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Odd trivia: Anti-racist cartoons are by far the ones that are most likely to result in me receiving anti-Semitic hate mail. I guess that’s no surprise; of course the angry racist and angry anti-Semitic crowds overlap.
I’m lucky, in that I’m not usually bothered by idiotic emails. My ability to brush stuff like that off is definitely a blessing for my career. (And was also a blessing for my previous job as a wedding coordinator; no matter how mean family members were to me, I’d have forgotten about it an hour after the wedding.)
This cartoon was fun to draw. One of the nice things about single-panel cartoons is that I can take more time, and do things like drawing seven figures in detail, or fairly elaborate cross-hatching. I think my favorite face here is the woman with the long kinky hair (third from the right); that expression just works well for me, and I like the different-sized eyeballs.
My friend (and patron!) Naomi, who is a wonderful cartoonist herself, suggested adding the broken crutch. Thanks, Naomi!
As for the subject matter of this cartoon, it’s a response to something I’ve seen again and again: White people who, when a racist (or apparently racist, or potentially racist) incident comes up, are far more concerned with trying to establish the purity of the white person’s heart than they are with the damage that’s been done, or with how that damage can be mitigated.
I do think intentions matter. But they aren’t everything, and when they shouldn’t be the first – or, all too often, the only – priority.
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Transcript of cartoon.
This is a single panel cartoon.
A white man, wearing a collared shirt, looks down as he raises a finger to make a point. He looks a but unhappy and wide-eyed. He’s standing on a huge, huge block of stone. Underneath the stone, struggling to get out, are seven non-white characters, of various genders, ethnicities, and body shapes. They have expressions of shock, pain, and anger. There is a broken crutch lying on the ground.
WHITE MAN: First things first: Can we all agree I had good intentions?
CAPTION: White Priorities
My favorite faces are the left- and right-most ones, especially with the legs sticking out on the left. But they’re all pretty great faces! :-)
On the subject matter: I empathize a lot with people who get defensive too easily, since I have that problem sometimes myself. What helps me is remembering that it’s usually just not productive. Depending on the situation and people involved, either it’s possible to start a conversation looking for a solution (in which case why waste time) or it’s not (in which case nothing I could say would help matters much). Politics is the mind-killer and all that.
So did anyone have a reaction to some of the imagery here? This might be just me, or it might be something that’s gradually transitioning from stuff that’s not culturally recognisable to stuff that is. Wondering if anyone else sees anything.
The art is good and the point is good, but I didn’t see them matching as well as most of your cartoons. If the goal is to imply that the white dude was semi-responsible for the wall on top of everyone, and is trying to escape that responsibility through intent (not sure if it was) then I think you need a precursor panel.
I don’t think it matters whether the white dude was semi-responsible for the wall in any way. The white dude is standing on top of the wall, worrying about having his good intentions validated, while everyone else is in the emergency situation of being crushed by a wall. Maybe the wall fell on the people, the white dude rushed over to see if he could help, jumped on the wall to get a better view, realized he was adding a little extra weight to the wall (probably not enough to make much of a difference), and then stopped to check in that everyone agreed he hadn’t intended to cause additional injury by jumping up to get a better view of the situation. Even though he didn’t cause the main problem and he really did have the best intentions, he’s still wasting everyone’s time, centering the situation on him rather than the injured people, not stopping doing the wrong thing, and not starting doing the right thing.
I think it is more about the white dude centering himself in an unproductive way, demanding affirmation from injured people and not trying to help solve the problem, and less about whether or not he is avoiding responsibility for a situation he caused.
Charles:
What you say is surely true in an emergency.* But in a non-emergency setting involving strangers, I think it changes:
If you’re considering getting involved in someone else’s dispute or problem (I’m deliberately trying to be general here; race is only one subject) don’t you consider the outcome to you?
-If you thought you might become a target of opportunity in the dispute;
-If you thought your attempts to help might get misinterpreted;
-If you thought you would get demands for assistance which went beyond your comfort zone, and refusing them would make things worse; and/or
-If you thought you might get swept up in the general blame for causing the problem in the first place…
Wouldn’t that affect your willingness to jump in and assist? And if you were moved to assist anyway, wouldn’t you consider taking steps as you entered, to try and minimize the risk to you?
