Keith Knight’s N-word toon strikes another campus

Alan Gardner November 7, 2008 1 minute 5 comments

The Keith Knight cartoon that caused a ruckus in The Montclair State University (NJ) campus paper over the use of the “n-word” has caused another stir in the The Arizona Daily Wildcat (Tuscan, AZ). Lauren LePage, the editor-in-chief told angry protestors that the cartoon was the result of a miscommunication between herself and the managing editor. Another cartoon was to have run that day commemorating President-Elect Barack Obama’s election victory, the controversial cartoon ran instead when the cartoon was swapped out on the file server, but not on the paginated page. The mistake wasn’t discovered until after it had been printed.

LePage was quoted in the Arizona Daily Star as saying, “there was an honest mistake,” she said. “I take full responsibility for the fact that it erroneously ran in the paper.”

Students are not satisfied with the explanation. Some are spreading e-mail calls for a boycott of the paper and the paper’s advertisers.

According to the Star article, LePage has reminder her staff that newspaper policy requires potentially offensive content to be reviewed by senior editors and that all comics will be proofread for spelling and content by copy editors.

She added, “we’re bringing more eyes to it, so that if there is ever any miscommunication again there will be backup.”

Keith notes on his blog that he has since spoken with the editor who has apologized to him and indicated that they will run the intended strip along with an apology.

Comments ⁵

Mike Peterson

“The audience for the Daily Wildcat is students
and alumni who should be capable of intelligent thought on such a subject.”

Well, there’s your problem right there.

We know that the n-word once existed. But it ended. Long ago. And those people who boycotted buses in Birmingham, who faced down firehoses and dogs, who were beaten by KKK’ers, who walked across the bridge in Selma …

… a bunch of damn fools. They were wasting their time. All it took was to ban the n-word and then a big rainbow came up and everybody loved each other.

So scrub that word from history. It never existed. And all those people who thought it was real? They were fools. Forget them.

Kevin Moore

Say, don’t they study “contextual irony” at them there fancy colleges?

Garey Mckee

I dropped the N-Bomb in my strip this past week. Got nothing.

Quint Nelson

Play with fire and you get burned.

Rich Diesslin

Or dinner.

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