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2012
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The NY Post issued an apology [28] for anyone who thought the cartoon was racist. I don't know about you, but the apology comes a bit too late. It's racist when a newspaper greenlights a depiction of cops shooting a dead chimp with a caption that reads "Someone's Going to Have to Write the Next Stimulus Bill" and thinks that's acceptable satire. It's racist when people make comments like, "Get over yourself, it's a cartoon", or "I'm Black and we have other battles to fight". The new Attorney General was right. This is a nation of cowards. Bamboozled and complacent.
If institutions expect African-Americans to forget how people were hosed down [or shot] for simply wanting to drink coffee at a counter, or how for a hundred years advertisers depicted black people as bone-wearing, red-mouthed faux humans just to sell some detergent, or how films like He's Just Not That Into You boldly flaunt white romance and the only snipet of blackness is a group of African women sitting around a campfire discussing men with subtitles that read: "Maybe he [the man] forgot your Hut Number", well, then institutions [and people] are mistaken. Whether the dead chimp with the Stimulus caption was meant to be racist or not, it's clear many of us will not tolerate "satire" like this anymore. Cut to: yesterday's protests! The NY Post [and others like it] need to do more than apologize, they need to deconstruct and then reconstruct into accountability.
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