suvroc

As seen on Feministe and a few other places.

The cartoonist is David Cohen and he works for the Asheville Citizen-Times. His other work can be found here. I like his drawing style but otherwise he's terribly unfunny, bordering on corny, bordering on terrible.

That brings us to the above editorial cartoon. I'm going to go out on a slight limb here and say that I really don't think that Cohen was being intentionally racist. I think the cartoon is incredibly racist, don't get me wrong. I just feel like the cartoonist wasn't doing it on purpose. What I'm saying is that the cartoon is an example of institutionalized racism and not, like, KKK burning crosses on your lawn racism. Does that excuse it? Surely not. I think what he was trying to do - and please correct me if you think I'm wrong - is wax poetic on the fear of the white man in America. In the past it was black people stealing his money at gunpoint. And now it's a black president stealing his money at legislation-point! Real deep. Unfortunately, Cohen isn't that deep, and the cartoon fails miserably.

The worst part about this whole thing is that the cartoon had to have been approved by a chain of command, a whole slew of copy editors and a section editor and an editor-in-chief and who knows who else. This cartoonist, he's not that smart. I just can't imagine why no one person at this daily newspaper that's been around for 130 years raised enough of a stink to keep this comic from being published. It boggles my mind when shit like this goes into circulation.