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.”