Outrage Over ‘Obama Chimpanzee’ Cartoon
Source: Sky News
A newspaper that published a cartoon appearing to portray Barack Obama as a crazy chimpanzee has been accused of racism.
The cartoon appeared in the New York Post on Wednesday
The New York Post cartoon shows two police officers, one with a smoking gun, standing over the body of a bullet-riddled chimp.
The caption reads: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”
The image has outraged civil rights leaders and officials who say it echoes racist stereotypes.
Rev Sharpton On NYPost Cartoon Row
Black civil rights leader Reverend Al Sharpton described it as “troubling at best given the historic racist attacks of African-Americans as being synonymous with monkeys”.
But the Post’s editor-in-chief, Col Allan, defended the cartoon as “a clear parody of a current news event”.
He said the drawing refers to a chimpanzee named Travis who was killed by police in Connecticut after it mauled a friend of its owner.
In a statement, he hit back at the accusation made by Mr Sharpton, saying: “Again, Al Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist”.
Reading The Pictures: Killing That Little Monkey
Source: Michael Shaw, Huffington Post
1. The buck(shot) stops here? Well obviously it likens Obama to a monkey, playing on a long-standing African-American racist slur.
2. The cartoon is tying three things together (a real dying economy, a real monkey that ran amok in Connecticut the other day, and the racist stereotype of animalistic tendencies in blacks) to anticipate a recession-driven increase in crime and the need (paging Giuliani!) for some good old right-wing law-and-order. Yeah, two white cops. (Of course, this would have nothing to do with Eric Holder taking over the Justice Department and, among other things, bringing a critical eye to the prison-industrial complex, or more simply, the incarceration of black males for minor drug offenses.) …Economy in meltdown (perpetrated by white guys on Wall Street)? Play the fear card.
4. And then, from a different angle, there is this from a reader of mine ID’d as “tanker”:
“This is more about the conservative worldview then racism. They really think that people hate the stimulus bill and view it as an abomination and a disaster. thus the cartoonist thinks people will get the joke that this thing must’ve been written by a crazed chimp. Get it? Of course not, because the vast majority of people view the stimulus bill as at least a mainstream idea, if not perfect. To most of us, the joke doesn’t make sense, so we immediately assume the chimp is obama. I think this just shows that the cartoonist failed utterly because he’s a biased wingnust and sucks at his job, not that he’s racist.”
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