Is This Cartoon Racist?

um yeah, what is else is new?

Is that supposed to be based on the chimp that attacked that poor woman?

yes

Well then, it's not only racist, it's sick in so many other ways too.

I don't get it - can someone explain it to me?

I think that the proper question is, IS THIS CARTOON EVEN FUNNY?

I think I might get it - but I'm really afraid to think that what I think they're trying to say is what they're really trying to say -
If that's the case = the reason I didn't get it is that I just don't have it in me to believe people are that evil.
In other words - is that monkee supposed to represent Obama?

I think the rightwingnuts are gonna have a real hard time in years to come avoiding the overt expression of the repressed racism i suspect many of them of suffering from. Witness the number of times some yahoo here refers to Mr. Obama as "O-boy." I think they're just absolutely squirming under the necessity to hold back their natural inclinations.

How many times was Bush portrayed as a chimp?

It appears the simple point is the chimp -- now dead -- could have written a better bill.

Has Al Sharpton weighed in on this one yet? Has the artist been fired, or merely suspended? (Edit: Yes, of course he has. How silly of me to ask.)

The answer is: no.

Tico said:

Well, that IS true.
You could look at it that way - and actually I'd rather look at it that way than to believe that there's the amount of hateful and dangerous racism directed against Obama that this cartoon could be interpreted to imply.

I guess given the historical references to blacks as less than human and apelike - it's not really the most fortunate comparison to make if one doesn't want to have their work interpreted as being racist.
The same reference to George Bush would not elicit the same metaphorical or allegorical response- the meaning you espouse would have been immediately clearer.
And then there's the whole assassination issue and angle.
And lack of respect, etc. etc.
But lack of respect for the office of President isn't anything new.

It's hard to remove the baggage of history from this and that makes it racist. Even coming from the NY Post I find this shocking. It's insulting the President, the NYC police, the primate that was killed and the woman who was mutilated. Perhaps if it was funny you could just pass over it, but it's not even funny.

Good question--perhaps you could tell us precisely how many times a political cartoon appeared in the New York Post, or any publication of an equivalent respectability (not much, though, in that particular case), in which the Shrub was portrayed as a chimp. Frankly, i suspect you'd play hell coming up with any example in a major newspaper in this country.

I agree GW.

The more I look at it, the less sense it even makes.

So, they're saying Obama is lower on the evolutionary scale, but why did they have to pick the image of the chimp if they wanted to insult Obama and talk about the stimulus package?

What's the connection between an animal attacking a poor woman and ripping off her hands and face, and the president?

It's like they had a sack full of news and they reached in a pulled out 2 stories at random and put them together.

Like sewing together the body of a goat and the head of a squirrel.

It doesn't have anything to do with the woman.

The chimp went apeshit and they shot it to stop its rampage

I guess they're saying Obama is going apeshit with this stimulus package and they'd like to see that stopped too.

The woman and what happened to her aren't referenced.

what, you're gonna tell me the squoat is not a real animal?

No, they aren't referenced specifically, but I would have to say they were refering to that story.

Where else did they get the idea from the chimp from, if not from that story?

Let's say that poor woman hadn't been attacked, and that chimp wasn't shot by the police.

In that case the image in the cartoon would have no link to anything. Where would the idea of the police shooting a chimp have come from? Isn't the nature of editorial cartoon that they do draw from recent events?

This seems to me to have been a slur of opportunity--without the incident of the woman and the chimp, there'd have been no basis for such a cartoon which weren't grossly and overtly racist.

my thoughts too