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

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Avoided in which contexts? I'm going to assume you don't mean all uses of the words should be avoided, because that would be unmanageably silly. If you mean, they should be avoided as terms of abuse for people, then yeah, they probably should (I don't say "certainly" just in case someone can think of a good use, I can't).

[lizw.livejournal.com]

Avoided as descriptors of people rather than foodstuffs.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

That's probably a good idea as a general rule, yes.

Am now racking my brains to see if there is a non-offensive connotation of any of those as human descriptors and it's tricky. Hm. Maybe if someone applied it to themselves eg if someone says, "eek, I tried on a dress that made me look like a coconut, round and hairy!", which is daft but mostly lacks that, I think? Not sure. Anyway, the sheer difficulty of the exercise probably says something.