We’ve posted a number of critiques of caricatures of Barack Obama that look suspiciously like those popular during and immediately after slavery (see here, here, and here). One common critique of our critique went something like this, “Well, if you’re going to caricature a black person, that’s what it’s going to look like? Are you saying we can’t caricature black people?”
For this reason, when I saw the caricature below accompanying The New Yorker’s endorsement of Obama, I thought “ah ha!” It turns out, we can caricature black people without resorting to the racist imagery of the past. Let’s insist upon it.
Bob M. had a nice comment! He wrote:
I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone caricatured with such a wide range of skin tones as Obama has been (as your four posts on this perfectly illustrate). Maybe Michael Jackson…
It would be interesting to display the four caricatures side by side to encourage a discussion of what “post-racial politics” means: are we really moving beyond seeing only the color of one’s skin, or are we using one’s ambiguous skin tone to reinforce racial categories (as the cartoons of Obama as a canibal and as a Middle Eastern terrorist do, whether for satirical purposes or not).
