'Daily Triplicate' Editor Addresses Reader Reaction to Obama 'Kool-Aid' Cartoon

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.