Cartoonists With Attitude

Hilzoy has written a great post responding to Ferraro’s latest, racist op-ed. Go check it out.

Hilzoy also points to this article by Ta-Nehisi Coates in Slate:

There is peculiar bit of jujitsu that white public figures have employed recently whenever they’re called to account for saying something stupid about black people. When the hard questions start flying, said figure deflects them by claiming that any critical interrogation is tantamount to calling them a racist, which they most assuredly are not.

[List of various racist statements by public figures, who then said it was just crazy to use the “R” word, snipped.]

It gives me no joy to report that Geraldine Ferraro has now applied to join the ranks of the obviously nonracist. I was 8 when she ran for vice president and vaguely aware that a party that would promote a woman for an executive office might be a party that would one day give a kid like me a fair shake. Thus I’ve retched while watching Ferraro beeline to any television studio that would have her, flaunting her rainbow bona fides, and claiming that she’s being attacked “because she’s white” and demonized as a racist. […]

The bar for racism has been raised so high that one need be a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party to qualify. Had John McCain said that Hillary Clinton was only competitive in the presidential race because she was a woman, there’d be no dispute over whether the comment was sexist. And yet when the equivalent is said about a black person, it’s not only not racist, but any criticism of the statement is interpreted as an act of character assassination.

Aaargh!

Ta-Nehisi is one of my must-read bloggers, and the point about the raising of the bar for “racism” is right on target. It’s sucks that he detracted from his article with a single sentence of needless oppression olympics - especially since on his own blog, he’s frequently argued against such comparisons.

He continues:

In some measure, the narrowing of racism is an unfortunate relic of the civil rights movement, when activists got mileage out of dehumanizing racists and portraying them as ultra-violent Southern troglodytes. Whites may have been horrified by the fire hoses and police dogs turned on children, but they could rest easy knowing that neither they nor anyone they’d ever met would do such a thing. But most racism—indeed, the worst racism—is quaint and banal. There’s nothing sensationalistic about redlining or job discrimination.

This is something I’ve seen more often than I can count. People’s logic goes like this:

1) Racists are monsters in their hearts.

2) I know that in my heart, I’m not a monster.

3) Therefore, I can’t be racist.

4) How dare you call me a racist!

You can pretty much replace “racist” with “sexist” or “homophobe” or any sort of bigot, and the above “logic” will continue to be played out in thousands of conversations every day.

For example, I recently read this painful exchange between two great Canadian cartoonists, Dave Sim and Chester Brown. I say it was painful because Sim was at one time an important role model for me. Since then, he’s become a belligerent misogynist, who argues (among other things) that women are intellectually inferior to men.

Brown — a Toronto cartoonist and friend of Sim’s who has stood by Sim for years — argued, as nicely as he possibly could, that Sim’s views meet “the common usage definition” of misogyny. Sim responded:

In other words you think I’m the gender equivalent of a racist. This is what I’ve come to realize: that people genuinely believe that I’m the worst imaginable thing (literally: a non-person, a sub-human) in our society. That being the case the only honorable thing is to withdraw from society completely and limit my contact with society to necessities (my rep at Diamond, people I buy food from). Would you associate with anyone who thought you were a subhuman? […]

RE: Visits to Toronto…Would you associate with anyone you thought were a subhuman?

Hard to imagine a clearer-cut case of “I can’t be a bigot, because I’m not a monster” logic.

I have no idea how I missed this article the first time it went around, but it’s one of the greatest articles about race I’ve ever read in my life:

People think I have it easy, but it’s surprisingly difficult being The Guy Who Got Where He Is Only Because He’s Black, what with the whole having to be everywhere in the country at once thing. One second I’m nodding enthusiastically in a sales conference in Boise, Idaho, and the next I’m separating conjoined triplets at the Institute For Terribly Complicated Surgery in Buchanan, N.Y., and then I have to rush out to Muncie, Ind., to put my little “Inspector 12″ tag in a bag of Fruit of the Loom.

It’s exhausting, all that travel. Decent, hard-working folks out there have their religion and their xenophobia to cling to. All I have is a fistful of upgrades to first class and free headphones. Headphones That Should Have Gone to a More Deserving Passenger.

