'Daily Triplicate' Editor Addresses Reader Reaction to Obama 'Kool-Aid' Cartoon
Posted: 10/30/2008 | By: E&P Staff
Richard Wiens, editor of the Daily Triplicate in Crescent City, Calif., has penned a column about some readers' negative reactions to a recent Gary McCoy editorial cartoon, in which former Secretary of State Collin Powell drinking Kool-Aid in his endorsement of Barack Obama.
The cartoon, he writes, "depicted Republican Colin Powell at a podium announcing his endorsement of Democrat Barack Obama. Someone held out a pitcher of Kool-Aid and asked, "More?" to which Powell responded, 'Please.'"
I thought this was one of those unbiased, down-the-middle cartoons. I considered the drink to represent the bitter medicine that a Republican was presumably swallowing in endorsing a Democrat, a reference to the infamous vat of poison Kool-Aid in the 1978 Guyana mass-suicide."
Two readers have told me they saw it as indulging a crass racial stereotype ? that black people are presumed to drink Kool-Aid in the same way they're said to eat lots of watermelon and fried chicken."
Check out the column in full, here.
The cartoon, he writes, "depicted Republican Colin Powell at a podium announcing his endorsement of Democrat Barack Obama. Someone held out a pitcher of Kool-Aid and asked, "More?" to which Powell responded, 'Please.'"
I thought this was one of those unbiased, down-the-middle cartoons. I considered the drink to represent the bitter medicine that a Republican was presumably swallowing in endorsing a Democrat, a reference to the infamous vat of poison Kool-Aid in the 1978 Guyana mass-suicide."
Two readers have told me they saw it as indulging a crass racial stereotype ? that black people are presumed to drink Kool-Aid in the same way they're said to eat lots of watermelon and fried chicken."
Check out the column in full, here.