And While We’re on the Subject

I guess I should’ve enjoyed the postracial vacation. Counting from inauguration it lasted, what, three and a half weeks? I mean, that’s practically a European-length get-away from race as usual. But this week we find ourselves right back in our cubicles.

And this is what was waiting in the inbox.  This cartoon received precious little attention last week, considering the racial clusterbomb that went off in the NYP’s offices. From where I stand, this is far more offensive. The Post cartoonist could at least cop to terminal cluelessness about the association of Obama specifically with the crazed chimp. The above offering is a hamfisted shout-out to the most resonant stereotype in American society: the black criminal.

That said. I don’t think that we can or should rally the troops around Obama every time a cartoonist goes off his meds and his editor trips over the boundary between edge and outrage. The reality is that all Presidents are subject to unfair criticism — though Obama is the first for whom that criticism has taken on a racial hue. Carter and Clinton were both ridiculed as backwater hicks (how often did we see references to Clinton’s libido paired with images of his down-home roots?)

Reagan’s advancing years brought with them a harvest of Alzheimer’s jokes: Did you hear that Ronnie announced he has Alzheimer’s… Again? Lincoln was ridiculed in Northern newspapers and depicted as (irony of ironies) part Negro and Andrew Jackson’s wife was assailed as a bigamist in the newspapers of the day.

At the risk of being cynical, I’m taking it as a good sign that this cartoon was largely ignored. All of us, but especially we black folk, are going to have to develop thicker skin and a shrewder sense of when we go Al Sharpton on some fool and when we offer the empty-heads only the tinny echo of their own isolated voices.