About that “honest” discussion on race …
I have to wonder if this is what AG Holder was talking about when he urged “cowardly” Americans to have “real” and “honest” discussions about race:
The Reverend Al Sharpton is putting the smack down on the New York Post, suggesting racism could be a factor in a political cartoon featured in this morning’s edition.
The cartoon (by Sean Delonas) comes in the wake of yesterday’s national news story about the cop who shot and killed a rampaging chimp in Connecticut. But the controversy in the comic comes from the dialogue between the two officers — which reads, “Now they will have to find someone else to write the stimulus bill.”
Before most of you woke up, Sharpton already fired off a statement saying, “The cartoon in today’s New York Post is troubling at best given the historic racist attacks of African-Americans as being synonymous with monkeys. One has to question whether the cartoonist is making a less than casual reference to this when in the cartoon they have police saying after shooting a chimpanzee that “Now they will have to find someone else to write the stimulus bill.”
“Being that the stimulus bill has been the first legislative victory of President Barack Obama (the first African American president) and has become synonymous with him it is not a reach to wonder are they inferring that a monkey wrote the last bill?”
The NYT helpfully points out that Sharpton’s not the only prominent figure to come out and condemn the cartoon. There are now calls for “boycotts” and “apologies” etc.
Figures.
In a rare moment of disagreement with his side of the aisle, Jon Chait says, well, sometimes a monkey is just a monkey:
But, look, obviously the point is that the stimulus bill could have been written by a monkey. The monkey doesn’t look like Obama and is in no way suposed to represent him. And it incorporated violence because the monkey in the news story was, in fact, shot — and the punchline depends on the monkey being dead and thus unavailable to write further legislation. Again, while it’s a mediocre joke at best, Obama supporters shouldn’t be looking for racial slights around every corner. So far there have been very few of them.
I hope like heck that the NY Post stands firm and doesn’t offer the slightest apology for this non-racist cartoon, because if it does, it will just mean that white people will once again have to take a back seat (no pun intended) to race hustlers like Sharpton whose forms of “discussion” on race equate to them talking, and you listening.
Malkin made some excellent points in her post today on the issue of “cowardly” Americans and the race issue:
Funny. When I think of racial cowards, I think of Barack Obama at Jeremiah Wright’s church, sitting there week after week, year after year, saying nothing about the separatist demagoguery echoing from the pulpit to the pews.
When I think of racial cowards, I think of all the navel-gazers who fret about poisonous racial dialogue, but say nothing about “My President Is Black” bigotry.
When I think of racial cowards, I think of the people cowed by mau-mau-er Al Sharpton — now attacking the NYPost over a cartoon lampooning that crazy dead chimp.
When I think of racial cowards, I think of the folks who enable p.c. thugs to cry racism over “That One” and “Thug Thizzle” and “tricked out.”
Holder doesn’t want an honest dialogue about race. In the Age of Obama, “talking enough with each other about race” means the rest of us shutting up while being subjected to lectures about our insensitivity and insufficient integration on the weekends.
Obama himself did everything he could to avoid race during the campaign — aside from the occasional insinuation that target=”_blank”McCain’s a bigot — until the Wright uproar forced his hand. He could have used his platform to push the issue front and center but he decided he’d rather get elected. Holder owes his job to that, ahem, cowardice.
Point taken, although just as a slight correction Obama actually did bring up the race issue during the primaries – in a subtle way of course. It was documented early on how he and his campaign bogusly played the race card on both Bill and Hillary Clinton back in January during the run-up to the crucial SC primary vote. TNR’s Sean Wilentz wrote about that incident, and others that happened after that here.