Less generally: do you agree that if you’re an ordinary random white dude, a group of hurt and angry POC discussing racism would satisfy all four of those criteria above?
Amp drew the white dude looking terrified that the help was going to go south, which I think is pretty accurate.
*Cartoon “trapped under wall” = emergency. Amp’s “white people when a racist (or apparently racist, or potentially racist) incident comes up” /= emergency. I still don’t know which one we’re discussing!
My reading of it was the same as Charles’
My hypothetical response cartoon would have the white man under a (much larger) wall too, but still on top of the others, sandwiched in between. The white man would be struggling, in vain, to get himself out from under the wall. The others would be yelling at the white man, “Why are you crushing us?”, “Get off us!”, etc.
Desipis: So you’re saying white people suffer just as much under the weight of racism as non-white people, but suffer even worse because they are so misunderstood?
Mine too.
Is the imagery here in any way inspired by the “Magic is Might” statue from the Harry Potter films? Or is it just a coincidence + my having a small reference pool?
https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8465/8096203439_98c4a509a2_b.jpg
Ampersand, no I’m saying all (99+%) people are being crushed by the system and blaming one group of people for being crushed onto another group of people is neither fair nor productive.
Ortvin: No, it wasn’t, at least not consciously. But that’s a really gorgeous statue and I’m glad you pointed it out to me.
If one separates, for the moment, what the cartoon intends to say and the world contained within it, subject to its own internal logic, it’s a bit odd to try to alleviate the white man of his full or semi-responsibility, given that he’s readily admitting to it. You don’t make a caveat like “good intentions” unless you’re about to explain why your behavior is not as bad as it looks or that the consequences of it are less important than the conscious intent behind it.
Desipis:
That might make a certain kind of sense—or at least would be worth discussing in some detail—if you explicitly named that much larger wall and described how you visualize the relationship between that larger wall and the one Amp drew. The highly abstract nature of your response, as well as of your response to Amp @11, makes it sound a whole lot more like a way to deny, or at least muddy, the issue Amp’s cartoon addresses than to offer any sort of nuance.
@Ampersand: I had the privilege of seeing the original prop at the Harry Potter studio tour in Watford a few years ago. It’s very impressive, even for someone who is only a very casual fan of the films.
My response is only as vague and abstract as Amp’s cartoon.
Amp publishes a cartoon to promulgate a negative and divisive racial stereotype and I’m the one muddying the waters?
This seems like an unfair attribution of motive. I would think that “that will, in my opinion, promulgate…” would have been more accurate.
Irony.
Sure. As a matter of fact, I’ve seen that cartoon, thirty years ago. Note that I am not implying that Ampersand copied it, given that his cartoon places him firmly among the people who serve the fat cat in original cartoon.
The cartoon, which was found in history textbooks in the 1988, and which I will try to find, depicted a pyramid of Westerners and Third Worlders with a grossly overweight capitalist enthroned at the top. Exploited people were upset with the ones closest to them, the white man and woman were directly underneath the throne, and yelling at each other, and the fat cat was dropping leaflets, two of which were readable, and two more were hinting at what they were about.
One of the leaflets was about males being responsible about everything harming women, another was about white people being responsible about everything oppressing people of color. Two more leaflets were about Catholics something the pope something, and immigrants something jobs something. An updated version would have “Gays something children something”, “Atheists something morals something”, “Transwomen something bathrooms something”, “Blacks something crime something”, “Culture something appropriation something”, “Lazy fatasses something health costs something”.
In case anyone still has not gotten the drift, the implication was that the only reason the oppressed people in the First and Third world have not overthrown their overlords is that said overlords are very, very good at finding issues to divide their victims, and having those they shear blame each other. You know, how the reason for specific communities falling to crime, unrest, drug use, etc. is ANYTHING but the steady erosion of opportunities.
I was not a Commie then, and I am not now. But I certainly did not see anything wrong with the logic of that cartoon, and have not seen anything in American politics to make me think was wrong. But hey, don’t look at me for solutions. I believe, like 99% of conservatives, that I’m right underneath the top, holding up one of the chair’s legs as steady as I can, and if only those lazy freeloaders underneath would stop complaining so much…
By the way, the comment above this one is mine. The author shows as “undefined”, for some reason.
