For anyone familiar with the regular editorial content of the New York Post, the cartoon correlating the recent killing of a chimpanzee with President Barack Obama and his stimulus package is not a surprise.
Despite the paper’s assertion that the cartoon was a parody of Washington insider politics and had little to do with President Obama’s identity as an African-American, there’s simply too much historical evidence in popular culture and media that establishes that primates have long been stand-in imagery for how some whites might view African-Americans, specifically Black men. Just last year, controversy erupted over the cover of American Vogue, which featured a picture of Lebron James and supermodel Gisele Bundchen that seemed to allude to the film “King Kong”. For the New York Post to deny the legitimacy of such interpretations is at best disingenuous and at worst arrogant. In this regard, the running of the cartoon and editorial defense of it, likely says more about the integrity—or lack of—of the New York Post than anything else.
Nevertheless this cartoon highlights the regular attempt to undermine the validity Obama’s presidency within the realm of popular media and culture. The New York Post is of course owned by Rupert Murdoch’s global conglomerate News Corporation, so it is important not to see the “chimpanzee cartoon” as separate and distinct from Fox News contributor’s Juan Williams’ delusional rants about Michele Obama’s presumed black radical political views. Neither should the neo-conservative views of the Wall Street Journal, another News Corporation company, be dismissed as unrelated, despite the fact that the commentary on Fox News or the New York Post is decidedly more vulgar in its presentation. The interconnectedness of these media entities underscores how many communities must become more sophisticated in response to racist, sexist or homophobic expression in the media.
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