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The Aping of Obama

Last Updated on Thursday, 12 March 2009 08:19

When issuing a statement of apology for the cartoon’s publication, the News Corporation chairman and chief executive, Rupert Murdoch, claimed the image was intended only to mock Obama's economic stimulus bill, and not the president himself, but admitted that it had proved a ‘mistake’ because it had offended so many.

Some African-American commentators, though offended by Delonas’s poor taste, had defended the Post’s ‘first amendment right’ to print the drawing. However, in the protests that followed the cartoon’s appearance, it was the voice of civil rights activist Al Sharpton, drawing attention to the image’s potency in the context of the history of American racism against its black population, which perhaps proved the most insistent and provocative.

As Sohail Daulatzai recently highlighted in his talk, Stepping Razor: Black Internationalism, Empire, and the Specter of the Muslim in the Age of Obama, as the US’s first president of both black and Muslim heritage, and cautious inheritor of the legacies of such emotive figures as Martin Luther King, Barack Hussein Obama seems locked in problematic racial double-bind. Delonas’s cartoon certainly illustrates how his delicately poised public persona may prove equally as susceptible to apish innuendo and implications of a rampant Black Power as it has been to previous Islamist ‘smears’ – whatever the complexities of Obama’s personal (and political) protestations of faith, identity or affiliation.

Last year, Obama dismissed ‘Politics of Fear’ cartoons that portrayed his turbaned self and gun-toting spouse as fist-bumping Islamic terrorists with the comment: ‘Ultimately it's a cartoon, it's not where the American people are spending a lot of their time thinking about.’ Yet, (as we saw with the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005), simple sketches which play so deftly and insidiously on the anxiety of a people and nation regarding an empowered black and/or Muslim ‘Other’, clearly have an ominous power and resonance that it would be unwise to underestimate.  

The controversial cartoons can be viewed at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/feb/24/rupert-murdoch-sorry-chimpanzee-cartoon and http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2008/07/16/2008-07-16_untitled__cover16m-1.html.