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Last spring, I wanted to draw a cartoon lampooning extremists on the political scene. I imagined a wild-eyed animal lover with faulty judgment; he would declare to the world his heartfelt belief that "animals are people too." The converse of this slogan-- "people are animals too" --came to mind. What is the opposite of extreme commitment to non-human life? Well, cartoons have their own internal logic: for my purposes, it would be extreme indifference to human life, in the form of a redneck death penalty enthusiast. I decided to build the cartoon around this bit of wordplay...
Under the animal lover, I wrote, "Some of his best friends are laboratory rats," a ridiculous notion that equates experimental rodents with human beings. His counterpart was trickier. Statistical evidence points to racial disparities in the application of the death penalty; if my cartoon redneck were indifferent to human life, he should be most profoundly indifferent to Black life. I wrote, "None of his best friends are young Black men." Both captions were meant to echo the hackneyed, insincere disavowal of racism. "Some of my best friends are Black...
...cartoon was unfair, and unapologetically so. There are, clearly, many principled opponents of animal testing who are not kooks. And it is not necessarily racist to support the death penalty. I drew the cartoon because the lunatic fringes of each movement fits its own caricature, and because unfairness is a cartoonist's prerogative. I allowed for the possibility that I would hear from disgruntled animal rights enthusiasts and death penalty advocates. I had a few susprises coming...
...cartoon appeared in the March 13, 1990 issue of The Crimson. It was then published by the College Press Service, a national syndicate to which more than 600 college newspapers subscribe. About two weeks later I received a call from an administrator at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. My cartoon had run in The Arkansas Traveller, the school paper, and had provoked all sorts of hostility. The paper and the public affairs office had been swamped with calls condemning the drawing's supposed comparison of young Black men to laboratory rats...
Bewildered, I explained the intent of the cartoon: that it was, in part, a condemnation of the death penalty; that the "provocative" placement of the captions was a device to compare two sort of extremists, not to compare Black men and rats (did this really need explaining?); that it was an anti-racist cartoon, and that I had never imagined it would be interpreted otherwise. My friend in Arkansas was satisfied. He now had an explanation for the angry students organizing in protest...