They'll soon be classing it as a mental illness with treatment available on the NHS.
Racist! Really?
- Thread starter koolpc
- Start date
They'll soon be classing it as a mental illness with treatment available on the NHS.
Caporegime
Why is Osaka white with blonde hair?
She has honey coloured skin and blonde hair so...fairly accurate.
Caporegime
- Joined
- 30 Jul 2013
- Posts
- 29,460
Honey coloured?
Caporegime
Soldato
I fail to see any deliberately racist elements to the cartoon.
A caricature is just that, a gross exaggeration of the subject's physical appearance to make a point.
The point being that Serena had lost control of herself by throwing her toys well and truly out of her pram with her outburst.......and yes she has previous with these sorts of antics.
If we look at the artists previous work he seemingly tackles everyone with this same exaggeration. He doesn't just target black athletes who have a problem with their aggression levels. No one is off limits for him.
The only thing that has irritated me about the artist is that he let the 'triggered' brigade bully him into pulling it down.
A caricature is just that, a gross exaggeration of the subject's physical appearance to make a point.
The point being that Serena had lost control of herself by throwing her toys well and truly out of her pram with her outburst.......and yes she has previous with these sorts of antics.
If we look at the artists previous work he seemingly tackles everyone with this same exaggeration. He doesn't just target black athletes who have a problem with their aggression levels. No one is off limits for him.
The only thing that has irritated me about the artist is that he let the 'triggered' brigade bully him into pulling it down.
Permabanned
The triggered brigade being all the racists crying they are not allowed to be a bit racist anymore.
Soldato
Everyone in the cartoon is a shade lighter skinned than they actually are. Serena is coloured much lighter than her actual skin, Osaka too, and even the umpire is pink for god's sake. It's really not as important as you are trying to make it. And you are right, it is barely even close to being a drawing of Osaka, because the whole point is she has been overlooked due to Serena's meltdown.I am not reaching for anything, other than reality.
I just refuse to be told by GD that the cartoon woman here:
Is supposed to be a depiction of this woman:
It is absurd.
The artist drew a white woman with long straight fully blonde hair. Whether this was done intentionally based on some sort of racist viewpoint, who knows, I don't think it was, but it is a drawing of a white woman with long straight fully blonde hair and is barely even close to being a drawing of Osaka.
Permabanned
I think you fill find that if you look at the emerging political landscape of Europe and the USA it shows this not to be the case at all. Quite the opposite in fact. As a one man crusade against racial sleights I fear you have your work cut out. Is it a hobby or a career?
Soldato
People will see what the hell they want to see to fit their own narrative and perspective on the world, and thats fine, it is what makes discussions such as these as interesting as they are sometimes infuriating.
If you do believe that the depiction of Serena is inappropriate, do you automatically level it as being racist as well?
The artist was secretly hoping for a story like this involving a famous black athlete so his inner klansman could come out?......got to be it right?
If you do believe that the depiction of Serena is inappropriate, do you automatically level it as being racist as well?
The artist was secretly hoping for a story like this involving a famous black athlete so his inner klansman could come out?......got to be it right?
If you had read my posts you would have realised that i too don't think it is important and probably wasn't done with any sort of racist intent. However, that, coupled with the sambo like drawing of Serena is why it has raised eyebrows. I'm just trying to explain why it could be understandably be perceived as being racist.
He didn't draw Osaka though, but instead drew a depiction of a white blonde woman with fully blonde long straight hair. People should stop trying to convince themselves otherwise. We know he can draw frizzy/afro style hair, as he has done with Serena so why did he give the opponent long fully blonde straight hair?
They have basically the same sort of hair other than Serena's dyed blonde bits have mostly grown out.
Personally, i think he has just drawn a "generic tennis umpire" and generic "tennis female opponent" (as the umpire is clearly not drawn anything like the actual umpire who was there at the time either). I don't think his intent was racist, but i do think he should have looked at it after he drew it and thought.."hm this might be misinterpreted quite badly"
Last edited:
Well yeah, cartoons tend to do that, not to mention the technique of making things in the distance paler/less saturated to avoid them taking attention away from the foreground subject. That was GCSE art.
I can just see all this trial by social media taking us down a path towards a very sterile society where you can't risk offending anyone. Pretty sad really given that pee taking has always been in the British and Aussie DNA.
Loving the indignation - has anyone actually asked the players what they think?
PS: Osaka is hot - although she looks like she might beat the hell out of you for doing a poor job.
Last edited:
Permabanned
It won't be long before this innocuous cartoon has received more critical appraisal then the Mona Lisa 
This furore is elevating some last gasp tennis player to that of a prophet in the minds of the cartoon censors.
I am glad to see the victor in the game has seen the terrible wrong in the Nordic appropriation of bleaching her hair blonde and is growing it out though
This furore is elevating some last gasp tennis player to that of a prophet in the minds of the cartoon censors.
