Editorial failure

Last week, The Oklahoma ran a political cartoon depicting U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor as a piñata, with a sombrero-wearing President Obama invitingly asks a group of stick-wielding GOP elephants: “Who wants to take the first shot?”

Is this cartoon offensive? The Oklahoma Women’s Network Blog, as well as a few others out in the world, including feministing and the blogs at Mother Jones magazine, certainly took exception. The Oklahoma Women’s Network Blog saw the cartoon as an invitation to violence against women:

Oklahoma ranks as the 3rd worst state in the nation for women. Much of what holds Oklahoma women and girls back is linked to our state’s culture of violence and disresepct for women. Oklahoma ranks #4 in women murdered by men, #1 in child abuse and our domestic violence shelters are full of women escaping violence.

So The Oklahoman today runs a cartoon showing Sonia Sotomayor – a brilliant Hispanic woman scholar, lawyer and judge – strung up by a rope while men with clubs prepare to have at her for believing she’s qualified to serve on the US. Supreme Court.

Commentors on the Oklahoma Women’s Network Blog, as well as at the race and pop culture-watch site Racialicious, have debated whether there actually are racist and/or sexist elements to this cartoon, and who the cartoon is mocking, Sotomayor or the frightened-looking elephants who seem to be thinking twice about giving Sotomayor a hard time at her confirmation hearings.

Like a lot of things in the world, what you see in this cartoon depends on where you stand. You can either see offensensitivity in the cartoon, see why some people could see it, or not see any at all. Most editorical cartoons are supposed to offend, but the question here is, is it offending the right people?

What I know about editorial cartoons is, they work best when they work as satire; that is, when they lampoon people in power. I also know that the harder you have to work at understanding them, the worse they are. This may require relying on standard tropes, culturally understood metaphors or even some stereotypes in order to get the message across instinctually.

I don’t think this is one of those effective cartoons.

For all the discussions since November about how the U.S. must be in a postracial society because we’ve elected an African-American president, such assumptions ignore the reality that full equality for both women and people of color has yet to come to pass. President Obama and Judge Sotomayor may be individually powerful, but they also represent communities that are actually at the bottom of the U.S. power hierarchy.  Writing about white poverty in a column in March, anti-racist author Tim Wise wrote:

The simple truth is, working people are not all in the same boat, and white working class folks have real advantages. Black and Latino workers are typically the first fired in an economic downturn, and remain twice as likely to be unemployed and 3-4 times as likely to be poor, in good times or bad; and white high school dropouts are twice as likely to find work as similarly uneducated African Americans.

Furthermore, according to Thomas Shapiro’s groundbreaking work on the racial wealth divide, whites in the bottom fifth of all white households (in terms of income) have, on average seven times the net worth of similar blacks. In large part this is due to a major advantage in home ownership and thus equity, due to passed down property from parents. Indeed, as Shapiro and his colleague Melvin Oliver have found (and chronicled in their book, Black Wealth/White Wealth), whites with incomes below $13,000 are more likely to own their own homes than blacks with incomes that are three times higher, largely due to these intergenerational transfers of wealth.

This is not to say that a satirist or editorial cartoonist can’t poke fun at Obama or Sotomayor, only that s/he should be aware of potential elements that are burdened under racist or sexist baggage and then use them with wisdom and skill. I don’t think that’s what the cartoon’s creator, Chip Bok, was doing. According to the Associated Press:

Bok said Friday that his point was that Republicans will look bad if they are too rough on Sotomayor. He added that editorial cartoons sometimes offend to make a point.

“A cartoon is disrespectful, it is insensitive,” Bok said. “That’s what we do. We’re not in the business of carrying out socially responsible dictates. That’s somebody else’s job. That’s not my job.

“I don’t mean to be gratuitously offensive. It was just a vehicle for the cartoon and I think it worked. It was funny and in some cases they are being too sensitive about it.”

Bok said the cartoon was “an utter exaggeration of the cultural theme. She has used her Latinaness stereotypically as an asset in her effort for the nomination to go through. So I turned it around and tried to exaggerate the cultural part of it. It’s part of the mockery of the cartoon, part of the joke.”

Bok’s comment is a non-apology apology, the kind that my mom would have made me redo “and mean it” had I issued it to someone who’d been offended by something I’d done. Again, I think the cartoon fails because it’s not satirical, but ultimately, it fails because it commits the worst sin of editorial cartooning: It’s neither funny nor thought-provoking. Its foundation is based on comments that  have been taken out of context. Additionally, the ensuing brouhaha over those out-of-context comments are truly indicative of how different contexts, such as race, class, gender and sexuality, can create world-view bubbles that keep us from truly comprehending the reality of those around us.

Now THAT would have made for some interesting satire.

What do you think? Is this a good cartoon? Is it offensive?