By Lee A. Daniels

Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon-even as the opportunists seek to make it something else.

New York Post
February 20, 2009

So said the sour bully-boys of the New York Post Friday, having been forced to at least appear to have some allegiance to the norms of civil discourse.

Despite its truculent, through-clenched-teeth tone, the New York Post’s editorial of February 20 seeming to apologize – but not really – for its racist cartoon of February 19 is important for one particular reason. It is a reminder of the power of protest – of old-fashioned, civil-rights-era-style, mass-action, out-in-the-streets, disturbing-the-peace and threatening-a-boycott protest.

You know, the kind of protest that some have declared no longer necessary now that we’ve arrived, they say, in the Promised Land of “post-racialism.”

Much of the letters columns of newspapers and of the electronic media and blogosphere have been aflame with condemnations of the New York tabloid’s offensive act. But part of the response has also shown the “racism-deniers” haven’t given up trying to declare that significant bigotry no longer exists and is no longer expressed by so-called respectable people.  Their assertions fall into four broad categories.

There’s the you-blacks-are-crazy-That’s not-what-it-means declaration. There’s the this-isn’t-the-right-issue-to-make-a big-deal-out-of gambit — put forward usually by those who adopt a deafening silence when the “right” racist event does occur. There’s the you’ve-got-the-wrong-black-leader-involved-so-I-can’t-support-you gambit. And finally, there’s the you-blacks-ought-to-solve-your-problems-first-before-complaining-about-whites’-behavior demand.

These ruses and rationalizations have been an integral part of the resistance to frankly confronting racism since the betrayal of Reconstruction more than a century ago. And ever since they’ve come from those blacks who find it professionally prudent or personally comfortable to be cowardly as well as white overt and closeted racists. The classic of racism-denial, of course, is the majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Feguson decision of 1896. Plessy was the legal and psychological constitution of the apartheid that characterized American society until the civil rights victories of the mid-1960s. “(W)e cannot say that a law which authorizes or even requires the separation of the two races … is unreasonable,” the opinion declares at one point.  At another, “We consider the underlying fallacy of [arguments for equality under the law] to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with the badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it,” it reads sentences later. And so on.

One cannot avoid hearing the echoes of such brutal illogic in the Post’s editorial – or understanding that it is a statement which fully deserves the characterization the legal scholar Charles L. Black applied to the Plessy decision itself: a document in which the curves of stupidity and callousness intersect at their respective maxima.

Lee Daniels is Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline and Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc.