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]

There's standing up against racist slurs, and there's attempting to ensure that nobody can ever say anything negative about a black person for fear of being accused of racism.

Obama's presidency has generally been a good thing - but in this case, Obama made a comment that was highly offensive to people with disabilities, and he deserves to be called on it. There's a long tradition of newspaper cartoons actually being vaguely related to current events and expecting you to keep up with them in order to understand them.

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

Yes, that was highly offensive, but I still wouldn't have associated it with a bowling ball. If I think about bowling balls I know they (often?) have holes in, but that's pretty much the extent of my bowling knowledge.

There's a difference between "saying something negative about a black person" and "invoking a racist trope", whether deliberately or accidentally.

[cjwatson]

It's entirely clear to me that any similarity was thoroughly accidental and that you should apologise to the cartoonist for going off the deep end.

Being oversensitive when you clearly hadn't taken the effort to understand the point of the cartoon (as is obvious from your letter) harms the cause by reducing the signal-to-noise of complaints about genuine racism. "Oh, all those racism complaints last time were ridiculous; let's ignore them." A better way to make your complaint would have been to take the effort to understand the point of the cartoon and then send a letter saying "you may not be aware of this, but your cartoon is uncomfortably close to this racist trope, and you should take more care to avoid this in future".

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

Yes, of course it's thoroughly accidental. Strawmen and the BNP aside, nobody ever means to do anything racist.

[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?"