And as an aside, Bulgaria in the 80s was even simpler. Apparatchiks living in the ‘luxury’ of highly skilled Western professionals, their kids acting like princelings among serfs, and the rest being told that anything less than perfect is to blame on the Western powers poisoning our water reservoirs, sabotaging our industrial facilities, corrupting our youth, and, of course, building up to crush us militarily.
Desipis:
I don’t know if I was remembering precisely the same comic that Seriously? described when I pointed out to you that the abstract nature of your response made it sound more like denial than any kind of substantive engagement with the issues raised in/by Amp’s comic. Still, what Seriously? described can be discussed, argued over, revised, rejected, etc. Most significantly for the point I was trying to make here, it engages a larger dynamic of oppression and exploitation that does not merely dismiss, as your response did, the racism—or, to be more precise, the problematic way in which white people all too often center our own experience/intention/feelings when dealing with racism—that Amp is trying to address here. Indeed, while I have no idea how you identify racially/ethnically, this response by you: “Amp publishes a cartoon to promulgate a negative and divisive racial stereotype and I’m the one muddying the waters?” is a perfect example of that tendency.
Amp:
I’m just wondering if using the past tense—”had good intentions”—was a conscious choice, as in you tried more than one tense in there, or if the past tense was how it came out of you and you just left it like that.
desipis, the most intriguing (and I think significant) thing about your response is that you jumped to identify with and defend the guy who’s crushing all those other people. That he insists his intentions were good only confirms that he’s responsible for this particular event. So while you’re not wrong to note that something like 99 percent of the population are ground down by someone else, the guy on top here is not one of the 99 percent.
Of course, many members of the 1 percent and the 0.1 percent also insist that they are being persecuted: that the rich are the only minority it’s acceptable to demonize, etc. They have numerous apologists who defend them in those terms, too, presumably people who hope to be one of them someday, or explain away their own lack of such status by claiming that persecution of the rich keeps them down.
In any case, your kneejerk response here, which fits your regular pattern, says a lot about you.
Duncan:
I really liked your comment and analysis, but it would have been a better fit for “Alas” norms if you had omitted the final sentence.
Richard:
(Slaps forehoead). D’oh!
In other words, the past tense was an unthinking choice. But now that you’ve said that, I’m going to change it to the present tense.
desipis, the most intriguing (and I think significant) thing about your response is that you jumped to identify with and defend the guy who’s crushing all those other people.
No, he is defending white people from the charge that they usually behave like the person in the cartoon.
Amp, for what it’s worth, I like the past tense better here. It implies that the guy is talking about a single event that just happened, rather than in generalities. I think that makes more sense with the allegory.
David Simon, thanks! Mandolin told me the same thing. So now I’m leaning towards leaving it as it is. :-)
What MJJ said. The title of “White Priorities” makes it seem like the guy on top represents white people generally.
Richard Jeffrey Newman:
I wasn’t dismissing anything. I was contextualising (albeit vaguely).
Also, I think I missed gin-and-whiskey’s comment @5, but I think the emergency vs non-emergency distinction is significant in considering the importance of how focused people can be on their own intentions. I don’t see how you could consider meaningful discussions on complex moral issues (such as racism) to be an emergency, and I think such topics would inherently require considering of (all) people’s intentions.
Desipis:
That may have been your intent, but the practical effect of what you did, however, precisely because you did it so vaguely, was to dismiss what you were trying to contextualize, which, for me, only highlights the fact that talking about intent almost always devolves onto a play/ploy for some form of consideration for the feelings of the person whose intent is in question. In this case, meaning this discussion on this blog, the stakes are not so high, and so I can certainly afford to respond by saying, “Oh, okay, now I see what you were trying to do. Would you mind being more specific/laying your position out more fully so I can actually engage with it?” I chose not to do that, Desipis, because I’ve been reading your comments here long enough now that this kind of vague response feels to me like a modus operandi and not something that happened because, say, you just didn’t have time to respond more fully.
Consider the contrast, though, with the people on whom the wall in Amp’s cartoon has fallen. Given their situation, the white man’s feelings ought to be precisely beside the point.
