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?

Another Police Cartoon, Another Editor

There haven't been any new developments in the dispute between editorial cartoonist Ted Rall and the Los Angeles Times-Police Newsletter, but meanwhile, there has been a police union protest against a syndicated cartoon by Milt Priggee in the Florida Times-Union.

And a very different response from the editors of the paper.

A spokesperson for the Jacksonville chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police has criticized the Florida Times-Union for an editorial cartoon that he said is offensive and puts local police officers in danger.
The cartoon by nationally renowned cartoonist Milt Priggee was published last Wednesday, and it compares the arrest of Dylann Roof, who shot nine black church members in a Charleston, South Carolina, sanctuary, to the shooting of a black man who was pulled over for a minor traffic infraction.

The first panel of the cartoon, captioned "To Serve and Protect," portrays a police officer asking Roof if he "would like fries with that'; the second shows two smiling officers, one with a smoking gun, behind a car with a bullet hole in the rear window as the officer with the gun explains, "Mr. Blackie tried to get away, so I had to shoot him."

FOP president Steve Amos is quoted as saying, “It infuriates me. It offends me. There is no truth in the nature of the cartoon at all.” That police officers did indeed bring fast food to Dylann Roof, and other officers did indeed shoot a black man who was driving without a license plate must be a truth invisible to the Jacksonville Fraternal Order of Police.

Without getting into any of the other merits of anybody's arguments, what I appreciate most is the final paragraph of the News4Jax.com article:

[Times Union editor Frank] Denton said editors at the paper would not be issuing an apology to the FOP, because if they did so, they would be apologizing to someone every time they publish an editorial cartoon.

Rall Entando al Fine

Ted Rall continues his series on How I Got Fired And Nobody Cared at rall.com this week, coming around to the failure of his fellow cartoonists to leap to his defense.

"You guys suck" was Rall's header for an August 9 screed on the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC) listserv blasting the AAEC's silence on his case -- described as deafening in another cartoonist's posting, the first on the topic, on July 28. (Postings on the listserv are supposed to be confidential, but since Rall has brought the discussion out into the open, I think the cat is out of the bag.)

Between July 28 and the publication of the AAEC statement on August 11, there was a lot of back and forth on the listserv over whether Rall had proven that his case was any worse than that any of the scores of other editorial cartoonists who have lost their jobs in the last 20-30 years, none of which have produced official statements from the AAEC. Of course, hardly any of those cartoonists were sent out the door with an editorial calling them liars.

So far this year, the AAEC has condemned the killing of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and editors, condemned the arrest of Malaysian cartoonist Zunar, condemned the shootings at the "Draw Mohammed" confab in Dallas, called for Maine's Governor LePage to apologize for telling a cartoonist's son that the governor would like to shoot the boy's father, and, of course, called for an investigation into the tape the Los Angeles Police Department gave to the L.A. Times editors to get Rall fired.

On the other side of the coin, I can't recall any instance of the AAEC officially criticizing any cartoonist by name -- although accusations of plagiarism have resulted in heated discussion on the listserv, a few well-known cartoonists leaving the association, and eventually, a code of ethics (see the update at the end of this story). There was plenty of internal discussion whether or not the Charlie Hebdo cartoons and the Texas anti-Islam cartoon contest were defensible, but in the end, the Free Speech absolutists won out.

We cartoonists are used to having our work criticized; we love praise, of course, but see criticism as a sign that our cartoons have succeeded in sparking conversation. Bill Sanders, for example, devoted three pages of The Sanders Book (1977) to hate mail. Today's editors, on the other hand, see editorial cartoons as little more than a graphic to break up an otherwise gray page. The occasional threat from a reader to cancel a subscription may not get a cartoonist fired, but complaints from advertisers, law enforcement, or the publisher's golfing buddies are likely to prompt an editor to discover reasons to "tighten the budget."

At issue here is not just whether the L.A. Times unjustly besmirched a cartoonist's reputation by calling him a liar, but also whether it should have leapt to conclusions based upon accusations by the LAPD supported only by a poor-quality recording.

I don't know who is qualified to step in at this late date, but a recent cartoon by Matt Wuerker was parsed by Politifact (and found "mostly true"), so perhaps we should let the Tampa Bay Times judge whether Rall's or the LAPD's pants are on fire.

Postscript:  (The Times defends its actions here, including a link to a recording from the LAPD purporting to document LAPD's failed attempts to contact Rall after his initial complaint about his treatment.
(But according to one of Rall's colleagues, J.P. Trostle, "As someone who has known Mr. Rall for almost 20 years, and was calling him frequently during this time period (as we finished collaborating on the book Attitude: The New Subversive Alternative Political Cartoonists), I can assure you that that is NOT Ted Rall’s voice on the answering machine, nor was it the greeting message he was using at time — which means the LAPD was calling the wrong number.")

Ted Rall Gets His Jaywalking Papers

In an era of Black Lives Matter and Je Suis Charlie, a 14-year-old accusation of rude policing during a jay-walking stop may seem pretty trivial.

In this case, it involves editorial cartoonist Ted Rall, a former president of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, about as far left in the political spectrum as it is possible to be and still accept payment for one's work. Until recently, he had been freelancing cartoons and blog posts on a regular basis for the Los Angeles Times. In May, he described in a blog entry having been stopped by a police officer in 2001 for jaywalking.

I had done everything right. I waited for the green "walking man" signal before stepping off the curb. I walked between the crosswalk lines. I got across the street just as the flashing red signal began.
All of a sudden, a motorcycle officer zoomed over, threw me up against the wall, slapped on the cuffs, roughed me up and wrote me a ticket. It was an ugly scene, and in broad daylight it must have looked like one, because within minutes there were a couple of dozen passersby shouting at the cop.
Another motorcycle officer appeared, asked the colleague what the heck he was thinking and ordered him to let me go, which he did. But not before he threw my driver's license into the sewer.

