Walt Carr is a freelancer who doesn’t even live in Cleveland. It’s widely believed that George Forbes wrote the thing.

He’s one of the biggest creeps in Cleveland politics, but he writes a pretty good cartoon.

Skin color doesn’t matter – racism is racism. What, you think blacks can’t be racist against blacks? Plenty of white folks are clearly racist against other white folks, duh.

That’s why I have a special thing for whites, particularly male heterosexuals, in my editorials, since with my biased perspective I tend to notice that they’re the group responsible for most of the rampant stupidity around me. In fact, pretty much every time I’ve ever gotten slammed for being racist in a panel, it’s usually by disaffected, even jealous, white folks who jump at any chance to vent their impotent white anger, usually from fear at losing their privileged position. That kind of ignorance is usually funny, until it gets into the really sad or creepy/scary comments, like some examples displayed here on this thread.

And this is also why editors are gun-shy about running controversial panels like this – seems that they are the ones who get pilloried instead of the artist: Walt Carr seems to have been around long enough and experienced enough to know what (and why) he’s doing. I looked around but doesn’t seem to have a web-presence, be nice to have him weigh in here.

Like any decent editorial it at least motivates discussion on the issue, or in this case, multiple issues. Being “one of the group” doesn’t necessarily automatically shield the cartoonist or their work from criticism, and they have the same shortcomings as anybody else and aren’t immune from making bad judgment calls either. The best work out there and what I admire the most in other cartoonists is when it transcends stereotypes and makes fun of universal human conditions, but those are rare, and harder to do than picking on people who are different, or maybe just the same as me.

Just because you or I don’t hear these sorts of racist comments coming from our circle of friends, I argue that it’s because you haven’t associated yourself with that type of person.

Don’t get me wrong, now. Racism is occuring on both sides of the argument. On one hand, you have a paper that has issued a racist cartoon, accusing a black woman of power that she is doing this simply to get support. On the other, while she may not be doing it for that reason (or is, who knows?), this WILL probably help her.

@Shane: I’m very glad about your passion for this subject, but as a general rule, insulting the opposite side usually leads to your opinion being discredited. I would certainly hate for that to happen, especially to someone who obviously has a very strong opinion on the subject.

Of course, you really only did the insulting in your first post, so possibly just a bout of anger? Understandable.

@Ted: Don’t be that guy. Don’t be the guy that finds a racist comment in a racist argument.

A poor choice of words to be sure, but I’m positive that he wasn’t talking about whipping.

A true soul cleasing butt whipping is inherently colorblind.

Of course my friend heard his black friends ripping racially on whites, hispanics, Jews, asians, etc. He wasn’t lying about how common it was. And he also mentioned how surprised he was at how much the black women (to whom he sold his cartoons to) would have no problem tossing out any of his artwork that had WHITE folk in them and then saying the usual racist garbage against them…

Sure, white folks aren’t gonna rip black folks in front of a black man. But I agree with him – those kind of racist comments are RARE in my experience. I rarely hear them from my white, asian, hispanic, black friends. And he commonly hears them, but only from his black acquaintances. Ah, but I’m sure that’s just his imagination, right? We’re all the same and there’s never anything negative about a sub-culture, hmm? LOL