University of Virginia cartoonist on Ethiopian famine

by Carmen Van Kerckhove
We’ve tracked growing trend of racism on college campuses pretty closely here on Racialicious. See no. 6 on my list of top 10 trends in race and pop culture of 2006 for a bunch of last year’s incidents.
The latest one comes to from the University of Virginia, where a cartoonist for the Cavalier Daily, the student paper, drew the cartoon above (thanks Rob). He claims that his intent was not to mock the famine victims:
“I was not trying to trivialize famine,” the 22-year-old said. “When you have a food fight, you fight with food. This cartoon brings you to the realization that there’s a famine . . . and in general, people give very little thought to starving people in other countries. But I will admit that I really lacked the foresight in anticipating the reaction. I should have thought that they were going to think I was portraying Africans as savage and misshapen.”
Here’s what the paper’s editor-in-chief had to say:
Ladley declined to discuss personnel decisions but said he had approved the cartoon for publication. “This one came in late at night, after 12:30, and my initial reaction was, ‘This is offensive.’ But we print a lot of offensive things. The instant the public raised a question about it, we realized it was a mistake.”
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Latoya Peterson (DC) is the Owner and Editor (not the Founder!) of Racialicious, Arturo García (San Diego) is the Managing Editor, Andrea Plaid (NYC) is the Associate Editor. You can email us at team@racialicious.com. The founders of Racialicious are Carmen Sognonvi and Jen Chau. Carmen runs < a href="http://urbandojo.com/">Urban Martial Arts with her husband and blogs about local business. Jen can still be found at Swirl or on her personal blog.
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