New Cartoon! The GOP Spin Cycle

See, I wasn't lying... I'm back with a new cartoon, that you can see in color on my web site, or black & white at the Crimson web site.

Also, for those of you who care, I'm going to be completely revamping the web site this summer to make it more user-friendly and improve the design... I also intend to add sections that include lists with some of the links I randomly sprinkle these blogs with (to good cartoonists web sites, good news sites, etc). And I've been asked to add a biography, so I'll do that do. But I have no plans to take the current site down while I revamp, so no worries.

Bonus: you should have seen the ecstatic grin on my face this morning when I opened my mailbox to find this Nation cover, featuring Huey Freeman of Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks (as I have repeatedly stressed, the only reason I even read the daily comics). The "Striking Back" on the cover refers to fighting restrictions on our civil liberties.

How to Swim

Have I mentioned how much I admire Clay Bennett's cartoons? Each one is like a little masterpiece... simple and powerful visual images without a lot of words (unlike, say, my cartoons). For those of you not in the know, Clay won the Pulitzer for Editorial Cartooning this year, and is also a really nice guy (I got to meet him at a special cartoonist's dinner/talk here at Harvard). Anyway, check out this cartoon he did recently on so-called welfare reform. And while you're at it, visit cartoonist Cindy Procious (who happens to be Clay's wife) who is also really talented and friendly and was very encouraging to me as a young woman trying to make it in the almost entirely male world of editorial cartooning.

I'm alive, and will have a new cartoon next week...

Yeah, that's right... The reason there was no cartoon the last two weeks is the same reason there weren't very many blogs: I wasn't sleeping, eating, devouring the news, or doing anything else unrelated to papers and final projects. But the worst is done with and you can expect a new cartoon on Monday. And more blogs as soon as I catch up on some sleep.

My Zadie says no to blackface

My Bobie (grandmother) Sylvia was reading the blog (see post below on blackface), and she wrote to tell me that I take after my (late) Zadie (grandfather), Leon Katler. Anyway, Bobie tells me that when Zadie was Youth Director at Temple Beth Am (he was also the first president of the temple before he had a falling out with the rabbi, but that's another story), one of the other youth workers wanted to put on a blackface minstrel show and "your Zadie put his foot down with a loud 'no way'." Way to go, Zadie.

Speaking of my Zadie, I miss him a lot (he died just after I started college), and I wish he could be here to see my cartoons and blog. He was the person who got me into progressive politics when I was a kid, he bought me subscriptions to In These Times and The Liberal Opinion (where I first read Tom Tomorrow's cartoons) and gave me his back issues of The Nation. One of the last things I remember him saying to me was that he wanted to make sure my friends and I were involved in labor activism and "marching for homosexual rights." (I am, Zadie, I promise).

And while I'm on this topic, I also miss my other grandfather, though he died when I was three. My mother tells me he was quite the personality and used to drive me around on his motorcycle... here's a picture of us together).

On the new Blackface and the never-ending Redface

In his film Bamboozled (see RealVideo trailer), Spike Lee imagines a world in which a disgruntled black television executive attempts to get himself fired by creating a modern-day minstrel show set in a Southern plantation watermelon patch. To the executive’s dismay, the Man-Tan Millenium Minstrel Show becomes a huge hit, spawning innumerable T-shirts, towels, action figures, lunchboxes and paperweights covered in old-style red-lipped bug-eyed “coon” imagery. But far more horrifying than the racist objects are the fans buying them. One of the more disturbing images in the movie comes after the show has really taken off and the television audience begins to go beyond T-shirts: the camera pans across a sea of cork-blackened red-mouthed white, Asian, Hispanic and black faces—all proudly proclaiming themselves to be “niggers...”

The twist of course is that Lee’s imaginary world isn’t really imaginary: I’ve already been there. Quick rewind to the Lowell High School of not-so-long-past: it’s fall of 1994 and I haven’t yet learned to hide in the art room during mandatory football pep rallies. The stands in the gymnasium are filled to overflowing with 3,500 screaming (and whooping) students. Hundreds of girls pull lipstick from their purses to anoint their friends with stripes of “war paint.” The crowd begins to stamp in imitation of a “tom-tom” drum, and then cheers ecstatically when the cheerleaders lead them in a cry of “Let’s Go Red Raiders!”

But blackface hasn't been replaced by "redface" (or "playing Indian"). It too is alive and kicking. The "coon" imagery and objects I linked to above are not antiques--they are all recently created for a thriving "black collectibles" market (check out this article from the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, "New Racist Forms: Jim Crow in the 21st Century.")

