The Australian has a long and storied history of just appallingly racist cartoons. There’s something about cartoons being racist that just hits differently — they feel like they should be a more cheery medium, and they are being misused somehow.
Anyway, since The Australian’s resident cartoonist Bill Leak went died in 2017, the paper has absolutely held up his legacy and continued with terrible, offensive cartoons.
The latest, by John Spooner, comes in the wake of the unlawful murder of George Floyd by police in the US, and the spate of protests that have swept the country since then.
The Junkee article includes a number of Twitter shots from people aghast that a major paper would print what they perceive as a racist cartoon, including at least one reporting the cartoon to the Australian Press Council.
