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	Workers Vanguard No. 931	27 February 2009

New York Post’s Racist Cartoon

(Editorial Note)

On February 18 the New York Post, part of Rupert Murdoch’s rightwing media empire, published a cartoon repugnant even by the loathsome benchmark of that gutter press. The Post’s page 12 Sean Delonas “cartoon” depicted two policemen, guns drawn, standing over a bullet-riddled creature they had gunned down, lying in a pool of blood. One cop says to the other, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.” Barack Obama signed the stimulus bill the previous day; the dead creature lying on a city sidewalk in the cartoon is a chimpanzee. The Post said that it was taking off from the story of an actual 200-pound rampaging chimpanzee that had mauled a woman in Connecticut and was killed; this, if anything, makes their racist amalgam even more hideous.

The message couldn’t be clearer: Obama can claim all he wants that the civil rights movement got America “90 percent of the way” toward racial equality, but this is still racist, capitalist America. No matter how high up you get, black people are still to be targeted for repression, still “fair game” to be gunned down by the cops. Like a suppurating sore, the Post’s outburst reveals the virulent poison of racial oppression, which is structurally embedded in American capitalism.

Here’s the reality behind the racist Post cartoon: Oscar Grant, lying on an Oakland BART platform, shot in the back by a cop on New Year’s Day 2009. Sean Bell, gunned down by New York City cops in a fusillade of 50 bullets on his wedding day in 2006. Even an 88-year-old black woman, Kathryn Johnston, wasn’t safe in her own home, as Atlanta cops killed her in 2006. Amadou Diallo was brought down by a hail of 41 police bullets fired at the unarmed 22-year-old African immigrant in the vestibule of his home in 1999. There are so many thousands more, from past decades’ lynchings to today’s death penalty, the legacy of brutal chattel slavery.

Seizing on the justified outrage over the Post’s cartoon, black Democrat Al Sharpton has organized several protests against the paper, including a boycott campaign. For this liberal hustler, the aim is to build and cement support for Obama, the Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism, which is the greatest enemy of working people and the oppressed the world over. In a February 18 statement on the cartoon, Sharpton denounced the Post for “making inferences that are offensive and divisive at a time the nation struggles to come together to stabilize the economy.” It’s Sharpton’s version of “national unity”: stand by “our” president, who, along with his fellow Democrats, is now presiding over the unemployment, homelessness, foreclosures, the nearly 900,000 black men and women in prison and the prison-like inner-city schools that have come to define American capitalism.

While the reformist left fawned over Obama’s election, we, as Marxists committed to the overturn of the bourgeois order through socialist revolution, gave no political support to Obama or any capitalist politician—Democrat, Republican, Green or “Independent.” Obama serves as a very powerful propaganda weapon for the bourgeoisie, telling black people and the oppressed to shut up and stop complaining, because, you see, “the American dream” works. But “the American dream” is a nightmare, a cruel lie, and more so today as the global economic meltdown throws even more working people onto the scrap heap.

Liberals and reformists of course decry such symptoms of capitalist rot as the Post’s racist cartoon. But the special oppression of the black population is deeply rooted in the American state’s origin as a slaveholding society and its continuation in capitalist wage slavery, with its periodic crises and wars and permanent need for a mass of unemployed, where blacks are the last hired and the first fired. Black oppression will not be done away with short of socialist revolution. The Democratic Party is the other party of racist U.S. imperialism and the class enemy of working people. We call for class struggle against the capitalist rulers. We fight to break workers and blacks from any illusions in bourgeois candidates and capitalist electoral politics, and win them to the struggle to build a multiracial working-class party, the necessary instrumentality to get rid of this rotting, racist capitalist system.