WTF?

[1womanarmy]

Really? Really?!

Send a letter to the editorThe thing that most gets me is the denial...like, oh it's a reference to all of Washington...IT'S HISTORICALLY RECOGNIZED AS A RACIST ICON

Comments

I donno, man

[langostino]

Political cartoons often make fun of politicans' physical appearance--they monkeyed GWB, too, and much more explicitly.

Surely there's a history to the Black/monkey thing, and this means that it's potentially offensive if that history is fresh in someone's mind. But unless we have some kind of definite reason to think they chose a monkey because Obama is Black, I don't think we can conclude the cartoon is racist.

Racism is certainly a reasonable explanation, but it's not the only explanation. I think the Post's explanation is also fairly reasonable. And I'm a big believer in the benefit of the doubt, so I don't want to just take the racism explanation if another equally-reasonable explanation is available.

All that aside, any real commitment to freedom of speech is going to be occasionally cognitive-dissonance-inducing. It's just inescapable. If you support free speech only when it's comfortable to do so, you don't support free speech. So its being problematic to you is not a bad thing.