Not since the outsized reaction to the infamous Danish Muhammad cartoons has such an innocuous cartoon elicited such an incommensurate response.
A week ago, you’d have a hard time convincing me that the story of Travis the Chimp would somehow be linked with President Obama. Travis, as you may have heard, was a chimpanzee who had starred in Coca-Cola and Old Navy commercials. Unfortunately, for Travis — and an innocent woman — Travis was also the star in a tragedy last week that ended in his seriously injuring his owner’s friend. The incident ended with police officers shooting Travis dead.
And now, Al Sharpton and his coterie of race-baiting pals are making a laughing stock out of themselves and the causes they represent by dragging Travis the chimpanzee and a president into this week’s Race Card Issue of the Week.
Travis’ story is a bizarre one. Eerie details are emerging of an almost romantic relationship between the chimp and the woman who owned him. Further, why not get a dog, versus an animal that, in the wild, eats the young and dismembers rivals? I know what you’re thinking. Travis sounds no worse than Mike Tyson. But no one has tried to make Tyson into a pet since Don King attempted it years ago.
But what is most surprising about Travis’ story — or legacy, if you will — is how it has somehow come to involve the always outspoken Al Sharpton, the NAACP, a fairly innocuous if untactful editorial cartoon, President Barack Obama, a not so reputable publication and the race card.
The New York Post, known more for its sensationalism and gossip columns than hard-hitting journalism, published the offending editorial cartoon which depicts two police officers standing over a now dead and bloodied Travis. One of the officers states: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”
If you, like me, found such a sentiment — the stimulus bill, ill-advised as much of it seems, could have only been written by a monkey — to be hilarious, the NAACP would like me to tell you that you might be a racist.
That makes two of us.
Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, has called for a boycott of the New York Post as a result of what he and his organization consider “an invitation to assassination.” Not of other rampaging, murderous chimpanzees, mind you, but of our nation’s first black president.
Singer John Legend has called for his fellow musicians to refuse interviews with the Post. Al Sharpton has called the cartoon racially charged and troubling. According to reports from MSNBC, director Spike Lee and judge Greg Mathis have joined with other supposed black leaders in voicing their displeasure at the cartoon.
By now you’ve made the connection: Since the stimulus bill was one of the first major legislative accomplishments of our nation’s first black president, saying a monkey wrote it is evocative of our nation’s shameful racist past. Such is sound logic to the knee jerk, race card-waving groups desperate to keep their fading roles and organizations relevant. However, their protests are far removed from reality. It takes little more than a passing knowledge of politics and policy to know President Obama did not write the stimulus bill.
Is this what we must endure? Our first black president has hardly been in office a month, and we are already being subjected to race baiting of Sharptonian proportions?
The comparisons and lampoons of black people as monkeys is an egregious historical testimony to the institutionalized racism that in the past has plagued our nation. Yet this is not one of those comparisons. In fact, it wasn’t until Jealous and Sharpton — who are both black — decided to make the comparison between President Obama and Travis the chimp as depicted by the Post that such a comparison was even considered.
As Jealous and the NAACP contend, police officers and departments in the past often had violent and even murderous relationships with black communities. Every column I write on race also demands I state the following: Racism in America is by no means dead, nor do we live in a colorblind society.
But this is a clear obfuscation of the racial issues America still faces. Further, it lessens what little moral high ground our self-proclaimed black leaders have in the battles still remaining for the civil rights vanguard. It is reminiscent of the much aligned outrage thousands in Pakistan and Muslims evinced when Danish newspapers published a series of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad.
It is revealing and pathetic, also, that it was black minds, and not white, that made the comparison between our first black president and a dead chimpanzee. Way to go, team.
Gerald Cox ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in economics.
