No, it wouldn’t. She has a blond ponytail, yes, but brown hair. The comic makes her entirely blonde.
To make a caricature, you take some feature of the subject that’s outside of the norm, and you draw it as even more outside the norm. If someone has a nose that’s bigger than average, you make it a lot bigger than average. If someone has an unusually short neck, then you make it even shorter, and so on.
But this artist seems to have decided that the way in which Williams’ appearance is outside of the norm is that she has West African ancestry, and so exaggerated the traits associated (correctly or incorrectly) with that ancestry. The underlying assumption is that the “norm” is necessarily white. And it fails as a caricature, because it doesn’t actually look like Williams specifically, as opposed to any other black woman.
That’s my main problem with this cartoon; it’s a caricature that is a placeholder for Williams, but actually looks nothing like her.
Her lips are fuller than your typical white woman’s but not thick enough to exaggerate without straying into the unrecognizable. In the cartoon, her face is consumed by the size of her lips and mouth.
Her body is muscular but it’s not fat. The cartoon suggests obesity, not brawn.
Truth is, very few of the cartoons that have appeared in this thread really resemble her, even the ones that don’t look like racist caricatures. I don’t know why that is; are her features that hard to capture? Her cheekbones and narrow eyes seem like easy enough things to depict.
Except multiple examples of non-racist negative caricatures have been offered in this thread. Did you miss them? I’ll quote the posts for you:
BS. Hereis a negative political cartoon involving Michele Obama. Negative but not at all racist.
Are the discredited stereotyped features being big, muscular, black, angry, scary looking, and with big lips and frizzy hair? Or was it the tennis dress, or the destroyed racket?
Regards,
Shodan
Big lips aren’t racist if the person has big lips. Or even if they don’t. You got to put a bone in the nose.
The discredited features are primarily the topknot, with no hair at all above her ears, the shape and structure of the mouth, and the foreshortened pose, all of which are recognizable as offensive African stereotypes, and none of which are recognizable as Serena Williams.
It strikes me that someone who is in the cartooning business should know the difference even if some of us here, ahem, don’t. This seems like your typical right-wing “build the deniability in up front” ploy, so that when someone points out the racism you can say: “That’s not what I meant at all. You must be the one with the problem.” In short, all the asshole of the honest racist but none of the balls.
I have to agree with you. Not about Osaka so much, she really does have some blonde hair and you can’t really see her facial features very well, but the Williams depiction is certainly racist. I don’t really see how it could be argued otherwise.
Yes.
You suggested then, and do so again here by the use of the word “tactics” and by suggesting that I will look until I find a definition that suits my argument best, that I am not out to debate fairly, but to do the opposite just to come out on top in an argument. Certainly there are many people who do this online. I do not. If you have evidence that I do, then show it, otherwise you are making an unfounded assumption.
Do we really have to start defining commonly known terms? Fine, I’ll go with this one, the first one I found just so you know: “a picture, description, or imitation of a person or thing in which certain striking characteristics are exaggerated in order to create a comic or grotesque effect.”
The Knight cartoon does this, unquestionably. It is a caricature. The other in question, shown here, while not a completely accurate depiction of Serena nor McEnroe, does not reach the level of caricature, nor even come close. I see not a single exaggerated feature, for instance. Of course this is my opinion. It’s okay if we disagree about if it is a caricature. Just know this is my honest belief, and not a tactic.
As for your comments about Serena, yes, I should have responded. I apologize. So, here: in the cartoon, Serena is not overly fat, but she certainly isn’t thin in real life, either. Serena’s hair at the Open was frizzy and somewhat unkempt, which the artist exaggerated. I don’t know what “normal” lips are, but Serena’s aren’t exactly thin. Exaggerated in the cartoon, but not to a racist degree.
This story on the cartoon includes a bit of reaction to it, including from black women: This cartoon of Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka is being called out for presenting racist tropes
I would also disagree with Shodan’s assertion that Williams is “scary looking.”
Fair enough, but the artist, for what I know about him, is a cartoonist first, and not really a caricaturist. Doesn’t mean he can’t draw a caricature of course, even if it’s a bad one.
Fair enough on Aunt Jemima, and you are correct on my ‘angry’ comment also. I badly misinterpreted what you wrote.
No, not racist. It shows exaggerated caricature features and shows the actions of a specific individual.
I guess there’s no reason to continue the discussion, then. Thanks for clearing this up.
In all seriousness, I’m not serious what you hope to achieve through your continued argument. Your opposition has clearly laid out objective reasons why the character in question is racist - it hews closer to classic racist caricatures than to a caricature of the specific person in question, and only does this for the black person. The response to this seems to vacillate between “I don’t see it and I’m the god-emperor of racism” and “There’s no such thing as racism unless there’s a bone through their nose”. Those are pretty poor responses. Are you planning to do better?
You link to a google search? Seriously? Basically none of the first page results are remotely racist on my google. And the original OPs cartoon does not have large earings.
That said, he OP cartoon is pretty hard to defend.
Yeah, when I first looked at it I was in the “doesn’t seem racist to me, but I could see how others might find it racist” camp, but considering the above, that seems to suggest a higher likelihood that it was intentional (or perhaps subconsciously drawing racist stereotypes). That being said, frizzy hair + tennis racket basically is all that’s needed to identify her as Serena - I haven’t seen any of the cartoonists other work so who knows if he even has the skills to do a good caricature. If he has accurately caricatured other people in the past and went with a generic stereotypical look here, that seems more incriminating than if none of the drawings that he does ever look like the intended subject. Does the artist have a past history of racist content?
It’s interesting how subjective everyone’s take on the picture is, though - the character definitely looks muscular to me, not fat, and it also doesn’t look like a top knot to me - it just looks like to me that the character is jumping with her torso leaned forward. The face/lips are the only things that look stereotypical to me.