POST-racial

The cartoon above appeared in the NY Post this morning. My initial reaction was to take offense, and I have been thinking about the extent to which this is a legitimate response. Clearly, the paper is well within its right to have published this. Nonetheless, I am surprised and disappointed that an editor saw fit to let this go to print.

To put the cartoon into context, let’s take a look at the relevant facts:

1. Yesterday, a domestic monkey in Connecticut went berserk, attacked somebody, and had to be killed by police.
2. Congress recently passed a large stimulus bill, considered by many to be inadequate to the task at hand. In some respects, this can be considered to be President Obama’s first major legislative success.

The benign interpretation is that the cartoon merely illustrates how attempts by the government to solve the economic crisis are qualitatively no different than those chimps would have come up with; that is, garbage. To be fair, this is not an altogether new image: think about the now trite idea of an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards. In this context, the shooting of the monkey is nothing more than an attempt to link the political activity with the bizarre topical story from (1).

Indeed, Col Allan, Editor in Chief of the Post, said (according to Gothamist):

"The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington's efforts to revive the economy"

Setting aside the poorly established link, and hence, the violence of that combined image, consider the more insidious racial implications.

Historically and presently, African Americans have often been degraded by being compared to monkeys (among many, many other forms of degradation). I find it hard to believe that the editors of even the NY Post would be unaware of this historical social context. Given the prominence of the Obama Administration in the development and passage of this legislation, it is not a very tenuous connection to link the image of the monkey to President Obama himself. This is racist and I believe inappropriate. Further, I find it completely implausible that the editors who allowed this to print would be unaware of this reading.

In my mind, this connects to a broader notion that Barack Obama’s historic election somehow moves us into a post-racial mode of interacting with each other. While few would explicitly suggest this, I sense an extent to which many believe his election has given them license to stop worrying about sensitivity in race relations.

I wonder, in other words, whether there are people who believe that the above cartoon is now ‘fair game.’

In my mind, of course, the answer is still a resounding NO.

I would love to hear some discourse on this topic--