Les Payne

February 22, 2009

Upon discovering that my description of the lips of President George W. Bush as “simian” meant ape-like, a former New York mayor fired off a letter to the editor demanding my head.  

“What if a Newsday columnist had referred to the lips of the Revs. Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson in that way,” Ed Koch wrote. “There would have been a flood of complaints, pickets…cancellations of subscriptions. Rightly so.”

Faced with another example of Mayor Koch’s misplaced concern, I wrote a second column four years ago explaining racial stereotypes to him and others. A “simian” reference to Jackson and Sharpton, I agreed, may well constitute a provocation. However, this same word applied to a white, Anglo Saxon male such as Bush is not a racial stereotype, but a simple adjective. It would be as if the ears of President Obama, say, were described as “owlish,” or even “elephantine.”

With tempers raging over the recent New York Post cartoon, my ’05 primer on such offenses might shed some light.

Reasonable observers have concluded that the chimpanzee described as the “someone” who wrote the stimulus package targets President Barack Obama, at the exclusion of all others. Every African American I know was sickened by the image and none, as Post editors suggest, waited for a signal from Rev. Al Sharpton.

It is the habit of this media-savvy, protest impresario to pick up the rage of his community and take it to the streets. Sharpton has the unfortunate history of playing off those he defends against those he attacks—and sometimes for a fee. As a result, the big-voiced preacher tends to discredit causes for which he marches, even as he highlights genuine abuses that might otherwise get downplayed.

“Shame on you for dodging the real issue,” said singer John Legend in a letter to the editor describing the Post cartoon as “blatantly racist and offensive…This is not about Rev. Sharpton.”

What then is the root of the offending Post cartoon?

A negative stereotype is an exaggerated belief associated with a targeted people--and is used to describe individual members. Over time, this association passes into popular usage. It is most effective when used by the dominant group of a society that directs its power toward dehumanizing an underclass, usually as a justification for its oppressive measures against those it deprives of certain rights and privileges.

Stereotypes are the stock in trade of the editorial cartoonist who has a license to traffic in abuse, especially of sitting politicians. However, the drawing that Sean Delonas slipped past his Post editors committed the double-barrel violation of not only depicting an African American as a chimpanzee, but also getting him shot dead on the streets by white cops.

The “stimulus” chimp exploits a pernicious stereotype that whites of Europe and North America have long used to demean those of African descent. The exaggerated characteristics unduly projected onto blacks associated with the caricature are physical as well as mental. (Don Imus’s radio shock troupe used to refer to a certain, black NBA star as a “knuckle-dragging, missing link.”)

Animals have been used to stereotypes people down through the ages. Starting in the 18th Century, the British disparaged the French, as well as the Dutch, as “frogs.” The Nazi’s and others used images of rats to dehumanize Jews; just as donkeys have been associated with Arabs. In early American journals, the Irish were caricaturized, along with blacks, as ape-like.

Unlike the caricature of Obama, some negative stereotypes are partly true, (herein springs the exaggeration). Thus one group may be exaggerated as being stingy, smart, and given to sharp business practices. Another may be dismissed as violent-prone, lazy and over-sexed. Transpose the sets of stereotypes between the two groups and you illicit confusion; if not outright laughter.

The potency of stereotypes is maintained in popular usage to the extent that members of targeted groups are kept out of the media inner-sanctums where such nasty images are perpetuated. A black editor would likely have noticed the high toxicity of the Post cartoon; instead, the Australian dominated system allowed the artist to compound the racial insult. 

In addition to stereotyping the African American president as a chimpanzee, the provocative Delonas also toyed dangerously with the troubling pattern of cops shooting black men dead on the streets of New York and elsewhere.

Here, it’s a sure bet that editor Col Allan knew exactly what his editorial page was doing! Humiliating blacks within the pages of the Post is business as usual.