I am glad to see the victor in the game has seen the terrible wrong in the Nordic appropriation of bleaching her hair blonde and is growing it out though
Given this artwork is intending for newsprint it would have to be coloured to take into account of the very limited colour gamut you get with newsprint. 200-220% max ink coverage.
http://www.mycontractproof.com/np-file-prep
So artists have to work within the very limted range of colours when drawing for newspapers.
If you want any features to be visable you wouldn't be able to make the skin tones too dark or they will just look like block colour and you wouldn't be able to make out any facial features.
I would guess the image when printed wouldn't have been very big, so Osaka would be tiny when printed.
http://www.mycontractproof.com/np-file-prep
So artists have to work within the very limted range of colours when drawing for newspapers.
If you want any features to be visable you wouldn't be able to make the skin tones too dark or they will just look like block colour and you wouldn't be able to make out any facial features.
I would guess the image when printed wouldn't have been very big, so Osaka would be tiny when printed.
As silly as these twitter storms are they really show how ridiculous a lot of politics, media, some celebrities and segments of the wider public have become.
Society is full of often quite brutal depictions of politicians and media personalities. Trump gets depicted in a lurid shad of orange with a toilet seat on his head or as a giant baby with a blimp.
Steve Bell regularly lampoon's Teresa May and others. When he draws for the Guardian and who hasn't seen a drawing of Angelina Jolie or Mick Jagger with their lips accentuated to a ridiculous degree because that's how caricature works.
But then we come to a black woman, a woman who recently disgraced herself with an incredibly poor show of sportsmanship.
A woman who all things considered got of extremely lightly for her poor behaviour. She was already losing so there was a good chance she would have lost the match even without the referees decisions and Osaka had recently beat her in another match so it would hardly of been an unprecedented loss.
For her disgraceful outbursts she was fined a little over the equivalent of £13,000... Which is a small fraction of the money she would have been paid for the game even as the loser.
And its not as though she hasn't got previous for such antics like when also smashed her racket and threatened an official saying "I swear to God I'll ****king take the ball and shove it down your ****ing throat" which she also refused to apologise for. Racism? Sexism? If I behaved like that at work I would be lucky to have a job let alone be defended by a load or sycophants and useful idiots.
And then we come to a picture published by an Australian paper.
Its racist!.... We are are told...
So some then ask why? .....
Well it resembles past actually racist caricatures of Africans....
How so some say?
Well it depicts Serena as a muscular / heavy set woman with dark skin, big lips, a flat nose and shows her acting like a stereotypical 'angry' black woman........
But Serena is a heavy set / muscular woman who does have dark skin, big lips, a flatter nose then most and she was acting in an excessively aggressive manner. You can't complain if your behavior is being depicted in a manner similar to a stereotype if you are acting in a manner consistent with said stereotype!
Ironically it seems as thought some in this thread, inadvertently, do lay out some examples of what would actually make this cartoon racist.....
Had Serena been depicted in some combination of wearing a grass skirt, with a bone through her nose, with a selection of fruits on her head, with a necklace of shrunken heads around her neckall whilst holding a spear I think most could agree it was racist. But it didn't it depicted, in caricature, how Serena acted and how she looked. There is nothing racists about saying someone 'spat their dummy out' and as others have pointed out there would have been uproar if Serena had been depicted as anything other then an African (American) woman.
Can someone explain how you could caricature Serena in an apparently non racist way?
So we are left in a bizarre place where, effectively, you cannot caricature a person if they happen to be 'black' without being accused of racism regadless of the context of the drawing according to some.
So there we have it the actual racism of different low expectations..... quite ironic that some on the people who were claiming Serena was being treated differently as a black womann then want her to be treated differently (preferentially) in another case because she is...er.....a black woman.
And the whole initial claim of racism and sexism on behalf of the umpire is total bunkum anyway. He has a reputation of enforcing the rules strictly for both men and women with a 'white' man, Rafael Nadal, having the following to day about him previously ...
“I say it with sadness, but he is an umpire who scrutinises me more and who fixates on me more,”
After he had penalised him in a a game...
The same umpire has also penalised the even paler white male, Andy Murray, for comments he made during a game.
Still it's nice to read pages of (largely debunked) whataboutery about whether Osaka's skin tone or hair has been correctly represented in a tiny almost featureless depiction of her in the same cartoon ... .
I suspect this is because some are clutching at straws to justify their incorrect racist interpretation of the cartoon after the fact
Society is full of often quite brutal depictions of politicians and media personalities. Trump gets depicted in a lurid shad of orange with a toilet seat on his head or as a giant baby with a blimp.
Steve Bell regularly lampoon's Teresa May and others. When he draws for the Guardian and who hasn't seen a drawing of Angelina Jolie or Mick Jagger with their lips accentuated to a ridiculous degree because that's how caricature works.
But then we come to a black woman, a woman who recently disgraced herself with an incredibly poor show of sportsmanship.
A woman who all things considered got of extremely lightly for her poor behaviour. She was already losing so there was a good chance she would have lost the match even without the referees decisions and Osaka had recently beat her in another match so it would hardly of been an unprecedented loss.