Also, if you (collective you, not you Desipis) don’t know that, certainly in the US, the appeal to good intentions is a common enough white response to all but the most egregious examples of racism that the accuracy of Amp’s cartoon ought not be open to question, then I have to wonder whether you’ve been paying attention.
Regarding the verb tense in the cartoon: I think either the present or the past would be just as powerful, but I thought I would explain a little why I asked the question, which I didn’t have time to do when I posted that comment. I was responding to Charles’ comment up at #4 and the fact that Amp said he had thought of the comic in the same way. Charles wrote:
Charles’ reading seems to me to lend itself to being expressed in the present tense more than the past. The past tense, on the other hand, absolutely implies a cause-effect relationship between whatever the white man did (which is now over) and the situation of the people under the wall.
I agree with RJN. Past tense makes causation clear, which makes it a very different cartoon.
As revised, the white dude is unquestionably wrong. But if you’re going for clarity (which seems reasonable since it’s a single panel cartoon) and if you intend to send a much stronger message, I think the past tense is better.
Odd trivia: Anti-racist cartoons are by far the ones that are most likely to result in me receiving anti-Semitic hate mail. I guess that’s no surprise; of course the angry racist and angry anti-Semitic crowds overlap.
It seems to me that by “anti-racist” you mean “complaining about white people.” By and large, when you deal with issues of race, it is “what are white people doing wrong?”
I would guess that the antisemitic hate mail is largely from white people who feel that you attacked them, and wish to retaliate in the same way, by denigrating your ethnicity.
MJJ: I imagine you’re right, that is how they’d excuse their behavior, if asked. But they are incorrect; a cartoon criticizing racism and white power is not the same as “attacking white people,” and it’s certainly not the say as emailing a stranger to say “you fucking Jew.”
desipis, 27
Would something like “Priorities Only White People Would Choose” work better for you? I may be wrong, but I think Amp would agree with this. (Not that I’m saying the title needs changing, but I am asking if my interpretation is correct in its re-wording.)
MJJ, 30
Is racism not wrong? Are racists not responsible for their actions? What is the conversation you want to have about race that Amp’s cartoons are not addressing?
One (white) guy’s 2 cents:
Love the cartoon. It expresses the idea (protagonist prioritizing his image management over urgent concerns for others’ welfare) boldly and amusingly. Short and to the point.
I prefer the protagonist speaking in past-tense. Thematically, the present tense makes more sense, but the past tense makes the guy’s reaction seem more narrow and immediate, and thus pettier, and thus funnier.
The title doesn’t bother me especially; I get the point, and don’t feel defensive. That said, it would be hard to imagine Amp writing a similar cartoon attributing a negative attribute to any other ethnic group. I might want to poke fun at the tribalism that might cause black people to take OJ’s side during his murder trial, but I’d be loath to suggest that ALL black people held this view. So I can understand that the title “White Priorities” might provoke people. (Yeah, yeah, you can’t really compare the status of dominant and subordinate groups, yadda yadda….)
More to the point, the title seems unnecessary. The cartoon’s message is conveyed by the characters in the panel, no narration required. I didn’t even read the title until people noted it in these comments. (In contrast, Amp’s cartoon about the climate-change denier at the NYT left me confused until I read the title.)
Again, I read the cartoon to poke fun at the protagonist’s behavior, not his race. The reader is expected to identify with the people being crushed and feel compassion for them, while recognizing the behavior of the protagonist and feeling aversion. Nothing in the cartoon demonstrates that white people are especially prone to behave like the protagonist. I’m not saying that white people AREN’T especially prone to behave this way. But the reader has to bring that conclusion with him; the cartoon will not persuade people of that who were not already persuaded.
In sum, a person reading this cartoon might recognize his own behavior, and see how inappropriate his behavior has been. But the cartoon, by itself, does nothing to illustrate that white people are especially prone to behave this way. Thus, I could understand people finding the title contentious.
So, all else being equal, I’d have proposed avoiding the word “white” in the title. Amp could have eliminated the title entirely with no loss of meaning. Or he could have replaced it with some snarky substitute. (“Priorities.” “A Matter of Priorities.” “First Things First.” “Urgent Priorities.” “Urgent Matters.” “First World Problems.” “Getting to the Heart of the Matter.” “Laser-Like Focus.” Etc.)
