A defiant front page
Now the Herald-Sun, the Australian paper that ran the strikingly racist cartoon of Serena Williams, is doing the free speech martyr act.
The Herald Sun newspaper has republished its controversial cartoon of tennis star Serena Williams on a defiant front page in which it attacked its critics and foreshadowed a future where satire is outlawed.
“WELCOME TO PC WORLD,” read the paper’s headline, over a collection of Mark Knight cartoons, including the depiction of Williams spitting a dummy and stamping on her racquet.
The cartoons are broad, yes, but they’re not racist. That one of Williams – we’ve seen those before.
“If the self-appointed censors of Mark Knight get their way on his Serena Williams cartoon, our new politically correct life will be very dull indeed,” the paper wrote.
No, it really won’t. It’s perfectly possible to do biting satirical cartoons without racism.
Knight has rejected suggestions his depiction of Williams was racist or sexist, while others said it drew on racist tropes of African-Americans.
“I saw the world number one tennis player have a huge hissy fit and spit the dummy,” Knight said on Tuesday.
“That’s what the cartoon was about, her poor behaviour on the court.
“I drew her as an African-American woman. She’s powerfully built. She wears these outrageous costumes when she plays tennis. She’s interesting to draw. I drew her as she is, as an African-American woman.”
Er…as a generic African-American woman in the mind of one male Australian cartoonist. That is not, in fact, her face.
Australian writer Maxine Beneba Clarke said she believed the front page demonstrated a “misunderstanding” of the criticism levelled at the cartoon.
“I think it’s really interesting that the Herald Sun has not included really any other caricatures or cartoons of black people — either Aboriginal people or African-American people, black people of any descent,” said Ms Clarke, who is of Afro-Caribbean descent.
“So what you have is essentially a front page that has pictures like Donald Trump being caricatured for his hair, Tony Abbott being caricatured for his big ears, you know the Prime Minister being portrayed as a muppet, kind of this innuendo that he’s having his strings pulled … and I think it’s fundamentally different to racial caricature.”
Ms Clarke said the front page had been carefully constructed.
“What it’s trying to say is that all people are caricatured, but the criticism of the Serena Williams caricature is that it’s specifically racist, and there’s a reason why the Herald Sun isn’t able to put other cartoons that they’ve reproduced of black people on the front page.”
But what about freedom of cartooning?
Syndicated cartoonist Paul Zanetti, a friend of Knight’s for forty years, said cartooning was under threat from political correctness, and the Herald Sun front page “spelt out exactly where we are at at this point”.
“Political correctness is really all about censoring, it’s about being bullied into conforming to a view of the world,” he said.
No, it really isn’t, at least not necessarily. Take this, for instance:
It’s obvious enough, yeah? I bet even Mark Knight would be able to see it.
Nothing of value is lost if cartoonists no longer do that kind of thing.
As a talent-challenged semi-catoonist I realize it’s hard to pull off caricature. Caricature always involves taking a bit of wind out of the target’s ego by overemphasizing physical traits. The Obama cartoons with the big ears come to mind. But they also show that you can lampoon someone a bit without giving it the old ‘Birth of a Nation treatment’. The guys say they weren’t trying to be racist. It’d almost be better if they had been – now it looks like they are so racist that they can’t even recognize racism in their work.
As for the PC police supposedly spoiling everything they should do what I do – draw an obscure comic that no one looks at and you can do what you please.
Pliny the in Between, exactly that. I had some ‘discussions’ with other commentators on STUFF where this article was published yesterday. Many could not or would not draw a distinction between caricature and out-right racist stereotyping. The fact that the cartoonist and now his publisher are so strongly defending themselves, while avoiding discussion of the specific criticisms made, speaks volumes in my view. Especially when combined with the attacks on ‘PC’. When did it become a bad thing to treat people with basic respect?
Pliny, stop with the self-pity. I know at least one person who looks at your work regularly.
AoS – sorry not trying to whine – just commenting that obscurity confers a great deal of artistic freedom, which I enjoy and which has to date kept me available in Pakistan. Also on the plus side – my small following doesn’t yet include any trolls. ;)
The Serena cartoon looked like so much like racist depictions of Africans, that I’m surprised that there is not a bone through her nose. I guess that would be TOO racist. Gawds!
Chuck, that’s exactly what I said on Ophelia’s original article.
Mind you, all else notwithstanding I love the expression on Trump’s cat’s face in the above image.