Letters to the Times

[mirrorshard]

If you haven't seen this appallingly racist cartoon in the Times, I recommend it for sheer did-they-actually-publish-that value.

Edit: please read the comments before leaving "helpful" corrections. If someone else has already said it, I don't need a "me too". Thank you.

I can't find an address specifically for complaints; comment@thetimes.co.uk gets autorejected. I've sent the following to online.editor@timesonline.co.uk as the apparent next most appropriate thing.



Sir,

I should like to register a complaint about Peter Brookes' cartoon dated 21st March 2009. It clearly depicts Barack Obama as a coconut, which is of course a strong racial slur - a derogatory term meaning "black on the outside, white on the inside".

I am disappointed that a respectable newspaper would publish such slurs, and further disappointed that a respectable newspaper can find nothing better to say about a prominent world leader so soon after his election than to comment on his race.

Yours sincerely,
mirrorshard

Comments

[cjwatson]

And that's a reason to excoriate rather than educate?

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

The complaints address is a fairly standard way to educate.

[cjwatson]

Your letter is an excoriation, and one that makes it clear you had no idea what the cartoonist was going on about. Not perhaps the most effective approach to education.

[neonchameleon.livejournal.com]

Except the way it was done will just get it filed in the circular file. It does not clealry depict Obama as a coconut (no coconut I have ever seen has holes that shape or in that pattern) so the best case scenario is that it will just get binned after that first sentence. The worst case is that the result will be "For goodness sake. People are going to read racist messages into anything - so why should we even bother trying not to be racist?"