Gary Younge/The Guardian, UK
The depiction of the tennis star in an Australian newspaper recycled centuries-old racial stereotypes. Publishing it showed an extraordinary lack of judgment
If there is one thing more damning than the racist cartoon of Serena Williams published in Melbourne’s Herald Sun earlier this week, it’s the paper’s response to accusations of racism. And that’s saying something. Because the cartoon is bad. It’s Hattie McDaniel in Gone With the Wind, Mammy Two Shoes from Tom and Jerry, going out in the cotton fields with Topsy to eat watermelon, Aunt Jemima’s pancakes bad. It’s Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Pauline Hanson, Jeremy Clarkson after a bottle of scotch and a screening of Katie Hopkins’ documentary on white South African farmers bad.
In the cartoon, Williams’ hair provides a bulbous, bloated, outsized frame for an enormous lolling tongue that’s bigger than her knee; nostril to nostril, her flat, expansive nose is roughly the size of her shoulder. It is not a caricature of Williams, whose lips, nose and tongue are not particularly pronounced and are rarely, if ever, remarked upon. It is a caricature of black people – and more specifically black women – that went straight through the editing process as though the 20th century had never happened. (Never mind the fact that Naomi Osaka, Williams’ Haitian-Japanese opponent, is portrayed as a white woman). When a furore broke out on social media, the cartoonist, Mark Knight, said: “The world has just gone crazy.”
That’s about the only thing he’s got right so far. The world did go crazy. Everyone from JK Rowling to Nicki Minaj to Martin Luther King’s daughter slammed the cartoon’s glaring bigotry. There was no chalk dust here: it wasn’t a close call.
So what could be worse than this? Well, as though to prove the point made by Australia-based academic Alana Lentin, both Knight and his editors at his Murdoch-owned paper seemed hellbent on illustrating that they “lack the racial literacy needed either to challenge racists or to discern racism, in cartoons or elsewhere”. On Twitter, a parade of white men from the Herald and News Corp stepped forward to summarily dismiss all accusations of racism and sexism as “PC BS” and condemn “ill-informed critics” (read: academics, civil rights leaders and social commentators) who disagreed as being “oversensitive”. Knight went on to criticise his detractors for “making stuff up” and say he was “upset they were offended”.
In an editorial the next day the paper blamed the “social media hordes” for “[attempting] to defeat cartooning – and satire – with a politically correct barrage”. It also published the cartoon again on the front page, alongside others it claimed could also cause offence, with the headline “Welcome to PC World”, a label “Satire Free Zone” and the words: “If the self-appointed censors of Mark Knight get their way on this Serena Williams cartoon, our new politically correct life will be very dull indeed.”
And so it is that we once again enter the culture wars, stage right, with aggressors posing as victims, bigotry masquerading as satire, free speech condemned as censorship; and any calls for sensitivity, historical context, moral responsibility, equality, accuracy, decency, fairness or accountability dismissed as “political correctness”. Rhetorical straw men are pummelled to within an inch of their lives and, in this case, a real black woman is deprived of her dignity.
This has nothing to do with censorship. Nobody, to my knowledge, is claiming this cartoon should be illegal. And if they have, they are wrong. Within the limits of laws regarding incitement to racial hatred (which I don’t believe apply in this case) Knight has the right to draw a racially offensive cartoon and the Herald has the right to publish it. But that right should not be mistaken for an obligation.
This is not an issue of freedom of speech but editorial judgment. If someone submitted a cartoon at the height of the #MeToo moment that portrayed Rupert Murdoch as a pimp on account of the sexual harassment in the upper echelons of Fox News, the Herald would almost certainly have refused it. Questions of taste, propriety and proportionality come into question. The question of where one draws the line in these moments is an important one. But we should never be in denial that there is a line and only some people get to draw it.
(I’m going to stick my neck out and guess there are very few women of colour on the editorial staff at the Herald.)
Moreover, just because you have the right to do something doesn’t mean you should do it. As I have argued in the past, people have the right to fart loudly in lifts and sleep with their in-laws, but they tend not to because such antisocial behaviour generally will diminish them in the eyes of others.