A monkey's grandson?

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/02/18/martin.cartoon/index.html?iref=newssearch

So here we go... Another interesting article. A NY post cartoonist makes a cartoon that I don't get and America goes into Black alert. Crying foul and screaming for that man to be burned at the stake for being a racist.

I posted a reply to it... but I noticed they didn't care much for it because it never made it to the responses page...

So, since I didn't actually think it was very agressive (I was being pretty fair-handed), I guess it must not have made any sense...

Well, that's what we have blogs for! :D

So, here's the deal; Ronald Martin is a columnist whom usually does the "Black people are oppressed" thing in his responses. Which is cool.

But the crux of the problem is that a long time ago black people were equated with chimpanzees... and thus this cartoon is obviously a poke at Obama, whom is black and therefore...

Except, I know my history pretty well, and somewhere I missed the chimpanzee thing... perhaps I slept through that part of history class or something, but I have to be honest, if I had been struck with the desire to write a cartoon refering chimpanzees, I would have never guessed I was "implicating" black people...

The problem is; that means that I must be educated in African American plight in order to not offend African-Americans.

So, I went on ahead and tried to do that;

I found three words that are used to label African Americans (Besides African Americans, of course); "Colored", "Black" and of course the dreaded "N" word (Which I was going to write out here, but I think the blogger will delete it automatically if it detects it). I found no reference to chimpanzees anywhere. I ran three different search strings: "African-American lables, African American slang and ethnic slang"

So, let's be clear here; Black people want to be equal, but everyone else must study black heritage before interacting with Black people. This study must be extensive enough that it means a trip to the local library now... And probably a couple of years of reading...

Or I could just live with them and figure it out by osmosis... most likely by making mistakes and getting in real hot water and widening the gap between our "peoples".

Yep... Now I have been pushed so far away from black peoples that I must STUDY in order to be friends with them...

And they wonder why there is still racism?

Here's the part that really sucks; I only have this problem with AMERICAN blacks (Not all of them, mind, just the ones like Mr. Martin, whom have already pegged me as "One of THEM" without even lookeing) , Normal black people -you know, the ones from Africa that don't require a textbook in order to communicate with them- are family to me...

My own kinsmen, the ones from MY country, however, are aliens...

Mr. Martin and those who saw the link between the Chimpanzee and Obama; if you go looking for evil, you WILL find it... even when it doesn't exist.

For me, I'm tired of talking about the color of my car and looking around nervously to make sure no African Americans are around to hear me say the "B" word...

---Me