I skimmed part of the thread and missed a few of your posts. I certainly don’t agree with any of these descriptions. I would never characterize you or anyone this way. I understand people bring an array of experiences, values, and expectations to any situation.
My heated responses in this thread were directed at a general public not anyone specifically. If it seems otherwise, I apologize.
No worries.
-XT
In case this link hasn’t been posted yet: this cartoonist has a bit of a record.
(I especially like how you can tell a person is gay because we don’t have any bones one of our legs, permitting us to bend them behind ourselves à la pseudopod. Also how we have Village People prints on our walls. It’s quite, um, unique.)
He does seem to have some serious issues with gays. Ok…for my part I concede that the reactions to this cartoon were, perhaps, not as knee jerk as I originally assumed. Not like it’s the first time I’ve been wrong about something after all.
-XT
Wow. I suspected there was more to it than was being admitted to, but that really puts things in context.
What a winner this guy is. 
Well then, you don’t understand the First Amendment. Society can restrict whatever it wants.
Well… hell. This is that guy?
mmmeeh. I still see it as a ‘written by chimps’ joke, just the guy’s too blind to notice it’s tasteless.
His editor must be blind, too.
As well as his editor’s editor.
And Ruppert Murdoch, too.
Sometimes giving someone the benefit of the doubt means blindly accepting the implausible. This is one of those times.
NPR this afternoon had a discussion with an editorial cartoonist about this kerfluffle. His take was that a cartoonist will grab whatever’s hot in the news, generate ideas off it, and can get so caught up in the image that results that he overlooks subtexts that are glaringly obvious to others. It’s his editor’s job to catch that sort of thing, point it out, and decide whether the cartoon should run or not.
Now, this cartoonist’s sordid history of offensive work undercuts his big-blue-eyes-batting protestations of innocence, but even if he did fail to see the racist interpretation, his editor for damn sure should have spotted it.
ETA: Good on you, xtisme, for looking at fresh evidence and being willing to change your mind.
ETA2: How the hell did I do that? I was trying to edit my preceding post.
The Post has issued an apology. Well, one of those non-apologies. You know, “I’m sorry IF I upset you, and it’s your fault if I did.”
Maybe some of you are too young to remember a time when chimps, monkeys and gorillas were not uncommon put downs for black men.
What was the one that the former official in Virginia used? Was it mucaca?
The stimulus bill is considered to be the President’s bill and its passage was his victory. It didn’t take Al Sharpton or anyone else to point out the racial overtones of that cartoon. I wonder how many people had to approve of it before it was published. It would never have gotten past me.
That’s the main issue, I think. As a white man I can’t presume to understand fully what it is to be non-white in a culture where white is the default color, so to speak, except to acknowledge that a person of color must constantly run into situations where they are reminded of their non-white-ness every single day. In a similar but opposite way white people, especially we white men, are too quick to dismiss race as a possible issue, because we are so oblivious to the issues of it. A few months ago, back before the election, I was looking at the L.A. Sentinel’s website, and one front-page story was titled “Race May Cost Obama The Election”. And it took me full a minute to parse that out, because I was thinking of a “race” as a “contest”, like the election. Then I understood they meant ethnicity.
I’ve been trying to come to a conclusion on this. My first reaction, regarding the uproar, was to feel offended myself, because the implication was that most or all white people still think of black people as closer to the ape. It reminded me of American tourists in Europe caricatured as overweight, loud, obnoxious, and condescending in a way that that certainly didn’t seem to reflect the truth of most of us. Yet the insulting portrayals of black people certainly persisted, and in some circles still do, for example the LAPD officer who muttered “gorillas in the mist” while on a domestic violence call in a black neighborhood.
So in the end I can’t gainsay anyone’s right to just anger and resentment. The wounds inflicted on African Americans over three hundred years of European settlement and colonization on this continent do not heal overnight.