It's Just Jokes. (Right?)

 

An interesting question posed by On The Media: how do you satirize Obama and Clinton without veering into territory that might be labeled a racist or misogynist? They talked to editorial cartoonist Nick Anderson about reactions to his caricatures and professor Elaine Miller about the way Geraldine Ferraro was depicted in editorial cartoons in 1984, when she was Walter Mondale’s running mate on the Democratic ticket.

After holding auditions, Seth Meyers told OTM that Saturday Night Live went with Fred Armisen as their Obama (he said Maya Rudolph was their emergency option). Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune wonders if they couldn’t have tapped a black person for that role.

(Also: Guest host Tina Fey kinda sorta maybe endorsed Hillary Clinton on Weekend Update.)

G.D.

G.D.

Gene "G.D." Demby is the founder and editor of PostBourgie. In his day job, he blogs and reports on race and ethnicity for NPR's Code Switch team.
G.D.

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  • verdeluz

    i’m going to give this a listen tonight.

    as far as visual depictions go, the artist’s intention is one thing, and i think it’s appropriate that racist and sexist implications are being taken into account. but the other side of the story is that which is beyond the artist’s control; namely, the glee with which images showing hillary being ‘taught a lesson’ are received by their audiences. the underlying woman steps out of her place/man puts her back in it theme is nearly impossible to avoid, because it’s part of the background that the viewer brings with them to the page.

  • K: That’s so much of the narrative that people bring them with Hillary (Monica made a very interesting post about the way Obama and Hillary are viewed and how being tangentially linked to the Civil Rights Movement is a boon to him but being tangentially linked to feminism is to her detriment).

  • Big Word

    Well given the history of blacks portrayl in cartoons, I can understand some hypersensitivity in that regard. I think the same sensitvity on the part of a white woman is a bit of stretch though. What group of people have been more favorably portrayed in the media than white women?

  • BW: Being a woman comes with a lot of baggage in the way she’s perceived (again I nod toward Monica’s post). You think the Hillary’s-a-shrill-bitch angle would ever be applied to dude?

  • verdeluz

    do you think it’s somehow inaccurate?

    assuming a scenario in which barack is the democratic nominee, i can see these things playing out in much the same way psychologically, sub ‘woman’ for ‘black man’.

  • Big Word

    G.D: Being cast a certain way based on certain personality traits is par for the course in American politics. I’m not sayin it’s right and I certainly don’t advocate using such nonsense when deciding for whom to cast a bollot, but when you take history into context a white woman doesn’t have much to complain about, imo.

  • Really, fam?