And then there is "Who is my Baby's Daddy?", a new Flash animation at Mondo Mini-Shows featuring an overblown stereotype of a black welfare mother known as Shirley Q. Liquor. But Shirley Q. is more than a cartoon: she is actually a popular stage character performed by tasteless white male Charles Knipp in drag and BLACKFACE. Yes, you heard me, blackface. He also sells Shirley Q. CDs and merchandise, performs her on the radio, and even created a "news" website under the Shirley Q. pseudonym in which blackfaced characters explain the war in Ebonics. I'm not making this up folks--he's not some fringe racist, he performs to sold-out crowds in various clubs around the country.

Wait, it gets worse! Mr. Knipp actually has the nerve to claim that he is not racist, and that black audiences "overwhelmingly" enjoy his performances. Check out these choice quotes from his web site:

People who hear my comedy without seeing me or knowing who I am often ask me - am I black? white? male? female? A racist? A satirist? But mainly they just want to hear more of what Shirley Q. thinks.

People often ask if African-Americans are offended by my modern day blackface minstrel comedy act. To be honest, people of colour who have seen my shows live or heard my CD's overwhelmingly tell me how much they enjoyed my accurate portrayal of a certain genre of the gritty, witty Southern woman that they fondly remember, no matter what her race.

This is kind of like the racist sports teams who go out of their way to find a handful of Native Americans who "feel honoured" by their mascots, and then claim that most Native Americans "feel honoured". And what's the "accurate" part, exactly--the 19 children all by different fathers whose name Shirley doesn't remember? The giant red lips and bug eyes? The "ignunce"? I love the way he sidesteps accusations of racism by declaring that "mainly they just want to hear more of what Shirley Q. thinks."

(Thanks to Tom Tomorrow for pointing out the Shirley Q. business in his blog)

For more on this topic (including links to sites on Indian Mascots, etc), see my blog "The Newly Permissible Racist Cartooning?" And check out this great new cartoon from Cartoonista Lalo Alcaraz, featured at Indianz.com.

More MCAS fun

Like I said (in this blog and a cartoon), Massachusetts education officials are optimistic to the point of absurdity. Check out this article in the Boston Globe today--in some bizarre twist of something, Boston is receiving an award for improving its schools and decreasing the performance gap between white and minority students. This is patently ridiculous, as the article notes:

On the spring 2001 Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exam, 81 percent of white 10th-graders passed math, while 41 percent of black 10th-graders passed. The 40-point gap is down only slightly from three years ago, when the difference was 42 points. The story was similar for Latino students, while Asian students did as well as or better than whites. Starting with the class of 2003, students must pass the English and math portions of the controversial exam in order to graduate.

How a 2 percent improvement (from completely and totally horrible to slightly less completely and totally horrible) merits an award is beyond me. Mayor Menino's reaction, of course, was: why are you all looking on the down side?:

Yesterday, city and school officials said critics were focusing on the negative. ''We're making progress,'' said Mayor Thomas M. Menino. ''We are not going backwards. More and more kids are passing every year.''

Not exactly. The MCAS passing rates have increased slightly--but so have high school dropout rates:

According to figures presented to the Boston School Committee two weeks ago, 1,594 students in grades 9-12, or 8.4 percent, dropped out of the city's public schools in the 2000-2001 school year, compared with 8.3 percent in 1999-2000 and 7 percent in 1995-1996, when Superintendent Thomas W. Payzant took over the district. As of October 2000, the national drop-out rate was 4.8 percent for students in grades 10-12.

So hip hip hooray, and please pass the champagne.

I was serious...

...when I said I was busy illustrating a medieval interracial love poem. See what I have so far, if you like.

I'm still alive...

...and I will have new material for your reading and viewing pleasure by Monday. Until then, on the SUV topic, a cartoon from Ruben Bolling... Also, there are plenty of things already on this web site, such as my photo comic about my great-great-grandmother and her double-barreled shotgun, The Hobo and Nell.

Really, I will have something here soon!+ Philip's SUV theory

Big apologies to you loyal readers for not having anything new here in the last few days. There have been plenty of news items to piss me off but I've been so tired from pulling all-nighters that I haven't had the energy to write about them. So for now, I leave you with the following revelation from reader Philip Pangrac, who is apparently just as paranoid as I am:

OK, earlier today I was writing a paper about how the Renaissance only affected an elite minority while the masses were still toiling as they did in medieval era, while also comparing that era to today when an elite minority enjoys the good life while the masses are not as well off (to put it nicely), and at one point an idea came into my head explaining why SUVs are so freaking huge: it's so the people driving them are lifted off the ground and can't see the homeless people lying in the gutters, thus making them feel unhappy (damn those homeless people). My mind then remembered the set up of all the buildings in the Jetsons, which are basically round buildings balanced on poles lifted so high into the air that you can't see the ground. So the way I see it now, SUVs are the first step to the Jetsons era, where white people are so high off the ground you don't see any minorities, homeless people, gay/lesbian/bi's, or other "unsavory characters". Or maybe they'd all been killed off before the Jetsons took place.