Guns? I wish I had a gun! Ever run out of truffle oil before a dinner party and have to go to Whole Foods on a weekend? It’ll make you want to spread a little buckshot around, that’s for sure.

Look, we’re all hurting, trying to make ends meet. I have serious overhead with all the résumés I send out. The postage is one thing, but I also like to print my résumé on a nice creamy bond. I think it sends a message. Then there’s the dry cleaning and the soap — I prefer to be clean and articulate in my interviews, put my best foot forward. I think it’s working. People are responding to how I present myself.

I know some folks feel bitter about me, as bitter as the first dandelion greens of the season. Yet these people are not without hope, hope that is drizzled on those dandelion greens like a dash of sweet pomegranate vinegar. Do they begrudge the scorpion its sting, or the duck its quack? How can I be other than what I am, The Guy Who Got Where He Is Only Because He’s Black?

Frankly it’s a lot better than my last two gigs, The Guy Who Left the Seat Up and The Guy Who Took the Last Beer, although I do suffer from a lot of work-related injuries, as you can imagine. For all this jibber-jabber about how I don’t understand a working man’s problems, you should take a look at my medical chart. I have carpal tunnel, tennis elbow, miner’s lung, scapegoat rash and vintner’s dropsy, and just last week I burned my thumb making horseshoes. The funny thing is, I didn’t want to be a blacksmith. But I heard they had an opening and I couldn’t help myself.

Via Ta-Nehisi, who like (Gasp! White guy! With a weblog! How’d that happen!) John Cole, as well as myself, wonder what the hell is wrong with Geraldine Ferraro. Seriously, did she go nuts recently or was she nuts all along?

I have no idea how I missed this article the first time it went around, but it’s one of the greatest articles about race I’ve ever read in my life:

People think I have it easy, but it’s surprisingly difficult being The Guy Who Got Where He Is Only Because He’s Black, what with the whole having to be everywhere in the country at once thing. One second I’m nodding enthusiastically in a sales conference in Boise, Idaho, and the next I’m separating conjoined triplets at the Institute For Terribly Complicated Surgery in Buchanan, N.Y., and then I have to rush out to Muncie, Ind., to put my little “Inspector 12″ tag in a bag of Fruit of the Loom.

It’s exhausting, all that travel. Decent, hard-working folks out there have their religion and their xenophobia to cling to. All I have is a fistful of upgrades to first class and free headphones. Headphones That Should Have Gone to a More Deserving Passenger.

Guns? I wish I had a gun! Ever run out of truffle oil before a dinner party and have to go to Whole Foods on a weekend? It’ll make you want to spread a little buckshot around, that’s for sure.

Look, we’re all hurting, trying to make ends meet. I have serious overhead with all the résumés I send out. The postage is one thing, but I also like to print my résumé on a nice creamy bond. I think it sends a message. Then there’s the dry cleaning and the soap — I prefer to be clean and articulate in my interviews, put my best foot forward. I think it’s working. People are responding to how I present myself.

I know some folks feel bitter about me, as bitter as the first dandelion greens of the season. Yet these people are not without hope, hope that is drizzled on those dandelion greens like a dash of sweet pomegranate vinegar. Do they begrudge the scorpion its sting, or the duck its quack? How can I be other than what I am, The Guy Who Got Where He Is Only Because He’s Black?

Frankly it’s a lot better than my last two gigs, The Guy Who Left the Seat Up and The Guy Who Took the Last Beer, although I do suffer from a lot of work-related injuries, as you can imagine. For all this jibber-jabber about how I don’t understand a working man’s problems, you should take a look at my medical chart. I have carpal tunnel, tennis elbow, miner’s lung, scapegoat rash and vintner’s dropsy, and just last week I burned my thumb making horseshoes. The funny thing is, I didn’t want to be a blacksmith. But I heard they had an opening and I couldn’t help myself.

Via Ta-Nehisi, who like (Gasp! White guy! With a weblog! How’d that happen!) John Cole, as well as myself, wonder what the hell is wrong with Geraldine Ferraro. Seriously, did she go nuts recently or was she nuts all along?

Cartoon for May 31

Who else will Barack Obama talk to without preconditions?

[This guest post is written by David Schraub, reprinted with permission from The Debate Link.]

Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins is one of the most important sex discrimination cases in recent history. Ann Hopkins was denied partnership with the Price Waterhouse accounting firm. Testimony established that she was caught in a double-bind: while the general culture of PW demanded a sort of hyper-masculinity to succeed, when Hopkins attempted to emulate this norm, she was castigated for being insufficiently feminine. It was ruled that this bind constituted actionable sex discrimination. This situation exists in broader culture as well: society articulates the routes to success in male terms, but when women attempt to follow them they find that traditional gender norms are strictly held against them. While everyone is to some degree boxed in by social conventions, women have a far smaller box to play in than men do.

I was reminded of Price Waterhouse and the more general ailment it signifies when reading this editorial by Margaret M. Russell and Stephanie M. Wildman. They are answering the charge that women supporting Obama represents a sort of betrayal of the sisterhood, and point out some reason why women might legitimately prefer Obama over Clinton. One passage stuck out at me, though:

We value his explicit and repeated emphasis on the language of diplomacy to solve problems, including his own; conversely, Clinton’s threat to “totally obliterate�? Iran, as well as her metaphors of Rocky Balboa and boxing gloves, leave us cold.

I find this distressing, because it seems clear to me that Clinton has been pressured into adopting these tropes specifically because she’s female. Certainly, the “man card” form of identity politics is nothing new in American elections, but there’s a reason that Clinton is not the one challenging it, just as there’s a reason Nixon was the one to go to China and not LBJ. I’d love to push political deliberation beyond the current “who can down more shots at the bar” standard, but Clinton can’t press the issue too much because she’s a woman — she’s ultimately the target that these patriarchal norms are designed to suppress. A male candidate might be able to effectively critique these norms from the inside, because his success would performatively indicate that men can still succeed under the new regime. A female critique directly threatens the male privilege these norms are supposed to protect, making backlash inevitable. Hence, women trying to succeed in a patriarchal world often times are forced to prove they are “one of the guys”, rather than demonstrate that things can go just as well even if she remains proudly a gal.

In such a world, criticizing Clinton for adapting the classical male tropes that we typically demand our politicians adhere to represents one of the key enforcement mechanisms of sexism. It’s like when Barack Obama was being indicted for not being enough of a “fighter” — he has to adopt the soaring, conciliatory posture that he does because if he shows the slightest bit of passion he immediately will be cast as the “angry Black man.” At that point, criticizing him for being not-John-Edwards enough totally misses how racism operates in public context. Likewise with Clinton. That patriarchal structure forces her into postures that are not to our preference is not a fair indictment of her — it blames the victim for the crimes of the perpetrator.

Glenn Foden wanted me to post his original e-mail to me in the interest of “fair dialogue.” Fair enough:

Hey, Matt
So, you think the cartoon I did about CA’s gay marriage thing was “crap.” Curious, and unfamiliar with your work, I checked out your stuff. You’ve done some interesting work. Nice But, if my cartoon bothered someone of your political ilk, I won’t be losing any sleep, I’ll just be drawing harder. We all grab our energy any place we can. Thanks for the boost. Seriously, keep it up though. The country needs all voices.

Glenn

Glenn tells me he wasn’t targeting gay people with his comic, but activist judges. He says, “Personally, I don’t care what they do. And, if the citizens of California want to legalize it, God bless democracy.”

I’m glad Glenn is more open minded than I had him pegged. I’d like to build on this relationship. If we get a 51% majority here in Oregon to approve Pig Marriage, I’ll fly Glenn out to officiate my wedding (to a female pig–I’m no pig homo).

Venture Bros.

Season 3.

If you made other plans, cancel them. This is your plan now.

Venture Bros.

Season 3.

If you made other plans, cancel them. This is your plan now.

In case you were still wondering why for some odd reason the world felt less funny all of a sudden yesterday, it’s because one of the funniest persons who ever lived left us. I’m sure everyone and their uncle has a favorite bit of his, but as a lifelong Mel Brooks fan the great Blazing Saddles rant was always my favorite.

RIP, Mr. Lamarr.

In case you were still wondering why for some odd reason the world felt less funny all of a sudden yesterday, it’s because one of the funniest persons who ever lived left us. I’m sure everyone and their uncle has a favorite bit of his, but as a lifelong Mel Brooks fan the great Blazing Saddles rant was always my favorite.

RIP, Mr. Lamarr.