Raise Your Hand if You’re From “Carjackistan”
by Latoya Peterson
Yet another racism in comics entry. This gem comes from Tank McNamara:
(Larger version here.)
Reader Kathryn writes:
Sorry to be a bummer, but this was so ridiculous that I had to share it. I was going to check out today’s Doonesbury on Yahoo when the attached comic popped onscreen. It was so patently offensive and racist that I still can’t believe that its real.
As usual, here we are, minding our own business when something racist pops up and smacks you in the face. The carjackistan joke, the elaborate hairstyle and joke about headroom in the car – yet, I can already hear someone protesting they are talking about a “certain type of black woman, the WNBA player.”
Umm-hmm.
This is “nappy headed hos” in comic form.
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
Celeste wrote:
They even gave her man-face. Do they mean to paint all black women with this brush or just black WNBA players? Also, exactly what are WBNA players doing that bothers people so much that they people go out of their way to hate on them? I never hear anything bad about them.
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 6:48 am ¶
Alexandra wrote:
Good grief even if they were only referring to a WNBA player that would still be offensive and disgusting. I am so sick and tired of black women being denigrated and not thought of as real women were only laughable parodies who can never meet the societies standard of beauty.
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 7:38 am ¶
dalia wrote:
reminds me of the name some people use to refer to the section of the toronto neighbourhood i live in: scarblackistan (scarborough)…
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 8:02 am ¶
frau sally benz wrote:
umm… I don’t see how anybody would even find this remotely funny. There’s no humor in it at all. How stupid of them.
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 8:10 am ¶
PaulPortland wrote:
I honestly tried to see this from the perspective of a person who would say things like, “Oh, stop being so sensitive. It’s just a comic strip.” You know, I looked at the strip a few times, kept repeating the mantra in my head, “It’s not offensive, it’s not offensive.” But…it didn’t work. I think it was the confluence of the lily-white couple smugly positioning themselves as superior in opposition to the othered pretty obviously ethnic “WNBA player from Carjackistan” that I couldn’t overcome. I mean, I can understand if maybe, just maybe the “WNBA player from Carjackistan” wasn’t so “ethnic” looking. Like if she was drawn as an Eastern European looking woman, then maybe I could tell myself that the creator of Tank McNamara was making some commentary about how after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the shock therapy of capitalism brought nothing but crime and chaos. But, that isn’t the case.
Honestly, if anyone can interpret this strip in a non-offensive way, I’d like to know (no judgements, no accusations). And I mean “interpret,” not, “Get over it, you overly-sensitive non-white person.” Anyone?
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 8:37 am ¶
Lisa wrote:
Oh my god.
Tank McNamara is one of those shitty comics that I always just skim over because it never seems to have a punchline or be about anything that I understand… maybe the writer decided that it was time to make a serious bid for some media attention?
And I just *love* how the white woman is comforting the guy in the last panel, as if to say “there there, we’ve ALL had to deal with THESE PEOPLE, but at least we’re in this together.” Maybe that’s reading too much into it, but ugh.
I also don’t understand the part about the wooden clogs.
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 9:09 am ¶
coco wrote:
(racialicious rewrite)
last panel: oh, those blk women… so unfeminine… not like you sweetheart. You’d never be an athlete, but even if you were, your hair wouldn’t exceed the socially prescribed 2 inches of fullness.
: /
Aw, i used to like tank mcnamara
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 9:10 am ¶
Lyonside wrote:
This cartoon isn’t carried in the Philly Inquirer. THIS is why.
Every time I go to Reading or Williamsport or Scranton for work or Huntingdon to visit family, I end up with some version of the local comic page. And not shockingly I find one simplistic or stereotypical or just painfully unfunny strip that would have been culled from a big city paper in a month.
These also tend to be the same type of papers that dropped FBFW years ago when they dealt with a family friend coming out. Even when there is diversity in the community, there evidently isn’t enough pressure to reform and update the funny pages to reflect that.
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 9:10 am ¶
Eric Grant wrote:
Is there a reason she seems to be Dutch? Is there a strong Dutch association with the WNBA?
@PPortland: My interpretation attempt (I know pretty much nothing about the WNBA and its associated notions): the creators were going for a kind of pan-international “foreigner” here (like Dilbert’s Elbonians) with arguably African–but maybe they were just going for “mannish”–features, quaint European folk costume, and a funny sounding foreign country–before the ’stans became all the rage, the country would have either started with “San” or ended with “alalia”.
I will say that “Carjackistan” has a certain Mad Magazine quality to it that I admire, because it sounds so close to Kazahkstan. But it does not work in this context because of other stupid associations to do with the WNBA
Anyway, the result is just too confusing, and obviously a “fail”.
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 9:21 am ¶
Rob Schmidt wrote:
“Doonesbury” has been running biased strips about “Berzerkistan” for a year or so. For example:
http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20071015
More on the story:
http://thecycle.prweekblogs.com/2007/08/13/greater-berzerkistan-issues-rfp/
For those who haven’t been following Doonesbury lately, Garry Trudeau has been featuring two Martini-imbibing, sunglasses-wearing PR pros discussing how to solve the image problems of Greater Berzerkistan, where the President-For-Life’s ethnic cleansing practices represent a big challenge – “That pig’s gonna need a lot of lipstick,” says one of the characters in an installment last week.