“First World Problems” would have been pretty hilarious.
Maybe draw a version with The Donald saying, “First things first: Can we all agree that I had no grasp of the consequences of my actions?”
Mookie, 32
I said “white people” not “racists.” Unless you are equating the two.
nobody.really 33:
That is sort of my point. Amp’s anti-racism cartoons tend to have whites as the bad guys.
Yes, if you ignore the title. But it seems pretty clear to me that “white people are especially prone to behave like the protagonist” is the point of the cartoon. It’s not like the guy happened to be white by coincidence.
So you’d like Amp to do a cartoon about #notallwhiteguys.
It’s a little bit like Jews and eating matzoh. Not all Jews eat matzoh, and not everyone who eats matzoh is Jewish. But if you do see someone eating motzoh, odds are that person is Jewish.
Ampersand,
One can argue, based on data by Piketty and the Elephant Chart, that a major issue for Western society is that the priorities of the Western middle and lower classes have been ignored. Non-SJ lefties (like Freddie deBoer) have been known to blame SJ proponents for mostly ignoring one of the main vectors of privilege, class, and thereby ignoring the concerns of middle and lower class whites.
Your cartoon, with the caption as it is, portrays white people as a group whose concerns are catered too. You may believe this, but it pretty clearly is not what many white people believe, given Brexit, the revolt against ‘the establishment’ that resulted in Trump, the disapproval ratings of congress, etc, etc.
In general, a lot of messaging by SJ people is not: ‘these people have it worse than you’, but ‘these people have problems and you don’t.’ The message is also often that privileged people have the power to change the system, while reality is that most people who are addressed as oppressors feel quite powerless to change the system.
In my field I run into a lot of people who have undoubtedly and directly caused a lot of bad outcomes, most of which were unintended. The vast majority of them have an initial response of “duck and cover”; it is very rare for the initial response to be “own the problem, apologize, and fix.” I might get them there in the end, but it takes work.
I also run into a lot of people who believe they were wronged or harmed by someone. Almost nobody will, on their own, entertain the possibility that they were not wronged at all. It’s a bit easier to get them to realize that there isn’t a party to blame; as I like to say, “not all bad endings have a villain.” But it’s even rarer for them to consider the possibility that there was a bad outcome–but it was actually their fault. Again, I might get them there in the end, but it takes work.
IOW: even if someone caused the problem, the desire to avoid blame is a “human thing,” not a “white thing.” And for sure, if someone did NOT cause the problem (but thinks they will get blamed for it) then it’s a human thing.
So I wonder if the result here will be a bit circular. You wrote a (good!) cartoon to draw attention to what I might call “blame-reduction.” But the likely reading of the cartoon is aimed at white people, and supports the “white people doing bad things” meme. And the more popular that meme gets… the more likely (and rational!) it is for any given white person to engage in blame-reduction.
[I’m leaving this comment here on this thread, as it’s relevant to the cartoon, and I’m just moving the discussion of antisemitism. But some of the comments it’s referring to have been moved to the “Worldwide Kitty” open thread. Sorry for any confusion this creates. –Amp]
No, not just you; I find both this statement and you to be frightening.
: – )
I sense we are all prone to see the world from our own perspectives and influenced by our own concerns, and to fail to see—or fail to give equal weight to—other people’s perspectives. The second-generation immigrant complains to his parents about feeling disrespected and lacking a sense of identity. But the parents—who fled to the US to escape pogroms, civil wars, floods, famines, or epidemics—may have little sympathy for the child’s critique of contemporary American life. They may have similar experiences of American life, but different frames of reference from which to judge it.
Thus Amp draws a cartoon about clueless people who, discovering that they’ve caused harm, focus their energies on justifying themselves rather than mitigating the harm.
desipis suggested a cartoon wherein the protagonist lacks autonomy to avoid harming others, or to mitigate the harm. Amp’s cartoon depicts a protagonist on top of a wall that is crushing a layer of people who remonstrate against him. The revised cartoon would depict the same thing—except that the protagonist would himself be pinned by a wall, with a layer of people above him. The people in the lower level, unaware of the protagonist’s constraints, perceive no difference between these two cartoons; they blame the protagonist either way.
