What looks like thick lower lips is actually the tongue. It’s not racist, just unflattering.
I’m having a Poe’s Law moment. Are you being serious?
Argue that you think a caricature of thick lips is okay if you must, but please don’t try to convince me that those lips are not a caricature outside the range of normal human lips. Yes, I can see the commensurately outsized tongue. The lips are the outsized parts above and below it.
And, once again, Serena Williams does not have thick lips.
Her face looks nothing like that face, shouting or not shouting. That’s a telling signal the artist doesn’t see her individuality and instead is using a stereotyped-laden approximation. Hunting around for a photo where her lips happen to look prominent, just to argue that the drawing doesn’t exaggerate them too much, doesn’t address the underlying problem here.
The only way that cartoon could look more racist is if she had a bone in her nose. She looks like an enraged cannibal in a Warner Brothers cartoon after Bugs Bunny has escaped the giant pot.
While this is admittedly a sidetrack from the original discussion, just to address the contrast being described by the cartoon linked here: I’m 32 and I can definitely remember as a kid people talking about John McEnroe like he was totally insane. “Outspoken” wasn’t the word that was used, it was more like “a fucking asshole.”
I have now looked at the various cartoons linked in different people’s posts, and I thought they were all pretty racially questionable, with the exception of the Michelle Obama “fat police” one (although I hate the politics of that one). Maybe Michelle has less stereotypically “African” features compared to Serena?
Well neither does Aretha Frankin, at least not as much as this drawing by Big Mike Roate. How come there’s no fuzz about it? Reason: There’s hardly any call to dislike the late singer, or to caricature her in a bad way.
Ok…caveats.
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I am Australian and have over the years seen much of Mark Knight’s work. He can be brutal in his lampooning of famous figures, particularly political ones but anyone famous can expect the same sort of treatment. See here
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Racism in America is different to that in Australia. Whilst it is as deeply entrenched and malign as the US, it doesn’t permeate the political sphere as much as it does over the big ditch. We don’t have the slavery narrative (actually debatable, but still) or the institutionalized segregation policies for example, but while we are a deeply racist nation, it’s different to the US in many ephemeral ways.
That being said, if I hadn’t heard opinions to the contrary, both here and via the media, I would have said that the cartoon was NOT racist. It was decidedly unflattering, which really is a cartoonists job, but given that Serena herself was behaving in a most unflattering way during the Open, I would have said “fair game”.
HOWEVER, reading responses here, I am prepared to revisit my opinion. I’ll get back to you later. 
…not so long ago Taika Waititi, the director of Thor Ragnorok called New Zealand “racist as fuck.”
This caused a bit of a comotion down under. We have our own mild version of the “right-wing outrage machine” here, and Taika pushed all of the right buttons and the outrage machine came back with all the expected responses.
But Taika was right. New Zealand is racist as fuck. I’m brown. And I’ve lived it.
But we are working on it. Things are better than they were before. Maori and the Crown are viewed as partners, sealed with a treaty that was signed over a hundred years ago and is enshrined as our founding document. We have a well-established grievance process for Treaty of Waitangi claims. Maori are guaranteed parliamentary representation. Te reo (the Maori language) is embraced by many, used everywhere from greetings (Kia ora!) to “regards” (Ngā mihi).
Australia, like New Zealand, is racist as fuck.
Australia, unlike New Zealand, cannot acknowledge this.
And because they cannot acknowledge this: they cannot begin the process to start dealing with this.
The treatment of Indigenous Australians in Australia is appalling. They only got the right to vote in 1965. Indigenous Australians the most incarcerated people on Earth. Every metric, from healthcare to education, show just how badly Indigenous Australians are treated.
But this is an issue that Australia won’t deal with. They throw band-aids at the problem. They ignore it. They say its all their own fault.
Then we have the asylum seekers. And how Australia deals with asylum seekers (mostly coming in by boat) is an inspiration to people like Stephen Miller and other white supremacists.Its disgusting. Appalling. An international disgrace.
And Australians by and large don’t really care. Not enough to make a difference anyway. The boats stopped. Thats all that really matters, doesn’t it?
In New Zealand we proudly sing the national anthem in both a Maori version as well as the English version. Right now in Australiaa 9 year old girl, who refuses to stand for the national anthem because “she believed it was disrespectful to Indigenous Australians”, is being attacked not only by the right-wing-media machine, but also by State Senators, like the racist-as-fuck-Pauline-Hanson.
Its a country that has never had to deal with its racist history. Its a country that tries to pretend that it doesn’t exist.
Most Americans know Rupert Murdoch through his association with Fox News. But Murdoch is Australian by birth. And Murdoch, through News Corp Australia, hold a substantial media empire in Australia.
And if you know anything about Fox News, then you can get an idea of the quality of journalism that you will get from a News Corp branded media outlet.
And the Herald Sun, the newspaper that published the Serena Cartoon, is a News Corp paper.
The Herald Sun regularly publishes articles like this. Or this. They specialise in demonizing the marginalised. They used their leverage as a news organization to post a series of attacks on blogger Yassmin Abdel-Magied which among many other things eventually lead her to leave the country.
The Herald Sun is a racist-as-fuck newspaper that regularly publishes racist-as-fuck articles that panders to its racist-as-fuck target market.
Which brings us to this cartoon.
Do I think Mark Knight intentionally drew a racist cartoon?
No I don’t.