In pitching for the new account, ideas include a celebrity golf tournament and a jingle – something bluesy, perhaps, to go with genocide. Is Greater Berzerkistan perhaps inspired by the recent story in Harper’s about two communications firms expressing interest in representing an investment firm purportedly associated with the oil-rich, democracy-challenged country of Turkmenistan?
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 9:31 am ¶
Ismone wrote:
I completely did not understand what was going on in the second panel.
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 9:35 am ¶
Lisa wrote:
Could his realization and embarrassment that his “car” is too small in the second panel actually be a metaphor for something else? Forgive me if that’s out of line, but we are talking about stereotypes here….
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 9:41 am ¶
Brad wrote:
Here is the previous comic, which sheds a little light on what the creators may have been thinking.
(Not defending it, because it’s 100% appalling.)
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 9:43 am ¶
PaulPortland wrote:
@Eric Grant:
Yeah, I can see your explanation about how the creators were going for a “pan-international ‘foreigner’” type there (what with the mish-mash of cultural markers like costume and clogs). What threw me, though, was the “Africanized” facial features of the “WNBA Player.” (Of course, that could just be my own prejudices coming into play by interpreting those facial features as “Africanized.”)
Just for the hell of it, I googled the racial breakdown of the WNBA, and it corresponded to my uninformed assumptions about the league – as of 2005 (the latest report I could find), there were 29 international players on WNBA rosters with 4 Black players being from African countries, 1 from Jamaica, and 1 from Canada. The other 23 were from European countries. As for players overall in the WNBA, 63% were categorized as African-American.
I guess what I’m saying is if Tank McNamara was attempting to parody “pan-ethnic ‘foreigness’”, then why the “Africanized” facial features if African players only make up 13% of international WNBA players (with international players only making up 14% of total WNBA players on top of that)?
I agree with you though that Carjackistan is a pretty funny name.
@Brad:
Hmm, the previous comic does seem to support Eric Grant’s argument that the creators were poking fun at a “pan-ethnic ‘foreigness’” stereotype. I’m still confused as to why this stereotype would manifest itself in the minds of the creators as “Africanized” facial features when the overwhelmingly majority of Black WNBA players are American.
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 10:19 am ¶
DEAF FEMINIST PUNK!! wrote:
HAHAHA SO FUNNY!!!!!
Not.
Do y’all wanna bet that it was drawn by some stupid ignorant white hipster boy who thinks he’s so EDGY?!?!?!
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 10:21 am ¶
Joselle Palacios wrote:
Wow. Racist AND entirely unfunny. A loser on two counts! My sense of humor is incredibly offended.
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 10:22 am ¶
Colin A. B. wrote:
Don’t forget that the woman next to him is obviously…as the previous strip Brad showed us, is turned on by his idiocy. Yep, that’s how it is, when one woman is being made a fool of by a bigot of a man, other women just LOVE it.
The anti-womanism and blatant racism and xenophobia are just off the charts. To me, the “wooden clogs” was a throwaway line used to try to disassociate the strip with anti-black racism by making the target in the strip seem like a “non-black” person, maybe a European white person, basically a CYA sort of thing in case black people saw it as offensive — kinda the way it is.
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 10:23 am ¶
Amanda wrote:
Yeah, the girl is supposed to be Dutch. That’s not a crazy hairdo but actually one of those stereotypical Dutch hats. And of course she’s got the stereotypical outfit, too. And that’s what the reference about the wooden clogs is all about. I think the Netherlands has the tallest average height in the world, hence the fact that she’s a WNBA player.
Whatever, it’s still stupid.
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 10:26 am ¶
Celeste wrote:
Okay, I’m starting to see that they meant the woman to be dutch. But how does being Dutch go with carjackistan. I hear “Carjackistan” and it cross-references other lovable phrases like “Memfrica”. Is car jacking a big problem for the Dutch? I have no idea.
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 10:57 am ¶
Phil Deeze wrote:
This cartoon was just a big old bowl of wrong.
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 11:15 am ¶
RainaWeather wrote:
I don’t even get the damn joke. What was funny about it?
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 12:37 pm ¶
DE wrote:
What is this woman doing that’s s worthy of snotty, smug judgement by strangers? Being tall? Being good at a sport? Wearing something other than jeans and a t-shirt? Stupid all around.
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 1:06 pm ¶
maia wrote:
even if she was supposed to be dutch (or whateva) it is pretty obvious to me that they created ‘ugly’ facial features (like the thick lips) by making her face look ‘african’.
when i first read it i thought it was a caricature of ‘those crazy black women who will wear anything, no matter how garish, or loud’. sort of the way that people see venus and serena williams. i dont really care what the intention of the cartoonist was…the impact is just so ugly.
but some people go for the cheap laugh.
that is not edgy. it is more like black face, because the cartoonist doesnt know how to pull together a well-constructed joke with the subject matter with which he is working.
ah well. sometimes i find it amazing that people get paid to do such lowlevel work. (speaking as an illustrator myself)
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 1:26 pm ¶
Lizzie (greeneyedfem wrote:
I read ‘Carjackistan’ to be some kind of play on Eastern European country names — and her outfit the same. What struck me was how horribly gendered the strip is — he’s just too appalled by her size and strength and sportmanship (she leads in fouls! she plays ball on a date!) to consider more than one date. And of course he gets reassured in the last panel by his teeny lady-friend — she’s the appropriate size for his hulking masculinity.
