A couple of weeks ago, I went to a local bar to play Quizzo with a friend. One of the questions referred to an actor whose name none of us could remember. My friend said, “I know his face! Just not his name.”
We joked, “Draw him.”
But my friend, who is white, said, “I feel like when I draw black people it looks racist.”
Artist Ron Wimberly had someone tell him that he’d thought Wimberly’s art was racist, before meeting him and realizing that Wimberly is black.
Wimberly noted that perhaps it’s just that black features don’t look strange or exaggerated to him.
This story was passed on to me recently (h/t), wherein Washington Post comics blogger Michael Cavna points out:
An unnerving number of North America’s political cartoonists are bizarrely obsessed with President Obama’s lips.
You read that right. Barack has the mouth that soared to the top of many cartoonists’ fixations. Just what in the name of Jimmy Carter caricatures is going on here?
If you don’t believe me, scan dozens of current political cartoons. For every Steve Benson or Mike Luckovich who is zeroing in on a swell, spot-on Obama, there seems to be a cartoonist who invokes “caricature” in the most grotesque sense of the word. Obama’s lips have been rendered in such unnatural tints, and at such dimensions, that somewhere, even R. Crumb would blush.
And of course, this physical area of caricature — unlike, say, Obama’s ears — comes freighted with a legacy of ugly racism and cruel, blackface-era mockery.
Daryl Cagle writes:
I’ve gotten a lot of questions recently on drawing Obama; people want to know about racial stereotypes and whether cartoonists are being pressured to draw him a certain way. When I was working as an illustrator I was often given clear guidelines on how I was supposed to draw African-Americans: with small noses and thin lips. I was instructed to make any crowds of cartoon characters racially diverse, but only diverse in color, not in facial features.
It’s an interesting, and tough question. After seeing the Obama Spider-Man comic, and observing that the Obama in the pages looked almost nothing like the actual president, I wondered what gave. This is 2009, we have our first African-American president, are we still dealing with the “all black people look the same” mentality? Or was the artist worried about playing into racist stereotypes and ended up with a generic dark-skinned character (hell, even the skin tone was wrong).
A while back, there was a controversy about the New Yorker’s cover, depicting Obama and his wife in stereotyped ways. I weighed in back on my own blog, and there were thoughtful comments on both sides. But I wonder if the debate over the propriety of that image has contributed to the thoughts of cartoonists depicting Obama now.
Cagle’s point, that he was taught to draw African-Americans with Caucasian features, dovetails nicely into this post, from Girls Read Comics, and this one, from Seeking Avalon, on Vixen being portrayed as, well, white. And then I think of my friend’s comment, and Wimberly’s comment, and…
I don’t have easy answers here. I don’t think any of the artists mentioned above or linked in any of these places meant to be racist. I also think that sometimes, whether you like it or not, racism creeps in. This shouldn’t be taken as a sign that white people shouldn’t be drawing people of color, or that caricaturing the President of the United States is off-limits now because said President is black.
This is only the first month of Obama’s presidency; I have no doubt that this won’t be the last time we have this conversation. I guess about the only thing I can hope for is that we can discuss it like adults, and move forward from here.
February 1st, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Most political cartoonists are avoiding caricatures of obama not because he’s black, but because they are in lock-step philosophical agreement with him. Suddenly, the left’s eight years of constantly screeching “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” is no longer acceptable to them. I guess “speaking truth to power” doesn’t count when your side is the one in power.
February 1st, 2009 at 5:12 pm
One of my best friends in high school was a black guy with a huge Afro, big lips, and a really wide nose. I’ve always wanted to base a comic book character on him (due to his amazing gymnastics/martial arts/parkour skills) but I realized I’d have to bring him with me to every convention to keep from being called racist.
February 1st, 2009 at 7:20 pm
My college newspaper had student drawn comic strips every day. And one artist drew a guy getting his stuff stolen by a burglar wearing a ski-mask. Unfortunately, he wasn’t a good artist and his characters were stick figures. And as with most ski masks, there was a mouth hole in the shaded-in, all-black mask.
Suffice to say, there was a huge outcry on campus because everyone assumed it was a black burglar with big stereotyped lips instead of just a guy in a ski mask. So yeah, this can be a touchy issue.
February 2nd, 2009 at 6:20 am
Here’s a caricature I did of Obama during his visit to the UK, meeting political leaders.
What do you think?
http://markandrich.googlepages.com/obama468.jpg/obama468-full.jpg
February 2nd, 2009 at 1:55 pm
“An unnerving number of North America’s political cartoonists are bizarrely obsessed with President Obama’s lips.”
I’d say they’re more obsessed with his smile. Like Carter’s, it is massive and friendly, and very angular – your eyes are drawn to it. It is easily his most identifiable feature, next to his ears.
One of the big worries many have had (myself included) is that people will attempt to “protect” the President from criticism and parody, under the claim that any attempt to skewer him is automatically race-fueled. I don’t think at all this is coming from the President himself – he appears to have a very good sense of humor – but people who want to “come to his aid” that will be percieved as coming from the President himself.
People thought Ross Perot looked like a chimp, and said so. Nobody minded. There’s whole websites dedicated to comparing photos of Bush to monkeys. I GET that it’s easily-misunderstood ground with Obama. But as soon as you say some things “can’t/shouldn’t be said” you limit the ability of the cartoonist of comedian to entertain. But where was the outrage when Condaleeza Rice was drawn as a parrot with Topsy curls and a Stepin Fetchit accent?
We’re in an over-litigious age of people with thin skins and a Blackberry full of contacts for the news media. Comedians and cartoonists are second-guessing themselves, hesitating over whether or not this joke of that drawing will be “taken the wrong way”. Again, it’s not Obama doing it, but the (over-)sensitivity because of the unique parameters of the historic position we’re now in.
I’m personally upset and annoyed to be in a world where people insist that certain things “aren’t funny anymore”. Yes they are. in the right hands, told at the right time, when people realize that they are jokes and not subtle political statements and step one of a campaign to destroy the world, EVERYTHING can be funny. But instead we laugh, and then furtively look around to make sure others were laughing, or that people weren’t offended. Go woth the gut reaction – if you laughed, it was funny. If it looks like Obama, it’s Obama, not a monkey in a suit intended to pass a racial comment.
I await with bated breath to see Gerry Trudeau’s icon for the new president in Doonesbury. Maybe a halo, or corona. Or maybe he’ll just never use the President at all for fear of being taken the wrong way. Which will in itself be taken as an attack by some.
And you think you can’t win with comics fans…
February 3rd, 2009 at 8:13 am
Gordon Brown is stocky, not fat.