Yes, I am aware of regional American history in which black people were sometimes referred-to as ‘porch monkeys’.
But please tell me how this cartoon is racist? 
According to Roland Martin, it’s a racist attack on the president. “The cartoonist didn’t hang a sign around the neck of the chimp, so he left it up to the reader to determine exactly who the cops were referring to. We all know that the stimulus bill was the first priority of the new president, so when reading the caption, it was easy to infer that the cartoonist was implying the president of the United States.”
I’m a smart guy.
I’m pretty up on the news.
I saw the story about a chimpanzee that was shot in Connecticut after escaping and attacking several people.
If I hadn’t seen the CNN editorial, I wouldn’t have known about the cartoon (I don’t get the New York Post frequently). Now that it’s become a broohaha, I’m looking at the cartoon.
Mr Martin is sorely mistaken – no one I know would’ve seen a racist comment being made in this cartoon. Nor a statement against the President of the United States. Congress wrote the bill (even if the President did back it).
The statement obviously being made is that Congress is a bunch of monkeys, and a chimp could do no worse.
In my experience, it’s people like Mr Martin, Al Sharpton, and others who constantly bring-up racism (who, may I add are black themselves) who keep the issue alive and well.
In my experience, skin color has never had any role in any interaction I’ve ever had. Where I grew up, the line of work I now have, jobs I’ve previously held, and where I’ve gone to school all show that if the person (irrespective of ‘color’) gets his work done, is pleasant, and overall just a ‘person’, they’re fine. I have friends of all sorts of colors and backgrounds. None of them feel any race issue.
I have a huge problem with hyphenated Americans. Other countries don’t have hyphenated citizens. There are no African-British. No Italian-Canadian. Never heard of a French-Chinese. So why do we have African-Americans (especially when a large percentage of black folks in America didn’t come from Africa)?
We are a post-racial country, as long as folks like Mssrs Martin, Sharpton, Jackson, and myriad others who vault themselves into the public eye keep quiet. Did America do wrong by other colors in the past? Absolutely. We participated in enslaving blacks (who we typically received as already-enslaved blacks from competing tribes), turning Chinese into barely-human workers to build railroads, etc.
This cartoon, and the [apparent] whirlwind of attention it is getting, just go to show that the only reason it’s an issue is because a few people make it one.
Had Roland kept quiet, anyone who had missed the cartoon wouldn’t have known, and everyone who saw would have gone along with the surface, obvious, not-read-into ‘meaning’ of the drawing as a political statement drawn on top of a recent news story that the stimulus bill was written by monkeys.
“News stories” like this contribute to people hating the news media. When the media becomes the news, makes the news, and comments about its own news, they’re not reporting’ the news’ – they’re participating in a narcissistic, self-aggrandizing series of congratulatory back-patting to make themselves feel better.
Maybe folks like Roland Martin could go back to doing something productive in life, rather than making an issue of something that isn’t there.