Teaching Tool: The Advantages and Limitations of a Race-Themed Political Cartoon

Humor can be an effective vehicle for delivering a serious message. Whether it is in the form of satire, parody or simple ridicule, the most powerful statements are sometimes delivered in a way that makes us laugh before we think.

On the RaceProject Facebook page THIS WEEK, we reposted (from a tweet from SocProf) a link to a book review that contains a political cartoon by Barry Deutsch titled "A Concise History of Black-White Relations in the United States." It is a simple, six-panel strip that conveys a clear, accurate message of contemporary misunderstandings about White privilege and progressive strategies for achieving racial justice. But, as we note in this space every week, these issues are never as simple as they seem. We offer a "concise" analysis of the advantages and limitations of using this cartoon in the classroom to help students understand the complex history of Black-White relations in the United States.


Advantages

The primary advantage of using humor is that it can be disarming. More and more teachers are using clips from Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show or The Colbert Report to stimulate conversation about current events. Students like to laugh, and they appreciate when teachers deviate from the course readings. So the first advantage is that a comic strip can get students to pay attention and to be engaged.

Substantively, there are several advantages, as well. The strip is an accurate overview of American history in this regard: Slavery was a way for Whites to gain advantage disproportionate to what they could have without it (panes 1 through 3), African Americans fought hard for legal emancipation and won it (pane 4), Whites feel guilty about slavery and the history of oppression and are (genuinely) sorry about it (pane 5), and many Whites are reluctant to support any effort to rectify those past wrongs that involves violation of the meritocracy principle (pane 6).

The final pane actually contains two narratives. The first centers on the refusal to embrace approaches that involve a perceived disadvantage to Whites, but the smaller image and print in the lower right-hand corner of the pane invokes the idea that Whites' view these issues as being individualistic rather than systemic. The White character says "[I]f I got up here myself, why can't you?," even though it was only a few panes ago (seconds in the time that it takes someone to read the strip) that he 1) clearly does not get up there himself (panes 1 through 4) and 2) acknowledges as much with his apology (pane 5). This friction between fact and myth is an advantage in the classroom because it forces students to confront the reasons behind the character's social amnesia and the degree to which it accurately reflects the reality of Black-White relations in the United States today.

Limitations

For all its benefits, Deutsch would likely admit that there are dangers to this. After all, part of the reason that the humor works is that it is patently silly to believe that such a simple story can accurately capture the nuance of 400 years of history. By titling the strip "A Concise History. . ." the artist is giving us a wink, acknowledging that while there is nothing substantively astray here overall, it is a deliberate, recognized oversimplification.

That oversimplification will be recognized by sophisticated, thoughtful readers, but it may be lost on folks who do not have a strong knowledge base with respect to the complexities of race relations in America. If one believes, for instance, that "racism" ended with the signing of the landmark civil rights legislation in the 1960s, that Brown v. the Board of Education integrated public schools in the U.S., and that affirmative action means quotas, this cartoon is unlikely to be an effective tool to combat those inaccuracies.

The "problem" is not solvable because the core of the limitation is also central to the strip's advantages. That is, by allowing individual characters to stand in for power systems, the artist is able to simply and effectively capture the reality of race relations while he intentionally fundamentally misrepresents the problem in a way that is likely to perpetuate it.

As is indicated in the final exchange in pane 6, Deutsch clearly understands that Whites' insistence on personalization is foolish because it decontextualizes the issue. The White character is the foil because he either refuses to or is unable to recognize that he has benefited from racism and continues to do so by opposing an action that would help to make things more fair (helping the Black man whom he used to gain his advantage). Because the strip accelerates history, the same characters appear in all six panes to reflect a time period, which, in reality, spans generations. White students will likely (and appropriately) note that while they may be the White character in the final pane, their situation is different because unlike the character, they were not present in the first four panes (the familiar "I never owned a slave" defense). They might argue that they arrived in the fifth pane, in fact, which shows that their entire lives have been spent feeling guilty about and "apologizing" for America's racist history.

The truth, of course, is that Whites who are living today have very much been present in those first few panes in some ways. While there has not been formal slavery of African Americans (of the kind depicted by the ball and chain) in our lifetime, Whites as a group are provided a "lift up" on the backs of persons of color. But that lift is not visible, it is not universally true on an individual basis, it is certainly not literal, and most Whites do not feel as if such a statement is accurate at all. Indeed, it takes a lot of reading, thinking and guidance for most Whites to understand the power and pervasiveness of the relatively invisible concept of White privilege. It is likely impossible for that story to be understood through a "concise" narrative of any kind.

The Black character in the strip is sympathetic; the White character is not. In the meta-narrative of race relations, this is probably fair, but at the individual level, it certainly is not. Individual White people have not, on the whole, acted in ways that are detrimental to Blacks. They do not consciously refuse to accept responsibility for their privilege and, it should be noted, are not directly responsible for that privilege the way that the White character in the strip is. In short, while the White character in the strip was aware of what he was doing when he took advantage of privilege and then adds insult to injury by not rectifying the situation once he realized it was inappropriate, the lived experiences of White individuals in America today cannot be captured by that dynamic.

There is a great deal of defensiveness on the part of Whites to any suggestion to the contrary, and this strip may evoke those feelings in Whites who encounter it. As those who are involved in the struggle for social justice know all too well, cutting through folks' defenses is a fundamental step toward consciousness raising.

The Verdict

We think that the advantages of this strip outweigh the limitations for college-age students (adults), which is the population with which we work. Because it can stimulate discussion and help to generate the type of analysis that we briefly offer here, we think it is a good way to explore some of the underlying constructs that hide below the surface of our contemporary political discourse on race.

