police context is far too powerful, the chimp-ineptitude context is too far a reach.
What this comes across to me instead is an excuse to push boundaries; the story of the chimp in Connecticut plays as cover for the offensive elements of the cartoon, a la Rush Limbaugh using the LA Times article to legitimize his constant “Magic Negro” barrages.