This cartoon is not subtle in it's depiction of the President being assassinated and someone else having to write the next Stimulus. Sean Delonas (a famed cartoonist) and the folks at the NY Post knew this before publishing it.

The cartoon is tying three things together (a real dying economy, a real monkey that ran amok in Connecticut the other day, and the racist stereotype of animalistic tendencies in blacks) to anticipate a recession-driven increase in crime and the need for some good old right-wing law-and-order. Meaning, two white cops. Of course, this would have nothing to do with Eric Holder taking over the Justice Department and, among other things, bringing a critical eye to the prison-industrial complex, or more simply, the incarceration of black males for minor drug offenses. ...Economy in meltdown - perpetrated by white guys on Wall Street? Play the fear card.

For some strange and interesting reason, many white people I've talked to will defend the cartoon as if they drew it. They keep saying the same thing, "I don't see what all the fuss is about." After all aggressive, reckless, racially insensitive nature of the chimp cartoon is just business as usual at the Post.

The idea of course is to get the tongues furiously wagging, get enraged emails, letters and phone calls pouring in, and then put forth the predictable defense calling this and other inflammatory cartoons a parody, a free speech right, and harmless spoofery.

The furor might have drawn little more than a public yawn and shrug except for two small points. One is the long, sordid and savage history of racist stereotyping of African-Americans. A few grotesque book titles from a century ago, such as The Negro a Beast, The Negro, a Menace to American Civilization, and the Clansman depicted blacks as apes, monkeys, bestial, and animal like. The image stuck in books, magazines, journals, and deeply colored the thinking of many Americans of that day.

It's true that was a long time ago, and as Mr. Allan intimated in his lame defense of the Post cartoon, no sober person could seriously believe that anyone would liken the president or for that matter any black to a chimp. Unfortunately, a lot still do - including a lot of GOP members, they even released the album containing such "hits" as Obama the 'Magic Negro', thus this cartoon is just a natural continuation.

Second Sean Delonas could so casually and easily depict Obama as a monkey because that image didn't die a century, half century, decade, or even a year ago. In fact, exactly a year ago, Penn State researchers conducted six separate studies and found that many Americans still link blacks with apes and monkeys. Many of them were young, and had absolutely no knowledge of the vicious stereotyping of blacks of years past. Their findings with the provocative title "Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization and Contemporary Consequences," in the February 2008 issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, was published by the American Psychological Association.

The researchers found that participants, and that included even those with no stated prejudices or knowledge of the historical images, were quicker to associate blacks with apes than they were to associate whites with apes.

This was not simply a dry academic exercise. The animal association and blacks has had devastating real life consequences. For example, in hundreds of news stories from 1979 to 1999 the Philadelphia Inquirer was much more likely to describe African Americans than Whites convicted of capital crimes with ape-relevant language, such as "barbaric," "beast," "brute," "savage" and "wild." And jurors in criminal cases were far more likely to judge blacks more harshly than whites, and regard them and their crimes as savage, bestial, and heinous, and slap them with tougher sentences than whites.

The Post cartoon was the complete package. It depicted violence, death, brutality, incitement, and animal like imagery. The topper was the not so subtle inference that the target of the chimp depiction and more was an African-American male, namely President Obama.

In the page preceding a New York Post cartoon that depicts drafters of the stimulus legislation as a gun-downed chimpanzee, the paper published a large photo of Barack Obama signing that very piece of legislation. The succession of the story and cartoon creates a rather jarring visualization.

Criticizing policy, even making fun of the President is one thing. But we mustn't trivialize this issue and have to resist the propaganda that "it is just a cartoon". There's simply too much money in racial trash talk (and cartooning), and too much silence from the higher ups that send a tacit signal condoning it. I am bewildered that anyone would think that this is okay.