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Britt Combs: Protests against cartoon do not reflect reality

Some people see racism everywhere because they want to.

By Britt Combs | The McDowell News

Published: February 24, 2009

It's depressing to see the old style of racial politics come to preoccupy the media and the public as it has this past week. A silly and not particularly great or important cartoon in the New York Post last week has led to cries of racism and even charges of a conspiracy to murder the president.
No one could say there was no such thing as racism in modern America. Clearly there are people who simply hate black people. Just last week in Transylvania County, there was a strange and incomprehensible case of a man leaving psychotic threats on a black man's cell phone, insulting the man's race and family.
We've all heard someone expressing a murderously low and hateful opinion of blacks. But the ones who say and do such things, you'll observe, are virtually always low-life. They're usually unemployed, uneducated, unconnected to any kind of money or power or influence. They're nobody. No respectable people hang around with them or even know them.
I've been around for a while now, and I have never met anyone who was influential or even just gainfully employed who expressed or exhibited racist ideas. I'm willing to bet you haven't either, certainly not in the last 40 or 50 years.
Some people see a racist under every bed and in every shadow. The Post cartoon is a case in point. The cartoon showed a dead chimpanzee, shot by two cops. One cop says, "They'll have to get someone else to write the next stimulus bill."
The same week, a much-publicized story about a rampaging chimp shot dead by police had made the media rounds. About the same time, the president signed into law a massive "economic stimulus bill," widely criticized for contributing enormously to the national debt without doing much to stimulate the economy. A working stiff cartoonist, Sean Delonas, suggested the bill was so goofy it could have been writen by a psychotic monkey, that Congress had hired a chimp to write the thing.
In the paranoid imaginations of some, the cartoon immediately suggested comparisons with the president. It should be noticed, although most news writers on the subject have overlooked it, that the president did not write the bill; it originated in the House of Representatives and was negotiated with the Senate. The president advocated it and signed it, but he most certainly did not author it.
Some people cannot watch the sun rise in the morning without being reminded of "America's shocking legacy of racism." The ubiquitous Al Sharpton wasted no time. He charged that America's story was one long, shameful narrative of "racist attacks throughout history that have made African-Americans synonymous with monkeys."
Barbara Ciara, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, said it was not possible for anyone to draw or publish the cartoon without being fully cognizant that she and Sharpton would take it as racist in intent.
"Anyone with half a brain …," said CNN columnist Roland S. Martin, "knowing the history of African-Americans being called monkeys and gorillas, would have said, 'We need to rethink this.'"
I suppose there must be a few citations enterprising scholars could unearth, but examples of this long history of non-stop monkey insults have been absent from media coverage and commentary on the story.
Is it possible that Delonas, Post editor Col Allan, and paper owner Rupert Murdoch might not think of black Americans as monkeys? I've been wracking my brain over this for the past week. I honestly don't think I have ever heard anyone say that black people remind them of chimpanzees. I certainly have never thought it. Aside from it being an ugly thought, it just makes no sense.
"It's absolutely friggin ridiculous," Delonas said. "It's about the economic stimulus bill. If you're going to make that about anybody, it would be (House Speaker Nancy) Pelosi, which it's not." But, come Tuesday, Murdoch realized he had nothing to gain by holding out. He apologized, although I can't imagine anyone predisposed to dislike him will forgive him.
But the fact is, this is an America that elected Barack Obama president, celebrates black Americans at every turn, ranks black politicians, businessmen, actors, musicians, athletes and soldiers among the most-loved and respected members of society. This is not an America that goes around comparing black people to chimpanzees.
Great and noble black men like the president have fully entered the highest arena of power in America, and are subject to the same questions and criticism and ridicule as any other president. It is to Obama's great credit, high-minded and noble man that he is, that he maintained a silent dignity and refrained from "playing the race card" while charlatans like Sharpton sought, yet again, to keep the focus on themselves.

Reporter Britt Combs, humanitarian, philanthropist and celebrated keynote speaker, writes for The McDowell News.