A Blatantly Racist Comic?

This cartoon above ran in the New York Post yesterday. Since then, there has been a lot of rumbling and talk about how this was a horribly racist comic that is comparing President Obama to a chimpanzee, touching on horribly racist ideas that likened African Americans to monkeys in the past. Is that really what this comic seems to be doing, though?

Big in the news this week was the story of a woman's chimpanzee she kept as a pet, violently attacking another woman and being shot to death. It was an awful story and horrible to think about. Also, President Obama signed the stimulus package bill into law this week. Does it seem too simple to connect the two stories into the comic's bottom line? I don't really think so. I think it can be read into comic that there are racist undertones if you try, but that is the case with so many issues/comments and I think that "racism" is called way too often on things that are not really being racist. I think this comic really is picking at the stimulus package itself and basically hinting that the thing may as well have been written by a bunch of monkeys or some crazed chimpanzee. I guess I could see it being more sinister of a message, but it's a bit of a stretch of the imagination to go there. It doesn't seem to have that intent and I think the author would have been very foolish to try to say that as his underlying message. It's all in the reading and we can't just know the intent of the creator, but I have a hard time believing it was more than a criticism of the stimulus package that hit on current events.

Reverend Al Sharpton had comments about the comic, arguing the other side. I wasn't surprised by that and while the stimulus package has become somewhat synonymous with President Obama, he's not the author and I think that Sharpton was taking advantage of this situation to remain in the limelight. I don't, by any means, think that we have reached an end to racist times or that racism doesn't still remain a prominent problem in the US/World, but I don't think that each and every idea that can be twisted and construed to be a racist one necessarily is.