You dont need me to walk you through the way that these [Nigerian kidnapped] women are drawn to see the racist tropes in their depiction — tropes that come directly from colonial-era racist ideas about Africans as sub-human, and tropes that are unnecessary to make the magazines point about welfare. And the emphasis of the cover, making light of Nigerian victims of mass rape in order to skewer French politicians, is uncomfortably revealing. The very real suffering of these women is treated insensitively, as a low priority. This is a regular pattern in Charlie Hebdos cartoons, even if you see the two-layer satire they often play at. People of color are routinely portrayed with stereotypical features — Arabs given big noses, Africans given big lips — that are widely and correctly considered racist. These features are not necessary for the jokes to work, or for the characters to be recognizable. And yet Charlie Hebdo has routinely included them, driving home a not-unreasonable sense that the magazines cartoons indulged racism. Further, the portrayal of people of color, as well as Muslims of all races, has been consistently and overwhelming negative in Charlie Hebdo cartoons. Reading Charlie Hebdo cartoons and covers in the aggregate, a reader is given the uniform and barely-concealed message that Muslims are categorically bad, violent, irrational people. This characterization indulges and indeed furthers some of the widest and most basic stereotypes of the worlds 1.6 billion Muslims. That would certainly seem to be racism in its most unmistakable and transparent form... In a field dominated by privileged voices, its not enough to say Mock everyone! In an unequal world, satire that mocks everyone equally ends up serving the powerful. And in the context of brutal inequality, it is worth at least asking what preexisting injuries we are adding our insults to. The belief that satire is a courageous art beholden to no one is intoxicating. But satire might be better served by an honest reckoning of whose voices we hear and dont hear, of who we mock and who we dont, and why. [OM]
Posted on: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 10:13:29 +0000
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