Racist cartoon?

Hube here again!

Via the man whom I consider my “blogfather,” John Rosenberg and his awesome site Discriminations, comes word of a possible NAACP boycott of The Michigan Daily, the University of Michigan’s student newspaper, because of this cartoon it ran on November 28:

NAACP 2nd Vice President Jamila Fair said the cartoon reduced affirmative action to a black-white issue. Affirmative action policies do not only benefit blacks but also groups such as women and other minorities, Fair said.

“It makes it seem like affirmative action is only a black and white issue,” Fair said. “To the NAACP it was a slap in the face. It hurt what we are trying so hard to fight.”

NAACP members said the Daily should not have printed the cartoon because they said it is racist. Members also said that the cartoon stereotypes blacks as a minority group that is both abusing affirmative action policies and underqualified to attend the University.

It comes as little surprise that the NAACP considers the cartoon “racist.” Virtually any form of dissent to what the NAACP desires is considered such. Ironically, Rosenberg received word of the cartoon from Jennifer Gratz, the plaintiff in the landmark US Supreme Court case on affirmative action. The SCOTUS actually decided two cases regarding the University of Michigan, and Gratz is the case in which they ruled harshest on AA. In Gratz, underrepresented minorities were “awarded” extra points (20, to be precise) in the admissions process. (Grutter was the other case in which the SCOTUS ruled that race can be used in admissions, but must be “narrowly tailored.”)

But back to the Michigan Daily. The Daily backs race-based admissions policies in its unsigned editorials, but that isn’t good enough for the NAACP.

Daily Editor in Chief Jason Pesick — who made the ultimate decision to run the cartoon — defended the paper’s handling of the cartoon.

“We give cartoonists and columnists on the edit page a great deal of latitude,” he said. “Their views don’t necessarily reflect the views of the editorial page or the paper as a whole.”

[Cartoonist Michelle] Bien said she wanted to portray a variety of races in the cartoon but did not know how to draw certain other ethnic groups. She said children in the cartoon with dark faces were meant to represent many minority groups and not just blacks.

Well, why not? Doesn’t the NAACP consider Hispanics, Native Americans and/or Asian Indians “people of color”? Why did the organization automatically assume all the dark faces in the cartoon were African-American students? (Were they stereotyping?) In addition, Bien indeed could have made the subject of the professor’s explanation Asian, since it is they who are, as Abigail Thernstrom argues, most negatively affected by affirmative action (or affirmative discrimination, if you prefer).