Last Updated on February 6, 2022
On Monday, a pet chimpanzee went bananas — pardon the pun — and attacked a neighbor of its owner.  Police eventually had to shoot the animal because of the threat it posed.
This isn’t the kind of story you hear about every day, and it’s exactly that reason that it has gotten a lot of attention.
Enter political cartoonist Sean Delonas, whose recent work has become a racial controversy.  Delonas’s cartoon, depicted here on Huffington Post, shows two police officers with guns drawn and recently fired, facing a monkey that is lying dead on a sidewalk, two bullet holes in its abdomen.  One cop says to the other, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”
The Rev. Al Sharpton finds the reference to the chimp as a racist statement.  This is not particularly surprising, since Sharpton seems to find everything he sees to be some sort of racist statement, whether it is or not.  So let’s forget about him.
The bigger issue is whether or not a political cartoonist can take a recent news event and turn it into a vignette in which something political can be lampooned.  That is, after all, what political cartoonists do.
One interpretation for the cartoon is that the stimulous bill is so badly conceived that it appears that it was authored by monkeys.  If the current president happened not to have been of color, I’m pretty sure this is the interpretation 99% of people would have gone with.  The remaining 1% is reserved for Sharpton and his more rabid supporters: I have faith that they’d still have found a way….
But because President Obama is African-American, and because we have been reminded constantly of this fact since his election, (which is proof that we have not achieved Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream, yet), race is on everyone’s mind.
Do I think this guy meant to imply that Obama is a monkey, as in a “jungle monkey,” which is a racist term?  No.  I think he was taking a very recent news event and using it to spoof another news event.
But then again, there’s this important point:  having grown up in a state that spent forty years arguing over whether or not the Confederate Flag should fly atop the capitol building, only to have a “compromise” that had it moved from the top of the dome to a Confederate monument right in front of the building, I have a hard time relating to the notion that someone could create such a cartoon and totally not see this double meaning.
Understand, I’m not saying that he did knowingly produce the image with that secondary, racist meaning in mind.  I just have a hard time believing that there are truly people who wouldn’t realize that this is right in front of them.
Maybe Delonas honestly doesn’t see anything racial in the image, and maybe no such connection ever occurred to him.  At least not before Sharpton started up.
Would that we all could see the world that way.
Worst part is the fact that a chimpanzee is not a monkey.
Taking race out of the equation, I suspect if George Bush had pushed this bill the same people crying racism today would be hailing this as one of the greatest political commentaries of the 21st century.
The NY Post is not considered to be a particularly cerebral news source. They run more to tabloidism than to journalism–and outrageous is a mode of choice. There is no way Delonas’s cartoon was an “Oops! We didn’t meant to cause a crisis!” moment.
Few people nationwide (or in NY) follow news closely enough to make the obscure connection between a chimp shot in New England and Delonas’s cartoon depiction of a dead ape with reference to its having authoring the stimulus bill. Had Delonas “accidently” ventured into tastelessness–or into implied assassination of that n***r territory–,any decent, worth-his-salt editor would have seen the cartoon for what it would represent to most readers and kept it off the page.
This is a failure of the cartoonist to keep to some standard of decency and a failure of an editor to do his job. Both should answer for unprofessional behavior and for inciting public outrage AND for feeding the rage of a segment of this society which still sees people of color as sub-human. There remain racist nutcases and guns are too easily gotten.
I’m with Sharpton on this one.
Yeah, you got where I was headed in my head. Perhaps Delonas is showing us a possible future where calling someone a monkey isn’t a racist term. I’ve called my son a monkey since he was toddling around…and to the best of my knowledge he has not a drop of African-American blood. Kids do act like monkeys. We are, after all, related to monkeys!! [bring on the ID proponents]