Okay. Perhaps I jumped too quickly to b**** about political correctness. I'm just damn sick and tired of people b****ing and suing about anything and everything. The "I'm offended!! You owe me an apology/money/first born child!!!" crap makes me want to beat the **** out of someone. I'm just waiting for Jesse, Al, and the NAACP to boycott the school or make a speech or something. However, I will stand by my claim that no one would complain of whites depicted in an equally stereotypical manner. It seems to be perfectly PC to make fun of white folks.
I don't have a problem with the actual content in the cartoon so much as the way it was drawn. Airport security screeners are seldom educated. Very true. I see the opportunity for satire, there. However, looking at the exaggerated stereotypes in teh cartoon... I see what the critics mean. I mean. I have no idea how they could *not* have anticipated the outcry.
I first read the cartoon and was LMAO. Of course, I wasn't even looking at the racial overtone. I don't even see what race has to do with this cartoon. The cartoon is attacking the airline industry, not a certain race. I believe in equality. If each race wants to be treated equal, then that goes for the good and bad. Most cartoons I read are all white based. (Curtis is the only one that comes to mind). If it were any other race, does that race have a right to get offended by it?
For what it's worth, most Aggies don't find the Batt to be a credible newspaper. Now on to see Black Hawk Down.....recap coming late night or in the morning.
Re-draw the cartoon. Make it a white teacher addressing a row of students in detention: one black, one white, one Asian, and one Hispanic. The cartoon would be PC but not that funny. Did I leave anyone out?
<B>Make it a white teacher addressing a row of students in detention: one black, one white, one Asian, and one Hispanic. The cartoon would be PC but not that funny. Did I leave anyone out?</B> You do realize the problem is not with the characters being black, right?
RR, Re-draw the cartoon. Make it a white teacher addressing a row of students in detention: one black, one white, one Asian, and one Hispanic. The cartoon would be PC but not that funny. Did I leave anyone out? Umm, how would it be less funny? Maybe to a racist/bigoted white person it might be less funny, but then it'd probably be more amusing to people of color. I didn't see the attack on airport security when I read it...... I saw the "caricature" of poor black people not speaking very well, and I didn't find it funny. Also, if you made the woman a teacher, race wouldn't matter, because she wouldn't be part of the "joke". Also (II), if the people were white the same concern would not be there, because there isn't a stigma of being poor and uneducated to being white as there is to being a minority. Warning weird analogy: If you have two arms (and I'm assuming you do), and one had a sore where you skinned you're elbow or something. Then you poke your arm with no sore it doesn't hurt. But, then you poke your other arm on the sore.... guess what? It'll hurt. For the slow: The sore is the stigma. The hurt arm stands for minorities. The other arm stands for the majority.
I'm not going to post my opinion about political correctness (or, as I like to call it, common ****ing decency). Of course there wouldn't have been the same kind of reaction by white people to the cartoon if it had been some slack-jawed yokels instead of two caricatured African-Americans (especially if it had been run by a white person). However, you know there would be all kinds of uproar if it had been run by someone like Jesse Jackson or the NAACP. I hear them ridiculed all the time by white people, so don't try and act we just sit back and take **** while minorites cry about offensiveness...it's just not true. Plus, if we had a history of not being able to eat in the same restaurants as other people because of a national myth that we were somehow sub-human, you bet your ass we white people would "b****" at anything that comes close to reminding us of those times (I won't even bring up slavery, I'll just hear the same old tired argument that "it wasn't me that did it" or "get over it"...well, you know what, you didn't win the write the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, or, most of you, didn't fight in WWII, yet you'll take credit for that in a second...and I bet you you'd punch someone in the mouth if 140 years from now, someone told you to forget about the WTC). Hell, young white men are the b****iest people I've ever known, and they're mainly pissed at the myth that 25% of their paycheck is going to pay for some welfare mother to buy crack...which any educated person knows isn't true. On this specific issue, I think there may be an overreaction of sorts, if only because the cartoon itself wasn't that bad (that does not equal not understanding why people, especially African-Americans, would find it offensive). However, like most people have stated, the problem is that the editor had to have known the backlash (also read: publicity) this would cause, and that's the only reason he ran it. The cartoon did not get the "point" across at all. Also, why does humor have to be offensive? I can laugh at all kinds of jokes...if they're funny. I don't know why anyone would think this cartoon is funny anyway, regardless of the obvious caricatures.
Personally, as a fat person, I am very offended by this cartoon. It is obviously meant to imply that all overweight people are stupid and lazy. With his obvious obeisity, the cartoonist shows that he could not hope to acheive anything above failure, both in school and, as the mother points out, in life. It is made all the more obvious by the may the mother points toward his belly, and he looks down at it in shame, not to mention the fact that he cannot even get a shirt big enough to cover his reasonably sized paunch. Texas A&M must just be a haven for those skinny, anti-fat elitists. My god, isn't there enough stigma attached to overweight people without a major college newspaper piling on.
It wouldn't have mattered. The context makes it offensive. In addition, the dialogue isn't ebonics; it's just poor English.
So if the cartoonist showed a respectable black mother and son, without the characteristics that is the caricature, and the kid still had an "F" on his report card, and his mother scolded him in proper english, black people STILL would be crying racism? Somehow I doubt that. The only questionable things I see in that cartoon is the caricature and the speech.
I don't care if you're tired of hearing it. -- I had nothing to do with it. -- I am not responsible for it. -- I will not apologize for it. -- I will not sit idly by while people piss and moan over it. I'll b**** about it just as much as anyone else if I so choose simply because I refuse to accept responsibility for something I had nothing to do with.
What do you consider respectable lynus302? The fact of the matter is: if you're white, you probably don't know. The artist clearly don't know. And you - assuming automatically a grammatically incorrect statement is ebonics - don't know either. It requries you to first respect your subject matter. What happens here instead is the artist mocks the quality of airport security by juxtaposing them against the dumbest caricature image he could think of.
Maybe I'm inferring the wrong thing, but are you trying to say that only black people can caricature black people...?
