Jenice Armstrong: Post cartoon: Funny? Racist?

ATTORNEY GENERAL Eric Holder was right when he called America a "nation of cowards" when it comes to talking about race.

We've gotten better. But if you've ever been at a dinner party and felt a chill pass across the table when a fellow guest dares to bring up affirmative action or some other racially charged subject, you know what I mean.

As Holder pointed out during a speech to Justice Department employees yesterday, many Americans still self-segregate when it comes to their social lives.

Most of us frequent houses of worship that aren't diverse. And although it's changing, particularly with the younger crowd, a whole lot of folks mostly hang out with friends who look like themselves the way they do on Bravo's reality series, "Housewives of Orange County."

It's about familiarity and, to some extent, what people's comfort zones are. Take a chance and run a risk of a misunderstanding or some sort of racial slight - not always intentional but almost always a possibility.

That's what I want to think happened with the editorial cartoon (shown above) that appeared in the New York Post yesterday. The drawing, by Sean Delonas, shows two police officers, one of whom is holding a smoking gun, as they stand next to the bullet-ridden body of a chimpanzee lying in blood. One of the officers says, "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."

What?

It took me a second to even get that the chimp reference was to a widely publicized killing of a crazed pet in Connecticut that had savagely attacked a woman before being mortally wounded. So, President Obama, the economic-stimulus plan's biggest champion, is a dead monkey?

Oh, my gosh. The Post editor claims the cartoon was an attempt to "parody" Washington's efforts to revive the economy. I'm all for free speech, but didn't anything in that cartoon make folks at the Post say hold on, let's take another look at this before going to print? I'll bet somebody thought they were being funny. You know. Wink wink. Pass it through.

"Monkey slurs against Africans and African-Americans go back to the days of early colonialism, when Anglo Saxon, Spanish and Portuguese conquerors used these types of drawings and descriptions to dehumanize black people so that their mistreatment and enslavement would not be viewed as wrong or sinful," pointed out the New York Association of Black Journalists in a statement yesterday.

And while the temptation is to roll ones' eyes at the Rev. Al Sharpton's insinuating himself in the middle of this, at least he's on the right side of the issue.

"One has to question whether the cartoonist is making a less-than-casual inference to this form of racism when, in the cartoon, the police say after shooting a chimpanzee, 'now they will have to find someone else to write the stimulus bill,' " said Sharpton in a statement.

As aggravating as these kinds of flareups are, they happen out of ignorance. Holder was right when he said yesterday that we don't talk enough about race. It's time to stop being so squeamish.

"It is an issue we have never been at ease with and, given our nation's history, this is in some ways understandable," Holder said during a Black History Month presentation.

"If we are to make progress in this area, we must feel comfortable enough with one another and tolerant enough of each other to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us." *

The Associated Press contributed to this report.