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

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

I'm fairly sure. I'm feeling spiky in any case today, but that would have set me off even without that.

The "coconut" thing ties into issues of cultural abandonment, marginalization, invisibility, and all the painful so-you-think-you're-too-good-for-us stuff.

Cultures are very much not symmetrical - it's one thing to move from a culturally dominant system to a less-dominant one, but quite another to do it the other way around. (There's also the issue of safe-for-white-people, not-safe-for-others.)

It can be very much an "I can use any word I want, but what the hell did you just call me, PAL?" issue too.