I'm back, ladies and gentlemen, and with something particularly horrifying on this delightful Wednesday morning.
Via Shakesville: a great article in the Guardian by a Shakesville contributor concerning a cartoon by a right-wing blogger (Darleen of Protein Wisdom) depicts Obama putting his shirt on and leaving after raping the statue of liberty.
I'm not going to post the cartoon here because I can't figure out how to put it behind a cut and I don't want to put it on the front of the blog.
As another blogger, Amanda at Pandagon, writes, what is so fascinating about this is how some conservatives are able to understand that rape is about power when using it as imagery to describe legislation or governmental power they don't like, yet the same (or other conservatives) are unable to understand this when rape is happening to ACTUAL PEOPLE, choosing instead to understand it in the context of promiscuity (women) or humour (men).
The other blatant, glaring issue here, for me, is the fact that the blogger who came up with the cartoon denies that there is a racial element to it. Even if (and this is a big IF) she came up with the cartoon without any intention to have racist over-, under-, and any other kind of tones, the failure to recognize the implications of "black man" + "sexual assault" + "white - OK, green - woman" is a gross oversight.
There are just so many things wrong with this that I don't know what else to say.
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Man, the comic was even worse than I imagined. I don't really have much to add other than to say that the deliberate obtuseness with which conservative humorist and cartoonists carry themselves has always been a confusing issue to me. Like if you go and read conservative political cartoons, they're consistently a maddening mix of offensiveness, bad taste, and miffed punchlines. Conservatives seem to regularly confuse saying something horrible and offensive with saying something that will make liberals mad and use the subsequent outrage to prove MSM bias.
ReplyDeleteI can't seem to find them online, but in The Onion's "The Onion in History" series, every time there's an American war, the newspaper features a racist caricature of the nationality being fought threatening to rape the Statue of Liberty. So on top of everything else, this isn't even original.
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