Tom Spurgeon on racism in how Obama is portrayed in cartoons:
We unfortunately live in a society with no shortage of avenues for cultural assault on people of color. As this sucks far worse for people of color than it does for people looking for an apt, appropriate visual metaphor shorn of history’s crud, I have no problem expecting people not to employ them, or to be sorry when they do. I refuse to believe it’s impossible to recognize the nature of many of the most troubling images, and to draw a line between imagery with a recognizable rhetorical legacy and those that fall into more traditional realms of caricature and exaggeration and point-making. In fact, recognizing the first strengthens one’s stand on the second. Acting that this kind of thinking is some sort of bizarre imposition contributes to the problem, and ultimately that problem becomes bad cartooning and lousy discourse. If you want to use some loaded piece of visual shorthand, that’s fine — but you should own it. One hopes that our cartoonists and thinkers about cartooning at the very least recognize the more obvious tropes for what they are — unnecessary, unfair, and ultimately a distraction from actual points being made on more concrete issues.
The trouble of course is that the people most likely to use racist imagery to criticise Obama are also the ones least likely to see any problems with that. There’s a lot of innate racism seeping out in the rightwing opposition to Obama which has troubles seeing any Black people as true Americans, hence the Birtherism, hence the racial stereotypes and hence the Obama caricatures that get their imagery more from those stereotypes than from how Obama (and his wife) actually looks. The people most likely to draw or distribute such cartoons as Tom talked about cannot be reasoned with — any hope of them owning their racist tropes is I fear forlorn. Instead the comics community as a whole needs to call people on their shit.
Which we haven’t been doing enough of. It’s always tempting to think of these things as business as usual, partisan politics in which nobody is innocent, of little intrisic interest to the comics blogosphere unless they become a media controversy, as when James Hudnall and Batton Lash were called out for their portrayals of Obama. Even then the emphasis was on the death threats they recieved, rather than on the racist imagery in their cartoons. That whole incident showed how ingrained our reflex is to circle the wagons whenever outsiders attack comics, rather than take a step back and see if they have a point.