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Is Sonia Sotomayor’s Ethnicity Fair Game for a Punchline?
Not only The Oklahoman‘s cartoon offensive, it’s wrong: Pinatas and sombreros are traditional among Mexican communities, not Puerto Rican. But if Supreme Court justice hopeful Sonia Sotomayor gets to talk about her ethnicity (as an asset or liability), does it give a political cartoonist the right to play on those stereotypes?
And because it’s the way we do things on this website, let’s flip the homo switch: If Obama had picked a gay court nominee, would you feel the same way if the cartoonist showed the person depicted in a hair salon with a limp wrist?
If he’s gonna do it, he should at list get the stereotype right.
Puerto Rican jokes should involve bananas, Chupacabras and the Unemployment Office, not piñatas and sombreros.
and a lot of salsa with merengue…
I think Mr. Bok’s cartoon might have been saying something to the effect of “Obama will be quite happy to encourage Republicans to attack Ms. Sotomayor, because then they will look bad and the Latino vote will slip further towards the Democrats.”
Chip Bok is generally not one of the worst of the conservative cartoonists. Check out Glenn McCoy or Mike Lester sometime. In fact, I think Mike Lester had one published yesterday that made full use of a “Chinese people can’t pronounce words properly ha ha” joke. And he also claimed the stimulus is worse than the Holocaust.
Meh. Of course ethnicity is fair game for political cartoonists, they just run the danger of making themselves look stupid (as in this case) when they do it badly.
What ashames me of my southern brethren is how many of them cling to our european roots while at the same time not realizing all of them have what we have been bred to hate. A national healthcare system.
Fear not people, for they will never learn and only succeed in destroying their own souls while thinking they have destroyed yours.
It saddens me that ppl in this country only focus on race, gender, sexuality etc. As a way to judge a person’s abilities. If ms sotomayor is the best candidate than she shuld be applauded for that not for being the first Latina. & that cartonist is a jerk n shuld pull his head out of his a$$ long enough to realize what he drew is disgusting and shuld be ignored.
@osocubano: thank you for the laugh
S Belle:
Not to mention that Spain is a part of Europe, and the diaspora’s heritage is thus essentially a European one.
@ousslander:
Happy to be of service.