Cartoonist's monkey business enrages African-Americans

AMERICA:A cartoon juxtaposing the shooting dead of a chimp with Obama's stimulus plan has been followed by a heated debate on race in US

WHEN A pet chimpanzee in Connecticut ripped the face off a friend of its owner and was shot dead by police, the image was too tempting for New York Post cartoonist Sean Delanos to pass up. Using a typical trope of his trade, the cartoonist juxtaposed the chimpanzee’s fate with the biggest political story of the week, President Barack Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus plan, which has been denounced by conservatives as a poorly conceived waste of money.

The result, which was published on Wednesday, shows a white policeman riddling a chimpanzee with bullets while his fellow officer, who is also white, says: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”

The cartoon has sparked two days of protests outside the headquarters of the Post, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, with civil rights leader Al Sharpton calling for a boycott of the paper.

The demonstrators claim that the cartoon is racist, depicting America’s first black president as a monkey and suggesting assassination. They point out that Delanos has a history of producing tasteless cartoons, many of them targeting gays, blacks and other minorities.

The Post issued something of an apology yesterday, declaring that the cartoon was meant to depict an ineptly written stimulus Bill and was not a depiction of the president or a thinly veiled expression of racism.

“This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologise,” the paper said. “However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with the Post in the past – and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback. To them, no apology is due.”

Sharpton has indeed had differences with the New York tabloid but his interpretation of the cartoon is widely shared by African-Americans who are painfully aware of an ugly tradition of depicting blacks as monkeys.

The paper’s champions charge that the critics are over-sensitive, pointing out that former president George Bush was depicted as a monkey by liberal cartoonists and suggesting that the protesters are seeking to curb press freedom.

The cartoon controversy came as Eric Holder, the country’s first black attorney general, called for a more candid discussion of race in America, suggesting that understanding the historical experience of black people was essential to understanding the US. “Simply put, to get to the heart of this country, one must examine its racial soul,” he said.

“Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial, we have always been, and we, I believe, continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards. Though race-related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about things racial.”

Holder pointed out that, although workplaces are racially integrated and blacks and whites socialise easily together in the hours immediately after work, they still tend to go their separate ways on Saturdays and Sundays.

“This is truly sad,” he said.

“Given all that we as a nation went through during the civil rights struggle it is hard for me to accept that the result of those efforts was to create an America that is more prosperous, more positively race conscious and yet is voluntarily socially segregated.”

Conservative talk radio hosts went ballistic, accusing Holder of bitterness and rage and the Obama administration of having a collective chip on its shoulder.

“What are we supposed to talk about that would satisfy these people?” asked Rush Limbaugh.

“Are the black students supposed to sit with the white students and ask the white students what it’s like being white? Are the white students supposed to say to black students, “What is it like being black?” Do you compare notes and figure out which you’d rather be? What is it we’re supposed to talk about? Do the gay students talk to the straight students, find out what it’s like to be gay, find out what it’s like to be straight?”

Such conversations might, as Holder suggests, be uncomfortable but if Americans want to finally overcome the divisions that have caused the country so much pain and created so much mutual suspicion, it doesn’t sound like a bad place to start.