He drew what he sees. And what he sees is the product of living in a racist-as-fuck society. This is how he sees Serena. He sees her as a grotesque creature, so that is what he drew. He exaggerates the features that he does because he lives in a bubble and nobody has ever told him before how how racist this sort of portrayal actually is. Its rare to be able to “penetrate the bubble”. But social media makes it easier now.
Something similar happened a few years ago (it was discussed here) when Harry Connick Jnr was a judge on “Hey Hey its Saturday” and they had a minstrel performance. (Note my sound isn’t going on my computer, so I hope the audio for the video is the correct one, if it isn’t, my apologies)
That performance was pretty fucking racist. Yet many Australians and many on these boards defended it. “Australians don’t know about minstrels. So its not racist!” But that defense didn’t cut it back then (IMHO) and that defense doesn’t cut it here now.
I’ll mostly give Knight a pass. I’ve looked at his old cartoons, and he specialises in grotesque caricatures. IMHO the cartoon is racist as fuck. But that wasn’t Knights intent. I don’t feel sorry for him though. The blow-back he got was to be expected and entirely fair. He is learning a harsh fucking lesson: but its a lesson that most Australians need to learn as well.
I don’t give a pass to the Herald Sun though. They are scum, run by scum, and they are capitalizing on this as one would expect. Australia has a problem with racism. I’m glad this went viral. I’m glad at the international outrage. Because many Australians don’t think there is a problem. So we need to shine the spotlight.
Caricature is supposed to be unattractive, and it is supposed to make fun of the person for being who they are, or at least who they became at their embarrassing public moment. That is the entire goddamn point. Falsely exaggerating the person’s real features is how it is RESPECTFULLY done. Disrespectful and racist caricatures add in lies. No lies have been added here. Do we want to pretend that this person has skinny lips and a stick shape? THAT would be lying, not just exaggerating.
The rhetoric (especially in the second link) is way over the line. But are those accurate facts? I mean the crime statistics and so on.
…I don’t live in Australia. So my process in establishing whether or not “the facts are accurate” would be the exact same process that you would have to go through to get the very same facts. And those facts wouldn’t materially change my point. But by all means look up “the facts” and share your findings with the rest of us.
Nah.
What the Herald Sun publishes or doesn’t publish is not necessarily germane to the question asked in this GQ thread which was, DID MARK KNIGHT draw a racist pic of Serena Williams?
Banquet Bear, all the stuff you mentioned in your previous post is absolutely true, but I don’t think it has any bearing on the issue here. YMMV of course.
My current stand is that the cartoon was not racist. If one cannot lampoon black people by the same ‘standards’ as white people (dramatically accentuating features etc) then you are censoring the cartoonists and I think that sets a rather uncomfortable precedent.
Editorial cartoons are not always meant to be good-time-awesome-tickle-fests. They’re art, but they’re not Bob Ross paintings with “Happy little trees” or Thomas Kincade’s treacly Stepford paintings.
They are op/eds pieces in illustrated form. Like written editorials, sometimes they can be particularly painful and stinging attacks. IMO, that’s what the Serena cartoon in question is: it’s not at all flattering, probably even mean-spirited, but certainly not racist.
It’s a cartoonists conundrum:
*"How do I draw a caricature of a muscular black woman who has, among other features, fairly large lips? Shall I accentuate the lips for humorous effect like we all did with Obama’s and Dubya’s ears?
“Hmmm… better not because it’s Serena so everyone will call me racist.”*
[But Wait a Minute!!]
"What if I de-accentuate her lips? Draw them just a bit thinner! Surely then they won’t call me racist!"
[Later, on the phone with the editor-in-chief…]
"Ummmm… what? I drew the lips too thin? You say now they look like a white woman’s lips? …Sorry, a PRIVILEGED white woman’s lips? …And that’s racist, have I got that right? … No, tell me one more time please… 'because it’s mocking Serena—sorry, mocking every single African-American in the world * by strongly implying that their lips should be thin like a white person’s…’…
… yeahokgotcha. "
What the HELL is the matter with people? Trump wins the White House so all the liberals have to lose their shit like college freshman reading Das Kapital/Atlas Shrugged/Kama Sutra/Charlotte’s Web for the first time. Hell, I’m a liberal. Or do I have to turn my Lefty card in because I’m not seeing racism and misogyny under every.single.fucking.rock.
I’m still trying to get over the fact that in the cartoon, the artist just HAD to make the chair umpire white! Really? He couldn’t have been a Inuit/Xhosa mix? Or perhaps a Mongoose/Tortoise offspring?
And don’t give me that crap about how the umpire in the Open Final was actually white… that’s just whitesplaining.
Of the four only The Marx book is a college-level read.
Blackface is caricature. Pickaninnies are caricatures. Mammy is a caricature. Gollywogs are caricatures. Nazi depictions of Jews were caricature. Wartime depictions of Tojo were caricatures
Something can be both a caricature and racist.
It helps if you have big ole jug-ears to work with, of course…
Osaka is as big as Williams. Taller, even. But you wouldn’t know that from that cartoon.
No. “Police statistics” can never show who is more likely to do something. It’s ridiculous. Facts would consist of "there were x number of robberies in y period, of which x number were prosecuted and y number resulted in conviction. The origins of the offenders convicted are blah blah blah. Even if a particular group is a higher number, it doesn’t mean they are more likely to offend, it could be just that they are more likely to be arrested, more likely to be prosecuted and more likely to be convicted (all of which can be racially motivated).
(Andrew Bolt is a racist knob.)