And What About Naomi?

Over the weekend, Australian cartoonist Mark Knight of the Melbourne Herald Sun drew a cartoon lampooning tennis great Serena Williams for losing her temper in the US Open championship match when the court judge penalized her a point for smashing her racket and an entire game for complaining about it. The cartoon provoked accusations that Knight was promoting sexism and racism. Her lips were too big and her biracial opponent, Naomi Osaka, was too white, in the view of many observers.

"Can You Just Let Her Win" by Mark Knight in Melbourne Herald Sun, September 10, 2018

I defer to the many people, including other cartoonists, who found the caricature offensive. The real Ms. Williams's lips are not that big, and if it weren't for the dress and the situation, I wouldn't recognize her in the cartoon. Also, as others have pointed out, Knight has a tendency, shared with a number of Aussie cartoonists, to be free and loose with racial caricature. That, and the fact that the Herald Sun is a Murdoch-owned tabloid, could explain why Knight's editors doubled down by reprinting the offending caricature on the front page today.

In Knight's defense, I would note that the two players' skin tones are nearly identical; Osaka being in the background however, she has none of the shading and contouring used in the Williams caricature. On the other hand, Knight did draw Osaka's blonde ponytail much longer than she wore it during the US Open, adding to the impression that he whitened her up.

Cartooning people of races other than one's own is fraught with the risk of letting some racism onto the page, consciously or unconsciously. I have yet to find a computer screen color that matches oriental skin tone, and I'm even less confident that the screen color will match the printed color. Darker skin tones, moreover, can muddy a caricature, especially in print.

Coloration aside, the question is: If caricature is based on exaggeration, how much is too much? Does the oriental person one is drawing really have slanty eyes? How far can a Semitic nose be hooked without going too far? Can one identify a character as Latino without slipping "Sí, Señor" into the dialogue? Where is the line between Little Black Sambo Face and dreary portraiture?

I'll give a case in point from my own oeuvre. Three years ago, I drew a cartoon about President Obama's visit to Kenya, during which he criticized his hosts' treatment of Kenya's LGBTQ citizens. 

My caricature of President Uhuru Kenyatta included a pair of very full lips. But if you look at a photo of him, how else could he be caricatured? I didn't hear a lot of criticism of this cartoon, but that can be attributed to the limited exposure that my cartoons get. This blog rarely gets visitors from anywhere in Africa, and my cartoon certainly wasn't printed in Kenya.

Ted Rall commented on Facebook the other day that the idiosyncratically monstrous characterizations of people in his cartoons are a reaction to the racist caricatures he saw in other cartoonists' work. Nobody he draws remotely resembles anybody enough to fit any timeworn stereotype. Closer to the center of the verisimilitude spectrum, Signe Wilkinson once responded to complaints about racial stereotyping by drawing a cartoon of eight identical Everymen in suits and ties who were labeled as belonging to eight different national and ethnic backgrounds.

I do try to be inclusive in my cartoons, which means drawing people who appear not to be Minnesotans of Scandinavian heritage. Tomorrow's cartoon includes a school principal whose skin tone is darker than mine but lighter than Serena Williams's. I didn't give her a name, so you'll just have to guess for yourself where her great-grandfather might have been from. And whether it makes any difference.

And what about Naomi?