Apparently, that jaywalking stop is still alive in LAPD's cold case file, because someone in the LAPD provided a taped recording of the encounter to LA Times editors to refute Rall's account. The recording is mostly static, but what little one can hear of the conversation sounds as if Rall and Officer Will Durr were having a calm, professional encounter.

On the basis of this anonymously leaked tape, editor Nick Goldberg terminated The Times's relationship with Rall, explaining it in a Note to Times Readers on July 28:

An audiotape of the encounter recorded by the police officer does not back up Rall's assertions; it gives no indication that there was physical violence of any sort by the policeman or that Rall's license was thrown into the sewer or that he was handcuffed. Nor is there any evidence on the recording of a crowd of shouting onlookers.
In Rall's initial complaint to the LAPD, he describes the incident without mentioning any physical violence or handcuffing but says that the police officer was "belligerent and hostile" and that he threw Rall's license into the "gutter." The tape depicts a polite interaction.
In addition, Rall wrote in his blog post that the LAPD dismissed his complaint without ever contacting him. Department records show that internal affairs investigators made repeated attempts to contact Rall, without success. ...
However, the recording and other evidence provided by the LAPD raise serious questions about the accuracy of Rall's blog post. Based on this, the piece should not have been published.
Rall's future work will not appear in The Times.
The Los Angeles Times is a trusted source of news because of the quality and integrity of the work its journalists do. This is a reminder of the need to remain vigilant about what we publish.

Rall has paid to have the recording professionally enhanced, and the enhanced version does seem to reveal onlookers berating Officer Durr for handcuffing Rall. You can listen to the recording and read a transcript here. I've listened to it, and without the transcript, you don't learn much. His tech geeks claim that there is evidence of the dubbed tape provided to the Times having stops and splices in it, in which case the tape is not the reliable witness that one would expect it to be.

On the other hand, Rall has walked back "he threw my driver's license into the sewer" to "...into the gutter," and from there to "...on the ground," so my take is that his memory has made the incident more vivid over time. (Exaggeration is, after all, part of the job for us editorial cartoonists. Let's not bring Brian Williams into it, Mr. Gardner.)

Whatever you may think of Rall's role in this story, what is clear to me is that the Times acted in violation of its professional code of ethics (recounted here), in particular:

The new guidelines are quite specific concerning the question of if the Times should and should not rely on anonymous sources, stating:
"An unnamed source should have a compelling reason for insisting on anonymity, such as fear of retaliation, and we should state those reasons when they are relevant to what we publish.”

After a surprisingly long period of discernment, the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists has joined Rall in publicly protesting the Times's actions:

Determining the truth in this matter is important to Mr. Rall's personal and professional reputation, and to the rights of journalists to freely express themselves. Furthermore, the Los Angeles Times should have demanded a higher standard of proof in this matter, and it is clear that Mr. Rall is owed a full and complete analysis of the 14 year old tape used to make a judgment about his actions.

There isn't much profit or career advancement in drawing cartoons protesting timorous newspaper editors, so the first (and perhaps only) cartoonist rushing to his drawing board in Rall's defense is a South African artist, John Curtis. Adopting Rall's style, Curtis pretty much says all there is for a cartoonist to say on the matter:

One Thumb Down

When my Facebook feed started to fill up with notices of Roger Ebert's death, I commented on one of them that surely Gene Siskel had saved him an aisle seat in the balcony of the heavenly Rialto. I didn't bother to draw that as a cartoon, because I was confident that several other cartoonists were already hard at work drawing the exact same idea.

I was not disappointed.

Then, of course, there is curmudgeonly altie cartoonist Ted Rall:

(click here to view)

Ted Rall Universal Press SyndicateApr 10, 2013 EditorialCartoonists.com

I have so far not been able to attend any of the annual AAEC conventions; there always seems to be a wedding or a conflict with work or family schedules. I don't have any direct conflict for this year's convention in Salt Lake City, but now I'm afraid to go.

I can just see myself meeting Ted, and having a lively discussion about self-plagiarism, or cross-hatching, or whether there is any difference between Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

Then, someday, he'd come speak at my funeral just to get the last word in about how wrong I was.

Ripped from the sketchbook!

At the convention of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists last week, a panel on social media agreed on little other than that it's important to post something every day. Since I don't have a cartoon to post today, here's a pencil drawing from my sketchbook of House Speaker John Boehner.

The AAEC panel on social media strove for diversity. There was Clay Bennett of the Chattanooga Times Free Press advocating that we cartoonists direct traffic from our Facebook page and such to our newspaper's site so that the newspaper knows how many eyeballs our cartoons bring them. Opposite Clay was Ted Rall, telling us to steer those eyeballs to our personal sites because our newspapers are going to screw us sooner or later.

Then there was Stephanie McMillan, detailing how we should each be posting daily messages on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, YouTube, MySpace, Google+, iChat, iChef, ManHunt, Emily's Listserve, and Farmville; blogging on WordPress; and keeping on top of all the on-line comments. Countering Staphanie was -- and I'm not sure I got the name right -- Bruce MacKinnon of the Halifax Herald. Bruce just wants to draw, so his wife takes care of all the technical computer stuff. She participated in the panel via Skype, and was left lingering up on the projection screen after the panel broke up and everyone else was milling around the room. (Eventually, she decided that nobody was going to come up and chat with her, and she hung up. How many convention/reunion attendees' spouses have wished they could do that?)