Blacky Fun Whitey cartoon
The Blacky Fun Whitey cartoon was a cartoon published by The Fed on Friday February 20th, 2004[1] during Black History Month. It sparked the Columbia University Concerned Students of Color Protest. The cartoon was intended to highlight the reductionist effect of Black History Month on the subject of black history.
It was part of a series of cartoons called Wacky Fun Whitey by Ben Schwartz, who had already graduated at the time of the cartoon's publication.
The editorial board subsequently apologized and the cartoon appears in The Fed's online archives with the following disclaimer:
A Note from the Editors:
Caution: You might not like this cartoon. A lot of people at Columbia didn't like it much in the print issue. It got nasty. We're sincerely sorry that people have been hurt by it; that certainly wasn't the intention. (In case anyone is tempted to take this comic seriously for even a second, don't. It may be a distasteful joke, but Wacky Fun Whitey is not a vehicle for racist propaganda, just a cartoon that can push hard on the boundaries of good taste. This time good taste pushed back.) There's actually a good deal of material on the web about the controversy surrounding this comic, if you're interested. We post it here because it's only fair that anyone who is interested gets their information straight from the horse's mouth (however noxious the horse's breath may be).
References
- ↑ "Citing 'Episodic' Racism, Students Stage Protests; Bollinger Responds", Columbia Spectator, 5/22/04.
External links
- "Blacky Fun Whitey", The Fed, Vol. 19 Issue 5
- Letters to the Editor in Response to Cartoon
