Drawing Dissent: Postracialist Pedagogy, Racist Literacy, and Racial Plagiarism in Anti-Obama Political Cartoons

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

This term is a collective term referring to monkeys, apes, and humans. For the purposes of this article, I use the term simian to refer to nonhuman simians.

A similar argument is often made about the term nigger, which cannot be used in the contemporary moment without invoking its racist history, making it inexcusable whenever it is used, regardless of the stated intentions of those who use the term. Further, the use of the term by white and black individuals cannot be made unproblematically equivalent because of this history.

Of course, the impact of racist humor is important, and specific attention must be paid to healing from these moments. However, challenging this humor by attempting to establish empathy has usually been a fruitless endeavor. Empathy depends upon identification with the self. Processes of racial othering make identification of racialized bodies with the dominant “self” impossible, placing racialized bodies outside of the reach of empathy.