On the other hand, we would be concerned about this strip being included in learning materials without the benefit critical discussion led by someone who has a sophisticated understanding of these issues. Under those circumstances, there is danger of misunderstanding the artist's intent and of a perpetuation of myths about the centrality of individualism in race relations in America.

As always, we look forward to your thoughts. What is the overall usefulness of a cartoon like this to help students to understand concepts such as White privilege, systemic power and hegemony? We especially want to hear from elementary school teachers and secondary education teachers: Is this appropriate for your classes? What advantages and limitations are these contexts?

The Limits of Racial Optimism

It is no surprise that the nation's first president of color has been a lightning rod for discussion of race and racism in America. For those who struggle for racial justice, this inevitability has had positive and negative components. For a nation that often wishes to ignore the deep racial problems that permeate society, Barack Obama's election has forced us to confront, on a regular basis, the ugly truth that Martin Luther King's dream has not been realized. On the other hand, President Obama has had unrealistic expectations placed on him with respect to his ability to mend the country's racial wounds. We argued back in March that he would have a difficult time dealing with racism while in office, an analysis we felt compelled to offer as a result of what we saw as a dangerously and unrealistically optimistic frame employed in the mainstream media and, to a lesser extent, adopted by racially progressive thinkers, writers and activists. There was considerable evidence that the mass public also felt quite hopeful in this regard.

USA Today released results of a poll they conducted jointly with Gallup THIS WEEK that was similarly framed in terms of American optimism with respect to improvements in race relations. While President Obama's approval ratings hover at around 50%, the pol reveals that six in ten Americans say that race relations will improve under his presidency; just 13% think race relations will get worse. Further, 40% of Americans believe things are already better in this regard; 22% think things have gotten worse.

Of course, examining differences in these attitudes with respect to the race of the respondents is important. According to Susan Page's story reporting on the poll:

Blacks are much more likely than whites to say that racism against blacks persists -- 72% of blacks say it is widespread, compared with 49% of whites -- but they are also more optimistic that Obama's election will improve that.

A 53% majority of African Americans say race relations already have gotten better as a result.

In other words, while Whites are more likely than Blacks to think there is not persistent racism against African Americans, they are less likely than Blacks to think that Obama's election (and presidency) has improved race relations already or will improve it in the future.

Compared with attitudes nearly a year ago (right after the election), there has been an understandable (and perhaps predictable) tempering of optimism, though the percentage of Americans who believe that race relations would one day no longer be an issue in America is still slightly higher than before Obama secured the Democratic nomination.

In many ways, the framing of these data in terms of "optimism" is quite curious. For instance, consider this statement:

Over the past year, the percentage who say blacks have as good a chance as whites in their community to get a job for which they are qualified has risen by 8 percentage points. That's the biggest one-year jump since Gallup began regularly asking the question 20 years ago.

That's your cue to ask, "So what?" Without a breakdown by race for this question, and knowing that the poll is (appropriately, since it is a random national sample) dominated by Whites (there is no Black oversample or weighting of Black responses reported), this simply appears to reaffirm our understanding that Whites are more likely than ever to believe that we are in a post-racial society. If these attitudes are, indeed, an accurate reflection of reality (that is, if Blacks in their communities actually DO have as good a chance as Whites to get a job for which they are qualified), then that certainly is a reason for optimism. If it is just what folks think, then this is actually a reason to be quite pessimistic because such attitudes mask the true state of racial injustice and render more difficult the struggle to move toward equality.

An interesting finding that is not discussed in the story (but is presented in the graphs that accompany the story) involves respondents' degree of satisfaction with "the way things are going in the United States": 47% of Blacks and 22% of Whites report satisfaction. Even with the larger margin of error among African Americans in the sample (due to the smaller number of Blacks in the sample), this finding is remarkable and, perhaps, speaks to the important symbolic power -- at least, we suppose, if these numbers are correct, for African Americans -- of having a person of color in the White House.

Question and response option wording and the order in which questions are presented to respondents is important to know. We are not able to ascertain much of that information because the USA Today article does not provide it, and there is no link to the survey instrument. Specifically, we are concerned about the conflation of "race relations" and "racism against African Americans." These terms might prime very different underlying constructs among respondents, but they are somewhat carelessly used interchangeably (or at least alternately) in the article. One might imagine, for instance, someone believing that racism as a systemic force is still persistent against Blacks but that our collective ability to address it ("race relations") has improved. Or, one could imagine the exact opposite (e.g., someone who does not think racism is a problem anyway and sees more racial animosity reflected in the media since Obama's election). Further, we could learn much more if we could statistically control for other important factors that are known to be related to racial attitudes such as self-identified partisanship and ideology, geography, age, and gender. Perhaps most helpful would be measures designed to tap attitudes toward racism, such as Henry and Sears's "symbolic racism" scale for Whites and either the Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity by Sellers or questions designed to tap Dawson's concept of "linked fate" for Blacks.

In other words, we can learn very little from this poll to help us meaningfully understand people's real attitudes about race relations and racism in America today. Add to that the fact the our conscious attitudes about race may not be as predictive of our behavior as our subconscious beliefs, and the poll (and corresponding story) is darn near useless in its current form. Certainly the headline -- "Poll: Hopes Buoyed on Race Relations" -- is not warranted and serves only to reinforce the wishful (and under-informed and misguided and blissful) notion that Obama's election either signaled or has ushered in a post-racial era in America.