From Harpers Weekly
this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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I am receiving reports that this comic is racist. Correct me if I am wrong. Although the story itself depicts an extremely racist and violent event, it seems more like a protest against the racism that was the norm in society at the time.
People who don't understand satire unless it's clearly labeled.
My first thought was that surely nobody could misunderstand such obvious satire, but then I remembered that I have met people.
Yeah, reading comprehension has taken a nosedive in the past 5-10 years. You see it a lot with places like TikTok and Insta, where people are constantly adding “this is only about this one particular group” types of disclaimers.
Like if you make a joke about a certain disability you have, you also need to add a disclaimer that it’s only talking about that one specific disability and not others. Because if you don’t, you’ll get buried in “BuT mY disAbiLitY is dIffEreNt aNd tHiS shOulDn’T be tArgeTed aT Me” types of comments. Like yes, of course it’s not targeted at you. You’re not the intended audience. But you could likely still appreciate the joke from a distance, if you were able to discern who the intended audience is.
Like being able to interpret undertones and infer the intended audience is part of basic reading comprehension. You should be able to read a comic, and figure out both who the intended reader is, and what a joke is targeting. But that skill seems to be getting more and more rare as time goes on. It’s something all of my English teacher friends have separately complained about, because the majority of their students are missing basic reading comprehension skills like this.
This joke clearly isn’t punching down on the black baby. It’s making fun of racists and racism, not encouraging it.
It depicts a oppressors killing others using self defense as an excuse.
Bullies victimizing themselves is a tale as old as time, as comic this was released in 1876. And very relevant today.
Do what? The source you linked stated it was about a white (U.S.) southerner and a black child. What "indigenous" person do you think is depicted here...?
Edit: original comment said this was about a "colonist" and an "indigenous person".
Oops you're right this isn't a native but a slave I'll correct my comment.
Not a slave either.
This was around 10 years after the abolishment of slavery in the south, was it not referencing that?
If not what is the actual context?
I'm being a little technical, but I think it's important. He/she would have been either an ex-slave, or a child of slaves, or just in general an African most likely. But definitely not "a slave".
Depends.. I bet in the head of Mr. Chiv there, it's still a slave.
It's not racist. Seems satirical. At least in this context.
It helps that it's being called "southern chiv" which I presume is either southern chivalry or southern knight.
Harper's also noted that this was published weeks before a presidential election.
Southern chivalry is analogous to Southern hospitality; it is a specific set of manners that reflect the ideals of the region. It was called chivalry before women could vote, after which chivalry was seen as old fashioned and the phrase changed into hospitality.
This also would have been the time period relatively shortly after the Civil war. The south is currently coming up with excuses to still not treat recently freed slaves very well, the KKK is rising in power and just recently the conservative Democrat party has taken over the south just a year or 2 ago by killing a large portion of the black Republican base and representatives.
Keeping them down to not risk having to be treated the same is absolutely all the rage in the south despite it causing a massive economic depression. This definitely feels like satire.
Yeah, I took southern chiv as a reference to a KKK member since they referred to themselves as knights. Or at least something along those lines.
It wasn't. It was a term - frequently sarcastic eventually, as in this cartoon - used to describe the "noble" behaviors of southerners.
Here's an article from the time on it, talking about how the rumored "southern chivalry" was anything but: https://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning/teaching-resources-for-historians/sixteen-months-to-sumter/newspaper-index/new-haven-daily-palladium/southern-chivalry
As someone else.mentioned, a form of it became "southern hospitality" and survived, usually in the complimentary way.
Sounds like the "knights of the KKK" might have come from the southern chivalry thing.
Maybe, but I don't think so, at least not directly. I can't find a source, though.
I just think the concept of Knights and Arthurian stuff was popular, and they just both came from the same general popular ideas, instead of one coming from the other.
People don't know shit about nuance anymore. If your art isn't obvious and the message isn't directly in your face, young people now can't process it and don't know if they should be outraged, they do love to be outraged.