FAIL
Marietta bar owner Mike Norman says the T-shirts he's peddling, featuring a look-a-like of cartoon chimp Curious George peeling a banana, with "Obama in '08" underneath, are not meant to offend. Norman acknowledged the imagery's Jim Crow roots but said he sees nothing wrong with depicting a prominent African-American as a monkey.What. The. Fuck
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When I was in second grade we did a class play version of Caps For Sale. We had one black child in our class, although I don't think it was until I was 9 or 10 that I had any concept of color/ethnicity. His dad heard that Gordon was going to play a monkey and he had a fit, yelling about the racial implications of that, etc, etc. The teacher, who truly had not even considered this, agreed that, of course, he didn't have to be in the play and she was very sorry to have upset the father, etc, etc.
(By the by, I know the details because the teacher became good friends with many of the parents and eventually a good friend of mine as well when I was older. We talked about this situation when I was studying to be a teacher. When I was 6? No clue this was going on.)
The dad came to see the play, very angry and self-righteous and, of course, very quickly realized that everyone in the class, with the exception of one older child as the peddler, was a monkey and ( ... )
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Was the impulse behind this shirt racist? Yeah, almost without a doubt. You'd have to be an idiot to say something like this and not be aware of the racist overtones. On the other hand, though, I've seen riffs on Curious George mocking Bush on bumper-stickers and such for the past 8 years. (Or take a look at http://www.bushorchimp.com/). It's okay to compare a white man to a monkey, but doing the same to a black man is racist.
I can absolutely see that if you call a white man an ape, the first interpretation is that you're commenting on his personal habits, his intelligence, or his appearance, and that if you say the same thing to a black man, it comes across as a racial rather than personal insult. There are valid historical reasons why that's so. But the double standard makes me cringe a bit when I'm forced to notice it.
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Here's a link to his comments. http://frontier.cincinnati.com/blogs/borgman/2007/01/qaminority-generic-characters_12.asp
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