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Can A Cartoon
Change Minds? |
When Disney released the gloriously beautiful cartoon movie Fantasia in the early 60s, it was missing a few seconds of footage from the original 1940 release, a fact Disney at first denied but later admitted. The missing piece? A stereotypically Black centaur by the name of Sunflower lovingly grooms and shines the hooves of a white fawn.
Presumably, in the 20 years between versions, someone at Disney came to the conclusion that in a racially charged time, even fantasy images can have unintended potential for harm.
But Disney and everyone else responsible for many of the images we see already knew that. Less than twenty years earlier, political comics, cartoon reels and graphic posters laid the foundation for a highly effective World War II propaganda effort that fueled American fear and imprinted stereotypes of Germans and Japanese (and Jews on the German side) that still find their ways into films, television and most importantly, the backs of our minds.
Just a few decades before that, editorial cartoons could be described as arguably more effective than the editorials themselves in demonizing Reconstruction and giving rise to the Klan, bringing down the power base of Boss Tweed and inciting American attitudes that led to the Spanish American War, among others.
If you’re in the media business, this lesson is the second half hour of the first day of Journalism 101.
So why did the highly intelligent people at The New Yorker, a magazine that has gained part of its reputation on the sly and subtle humor of its cartoons run with this satirical caricature of Barack and Michelle Obama on the cover, given their knowledge of the power of these kinds of images to do harm?
Because they thought it was smart and funny, which satire can and should be. But “they” in this instance, is a relatively small part of the population.
Patrice Evans, aka The Assimilated Negro, wrote a humorous piece a while back on why Black people don’t get satire. But this case doesn’t apply to that standard. This isn’t a particularly racial offense, it doesn’t rise to the standard of vicious manipulation like the previous examples. But as a joke that falls off its mark, it plays directly into the hands of the people The New Yorker intended to lampoon – an unintended result but still the result.
Of course, satire is generally only funny to the people who get it and one can assume that The New Yorker’s readers get it. Inside the issue is a very favorable article on the Senator. Problem is, more people like to subscribe to The New Yorker and brag that they are too busy to read it than actually read The New Yorker.
But they aren’t the crowd you have to worry about. It’s the pass-by-in-the-airport crowd, the mall walkers, the bookstore browsers and the short attention span internet audience who will see the image on blogs and websites absent of any defining context that make this image troublesome.
One could argue that anyone soft and squishy enough on Obama to be influenced by a single image was not a likely Obama supporter anyway. But it’s just those soft and squishy folk who represent the important battleground for November.
In various degrees, mistakes like this get made in editorial offices everyday as more and more writers and editors take their cues not from the world around them but from the tiny demographic of their sophisticated friends and colleagues.
A New Yorker editor’s sphere of daily contact is unlikely to include anyone who would push back on this particular brand of humor. It all goes to prove that every journalist needs to spend a whole lot less time talking to other journalists and more time on the street. The New Yorker is a great magazine, and they should keep taking risks. Magazines should be fun and a little dangerous, five bucks is a lot of money not to be entertained. But every now and then David Remnick should skip his lunch at Michael’s and grab some wings from a corner joint in Harlem.
And Disney still has those crows in Dumbo to explain.
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