I sense that this second cartoon would illustrate MJJ’s concerns: Members of subordinated groups appreciate their own perspectives and grievances against members of dominant groups. Yet members of dominant groups likely regard themselves to be subordinate to others. And members of subordinate groups may also be dominant in other contexts. But, perceiving the world through our own concerns, we are more likely to identify with feeling subordinate and aggrieved, than with feeling dominant and aggrieving.
Are black women members of a dominant group, or a subordinate one? Ask their kids who complain that mom won’t give them enough money for a ticket to FunWorld. Maybe the mom feels constrained by her lack of resources. Thus she may not respond well when she finds that junior has been circulating a cartoon depicting her as crushing her children’s fun out of sheer indifference.
Likewise, the mom’s boss at the bookstore may feel stung when he finds the cartoon depicting him as crushing the life out of his workforce with paltry wages. Don’t his employees see that Amazon has been driving bookstores out of business left and right, and he has absolutely no discretion to pay more than he is?
Etc., etc.
I once wrote an essay about films that illustrate the distinction between hierarchy and privilege. In my lexicon, “hierarchy” refers to a social pecking order, while “privilege” refers to drawing judgments about other people’s behavior base on ignorance of their circumstances. Because society pays more attention to people higher up in the hierarchy, we are prone to know more about the lives of the upper tiers than the lives of the lower tiers. But we’re still likely to be ignorant of the particulars. Thus we have various “Prince and the Pauper” stories wherein people lower in the hierarchy suddenly find themselves higher in the hierarchy. They come to appreciate the pressures and constraints that come with this new status—and find themselves ridiculed by their former peers who do not understand these new circumstances.
We all struggle to manage the pressures and constraints of our lives, and are privileged not to have to worry about the pressures and constraints of those elsewhere in the hierarchy—that is, we judge the behaviors of people elsewhere in the hierarchy without having the same appreciation for the pressures and constraints under which they operate.
As I’ve said, I love Amp’s cartoon; I think it ably expresses the frustration of people who feel subordinated, and the frequent cluelessness of the people doing the subordinating. But I wouldn’t want to suggest that the perspective of the people feeling subordinated is the only relevant perspective.
The discussion of antisemitism has been moved to an open thread.
[Link corrected! Thanks Hume.]
Um… That was certainly how I took your position from the email exchange and surrounding facts, and it should be pretty clear from the followup that I was trying my best to avoid a discussion which I thought you had said you didn’t want to have.
I still don’t understand precisely what you mean by the term “scientific racism.”* (That is not a term I use, since I think that applying labels to scientific inquiry is inherently anti-scientific.) But in any reasonable interpretation of the term, it seemed clear to me that the SSC claims of “genetic superiority based on racial background” would fall in that category, since that SSC claim is literally based on science and race and relative differences.
And since you specifically said you don’t allow defenses of ‘scientific racism’ on “Alas,” I was trying in good faith to follow that rule.
Anyway, if I failed to fully understand and parse your obviously-complex views on when/where it is appropriate to discuss these things… OK, I will adjust my views as accurately as I am able, based on your response. But accusing me of lying about your views is really weird; why on earth would I do that?
*To avoid future misunderstanding, it would be helpful to know how you actually define “scientific racism”, since I am, in fact, doing my best to follow your “don’t discuss it here” rule.
Ampersand,
Your link goes to this thread, which seems incorrect.
I was raised conservative Catholic. Much of my family still holds those views and supports conservatives. I am a white woman married to a successful white man. I understand perfectly well why people like me vote Republican. Materially, I am well off enough to benefit financially from Republican economic policies (or, I would be if I still lived in the U.S.). I have never been without health insurance. It would be very comfortable to believe that my wonderful life is all due to my own hard work and virtue. Except, I know that’s not true.
I am a liberal because I listened to other perspectives and was influenced by other people’s concerns. Most of the white liberals that I know are in similar positions.
The difference, for us, is not one of perspective. It is one of values. Do we as a society educate our young, care for our sick and aged, give a hand to help those who have had bad luck (or even made mistakes!) get back on their feet? Or do we say that is the responsibility of individuals, knowing full well that the results will be poor smart kid not getting access to education and thousands dying for lack of healthcare and on and on? If there were a non-governmental model that provided education and healthcare for all I’d be all for it. I’ve never seen it.