More Than Bad Taste: The Chimp Cartoon and the N.Y. Post

Nicolaus Mills on the N.Y. Post Cartoon

IN 1964, Mississippi’s segregationist governor Paul Johnson campaigned against the civil rights workers who had come to his state to do voter registration with a stump speech in which he declared that the initials of the NAACP stood for “niggers, apes, alligators, coons, and possums.”

Forty-five years later the New York Post’s editors seem astonished that their paper should be plunged into a national controversy for running a cartoon, based on the police shooting of a chimpanzee in Connecticut, that shows two police officers standing over the chimp’s body with one officer saying to the other, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”

Who else other than, the president, the author of the stimulus bill, could the chimp represent? What else could the cartoon be implying except that the bill was so bad that only a subhuman could have written it?

Even if we assume for a moment that the New York Post’s editors are utterly without a sense of America’s racial past (and the shooting of black leaders from Medgar Evers to Martin Luther King), it is still hard to believe they had no sense of the message their cartoon sent. In 1983 legendary sports caster Howard Cosell generated widespread protest, including a demands for an apology by the Rev. Joseph Lowery, the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, when on Monday Night Football he referred to the Washington Redskin’s black wide receiver Alvin Garrett as a “little monkey,” and in 1996, basketball announcer Billy Packer nearly brought his sports career to an end when he called Georgetown University guard Allen Iverson a “tough monkey.”

But instead of acknowledging that its cartoon perpetuated a racist stereotype, the Post’s first response was to say it had done nothing wrong. Then a day later, in the face of mounting protests, the Post sought to amend its original denial of wrong doing by issuing a non-apology apology.

“To those who were offended by the image, we apologize,” the Post declared. It’s hard to miss the paper’s weasel wording. We didn’t do anything wrong the Post is really saying. Nonetheless, if you were among those who were offended by the cartoon, then we are sorry. Unstated, but clearly implied, is that only the hypersensitive would be offended by such a cartoon. In short, according to the Post the real cause of the Post’s chimp cartoon controversy is not the Post.

It is difficult to imagine the Post continuing to backpedal. For the moment, its editors and owner, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, have to be hoping that in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the Post’s chimp-cartoon controversy will fade away. It would be sad if their calculation proved true.

At this point in American history, the Post should not be allowed to get away with publishing a racist cartoon by claiming racial innocence. We have come too far for that. The paper needs to come up with a genuine apology or face continuing protests. With its massive circulation, the Post is powerful, but at the same time, it is far from invulnerable to reader boycotts. In a city with multiple papers, there are plenty of alternatives to the Post and plenty of neighborhoods where few would object to the Post being removed altogether from newsstands.

Nicolaus Mills, a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, is author of Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964–The Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America.