Academic

On the Cartoon . . .

By firstamendmentblogger

By now we're used to the conservative right relying on Black commentators to downplay the significance of White racism, so Ron Christie's appearance last night on Anderson Cooper was really no surprise.  Here's part of what he had to say in defense of the NY Post's decision to run the insensitive ignorant racist "chimp" cartoon: 

As a proud Black man, I don't look at a chimpanzee as an African-American, I don't look at it as a reflection of who I am and who African-Americans are in this country . . .  We need to get together as a country and not look at racism behind every corner, for goodness sakes, the cartoonist said that that was not the intent, let's not assume that there's always something evil lurking behind every corner.

Sigh. 

I would think that most people don't consciously "look at a chimpanzee as an African American," but that of course says nothing about the historical underpinnings of the caricature, much less the belief system of the cartoonist or the Post's editorial staff.  Since when does racism inhere only in the myths and caricatures that we buy into?

What's more, does Christie not see the irony of calling out people offended by the cartoon as those who "look at racism behind every corner."  This is the very same nonsensical victim-blaming rhetoric the Supreme Court used more than a hundred years ago in Plessy v. Ferguson when it refused to strike down a Louisiana segregation statute:

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.

Sure we've come a long way since the days of Jim Crow.  But apparently we've yet to abandon the mindset.

-Kathleen A. Bergin

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on February 19, 2009 (boomark / email).