For her disgraceful outbursts she was fined a little over the equivalent of £13,000... Which is a small fraction of the money she would have been paid for the game even as the loser.
And its not as though she hasn't got previous for such antics like when also smashed her racket and threatened an official saying "I swear to God I'll ****king take the ball and shove it down your ****ing throat" which she also refused to apologise for. Racism? Sexism? If I behaved like that at work I would be lucky to have a job let alone be defended by a load or sycophants and useful idiots.
And then we come to a picture published by an Australian paper.
Its racist!.... We are are told...
So some then ask why? .....
Well it resembles past actually racist caricatures of Africans....
How so some say?
Well it depicts Serena as a muscular / heavy set woman with dark skin, big lips, a flat nose and shows her acting like a stereotypical 'angry' black woman........
But Serena is a heavy set / muscular woman who does have dark skin, big lips, a flatter nose then most and she was acting in an excessively aggressive manner. You can't complain if your behavior is being depicted in a manner similar to a stereotype if you are acting in a manner consistent with said stereotype!
Ironically it seems as thought some in this thread, inadvertently, do lay out some examples of what would actually make this cartoon racist.....
Had Serena been depicted in some combination of wearing a grass skirt, with a bone through her nose, with a selection of fruits on her head, with a necklace of shrunken heads around her neckall whilst holding a spear I think most could agree it was racist. But it didn't it depicted, in caricature, how Serena acted and how she looked. There is nothing racists about saying someone 'spat their dummy out' and as others have pointed out there would have been uproar if Serena had been depicted as anything other then an African (American) woman.
Can someone explain how you could caricature Serena in an apparently non racist way?
So we are left in a bizarre place where, effectively, you cannot caricature a person if they happen to be 'black' without being accused of racism regadless of the context of the drawing according to some.
So there we have it the actual racism of different low expectations..... quite ironic that some on the people who were claiming Serena was being treated differently as a black womann then want her to be treated differently (preferentially) in another case because she is...er.....a black woman.
And the whole initial claim of racism and sexism on behalf of the umpire is total bunkum anyway. He has a reputation of enforcing the rules strictly for both men and women with a 'white' man, Rafael Nadal, having the following to day about him previously ...
“I say it with sadness, but he is an umpire who scrutinises me more and who fixates on me more,”
After he had penalised him in a a game...
The same umpire has also penalised the even paler white male, Andy Murray, for comments he made during a game.
Still it's nice to read pages of (largely debunked) whataboutery about whether Osaka's skin tone or hair has been correctly represented in a tiny almost featureless depiction of her in the same cartoon ... .
I suspect this is because some are clutching at straws to justify their incorrect racist interpretation of the cartoon after the fact
Last edited:
Soldato
Our future seems to be heading towards a combination of Demolition Man and Idiocracy...
"What's your boggle?"
"What's your boggle?"
Soldato
- Joined
- 13 May 2003
- Posts
- 8,941
Nice summation.
As far as I can see, the same line is being repeated ad nauseam. It's not racist because the caricature looks like her.
The caricature of Williams is not why the cartoon is offensive. It's offensive because it looks like the Old Tom cartoons and draws on the same stylistic elements and makes the same "joke" as many of those cartoons did. That's not up for debate. That's what it looks like. Saying "it doesn't" is just plain silly.
There is a question of if the cartoon is deliberately racist, ie if the cartoonist was aware this cartoon would evoke similarities of these old cartoons. Only he will know. After that it's the editors job to know. I don't believe either of them.
I have some sympathy with posters who say they've never seen these old cartoons (Tom and Jerry!?) and therefore don't draw comparisons and don't therefore get offended by it. The rest of you are basically just repeating "I don't know why it's racist". "I don't understand" and / or attaching some kind of "PC gone mad" nonsense to it to make sense out of it.
The caricature of Williams is not why the cartoon is offensive. It's offensive because it looks like the Old Tom cartoons and draws on the same stylistic elements and makes the same "joke" as many of those cartoons did. That's not up for debate. That's what it looks like. Saying "it doesn't" is just plain silly.
There is a question of if the cartoon is deliberately racist, ie if the cartoonist was aware this cartoon would evoke similarities of these old cartoons. Only he will know. After that it's the editors job to know. I don't believe either of them.
I have some sympathy with posters who say they've never seen these old cartoons (Tom and Jerry!?) and therefore don't draw comparisons and don't therefore get offended by it. The rest of you are basically just repeating "I don't know why it's racist". "I don't understand" and / or attaching some kind of "PC gone mad" nonsense to it to make sense out of it.
Soldato
Actually, people are saying that they understand why people like you think it's racist. It's just that we don't think it is, and believe that everyone is fair game for a caricaturist. No exceptions.
What bit of "it's not the caricature that's the problem" don't you get?
Soldato
You can't say the caricature isn't the problem and then say it is the problem because it looks like something else.
I will concede that the red lips are the issue, rather than the size or whatever.
I will concede that the red lips are the issue, rather than the size or whatever.