So yeah, no matter how you read it — offensive and not funny.
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 1:47 pm ¶
Phrone wrote:
I think I’ve reread the comic like five times, read through all the comments, and STILL don’t understand what the joke was supposed to be. (Except lol unfeminine racialized ‘other’ woman)
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 2:59 pm ¶
PaulPortland wrote:
By the by, the funniest thing about that comic strip was the add for Colgate toothpaste down in the right hand corner…”Advanced Whitening” indeed!
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 5:21 pm ¶
magda wrote:
Whatever, WNBA players are totally hot. Long lean bodies, sculpted arms, athletic endurance…
Agreed, this cartoon is racist, sexist, and unfunny.
Posted 09 Aug 2008 at 1:18 pm ¶
Sniper wrote:
This cartoon reminds me of the “joke” of Soviet/Eastern European women looking like big scary guys that was popular when I was a kid. The idea was that those godless commies would cheat at the Olympics by dressing men in drag to compete <i.or, that Soviet bloc women were tough, unfeminine creature who had unnatural interests in sports and hard sciences.
I think that’s what they’re getting at, although it’s still gross and doesn’t make a lick of sense.
Posted 09 Aug 2008 at 3:41 pm ¶
adamson wrote:
Lisa wrote:
“…I also don’t understand the part about the wooden clogs.”
I suppose that they’re trying to compare black people to a people that has to ‘create’ their own shoes… a.k.a. we can’t ‘afford’ them, or we’re just too ass-backwards to wear them. I don’t know…
I’ve been seeing the ‘Berzerkistan’ for some time… I used to like this comic.
Perhaps it’s because I’m ‘only’ sixteen and I couldn’t understand the full racial connotations of the comic for some time (I hope THAT’s not what it is, seems to be right, though).
I see this in the Los Angeles Times.
Posted 10 Aug 2008 at 12:18 pm ¶
Marcus Kwame wrote:
wow… some racist statements are SO racist that they leave you speechless. It’s hard to believe they fit so many offensive things in just 3 panels. I find the colgate advanced whitening ad on the page pretty ironic. damn.
Posted 10 Aug 2008 at 6:37 pm ¶
Paul wrote:
The WNBA is a joke in and of itself. If we are are equal, in terms of gender, why can’t women hack it in the NBA or NBDL?
In terms of the comic, when was the last time any mainstream comic was either funny or enlightened? Boondocks might be arguable, but it’s not ntruly mainstream. Look at Peanuts, it has one character of color. Franklin’s got no discernable reason for existing in The Peanuts universe, save his blackness.
Posted 10 Aug 2008 at 9:07 pm ¶
livininphilly wrote:
hmmmm… the first time i looked at this i didn’t understadn it at all. Thanks to Brad for putting up the previoud comic. I didn’t understand it at all until after i read that. 2 points:
1) I didn’t at first think this was about black women & believe me i’m always on the look out. Instead I thought it was rather a xenophobic attack against eastern euopean women. Remember black women aren’t the only people who play in the WNBA. In fact most of the women who play in college and go on to the pros actually play for European countries and not in the WNBA. I’ve been told by several friends who played in college (and beyond) that it’s easier for US women to get into international leagues than it is to get into the WNBA b/c mny home teams recruit internationally.
2) @ Celeste, i’m confused about the man -face comment. What exactly does that mean? To me the character instead looks as if she has strong features which isn’t necessarily assigned to a specific gender or race.
I agree that this comic isn’t funny at all. But really, are we surprised that Tank McNamara artists would draw something like this? Honestly, i’ve read this comic maybe 2 other times and even as a kid I thought it was stupid, insulting & definitely targeted at an audience that I was NOT a part of. I grew up in DC and this comic runs every day there. DC is full of people from all over the world and it’s irresponsible for the Post to carry something as offensive as this.
Posted 11 Aug 2008 at 9:32 am ¶
ccch wrote:
Gosh, some of you guys see racism in EVERYTHING!. And this is especially true for Black Americans. In no way does her features look like any “African feature”. Stop being so overly sensitve and especially negative towards your own looks, otherwise you wouldn’t see these features as “African”, when they’re actually exaggerated features of Eastern European “Olgas”.
Man, sometimes I really need a break from this blog as it can actually be quite detrimental…..
Mod Note – Break granted: you’re banned from the conversation due to your last three comments. And go look at some back issues of Tank McNamara. The overexaggerated features are how he tends to draw black women and/or rough looking women. White women tend to look like the woman in the first panel. – LDP
Posted 13 Aug 2008 at 7:14 am ¶