Sunday Morning Cartoon: Another Message Lost in Translation

Comedy can be one of the most productive ways to talk about race and class. The genre depends on using situations accessible to large numbers of people, which is often the first challenge in race work. The intended levity allows people to hide their feelings of discomfort, anger or confusion behind laughter. And if someone gets offended, well, we can always claim they just didn't "get the joke", thus making the problem theirs and not our own.

Comic strips are just one of a million ways social critics can talk about our everyday realities. This comic was featured in the Chicago Tribune today, June 28th, 2009. The name of the strip is "Watch Your Head" and it is written and illustrated by Atlanta-based (and Trinidadian-born) artist Cory Thomas. For more information about Thomas, visit his website: www.plantcory.com.

My reading of the comic is this: One rich and academically non-gifted college student comes home for the summer to a mother who wants him to be responsible for his bad grades and a father who not only does not hold his son responsible for his bad grades, but refuses to do so because he believes that is a behavior attributed to middle class peoples.

Ok, so the idea of a father not wanting to raise his kid "middle-class" while dressed in a suit and talking about a yacht and vacation house (two things that require more than middle-class standing to obtain) is illogical, thus the joke. And I get the social commentary here. Although I don't think that personal responsibility is the only thing that will enable people to move up to, or maintain their standing in, the middle class, it certainly helps.

But what leaves me scratching my head is that I read this in the Chicago Tribune, a paper that is very expensive (as far as newspapers go) and is pretty clearly targeted towards middle-class audiences. So...why that content in a middle-class paper? So middle class blacks (and whites and people of colors for that matter) can be given more reason to look down on non-middle class peoples? Perpetuate the myth of the American dream?

(Thomas, according to his website, is a two-degree recipient of Howard University, a school known by reputation for being exceedingly bent on producing middle-class citizen and unforgiving of everything else. But this is a side bar...who knows what is on Thomas' mind?)

Yeah, ok, "Watch Your Head" is run in papers besides the Trib. Infact, here is the list (according to Thomas' website): Chicago Tribune (IL), Washington Post (DC), Boston Herald (MA), New York Newsday (NY), St. Petersburg Times (FL), Florida Times Union (FL), Dallas Morning News (TX), The Charlotte Observer (NC), The New Mexican (NM), LINK/Virginian-Pilot (VA), Stockton Record (CA), The Kenosha News (WI), Highland Park Mirror (NJ), The Cleveland News Leader (MS) and Trinidad Guardian (TT). I know nothing about any of these papers except the Trib, Post and Herald. And those three, I think, serve pretty much the same purpose just in different geographical locatations.

This feels like yet another in a long line of calls for the lower black classes to assume personal responsibility (see President Obama's 2009 Father's Day Speech, Cosby and Pouissant's 2007 Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors or Shelby Steele and any self-proclaimed black conservitive). The message, of course is good. When isn't a message of personal responsibility good?

But we do seem to hear it more directed towards populations of color than not. There is a reason for that: it's a numbers game. White populations are not telling each other to pull it together because there are a lot more of them than populations of color. There are so many people, there will always be a supply of white individuals to take those topsspots. In the case of white America, it would be counter productive for cultural leaders to call for personal empowerment.

So while these "call to action" speeches and campagins are needed and encouraging, there is no way to make them not feel awkward. One of the criticisms of these speeches, ralleys and campaigns is that they are embarrsing, they shoot a spotlight on communities already struggling. I don't know how to avoid that. Since whiteness defines normalitiy, anything that our mainstream culture doesn't do is going to be abnormal. And while our culture endlessly produces sublte messages about the American dream and bootstraps, it is not the same stark image of this comic.

What I find more embarrasing is when these "get your act together" messages come in completely illogical packages. Thomas writing a comic strip aimed at lower-class black populations in a middle-class newspaper? Cosby, Pouissant, and Steele writing dense and expensive books to parents they chide for not reading enough? Please. The only people getting these kinds of messages are middle class people who will either further their belief of "the lazy black syndrome" or look at these out of touch cultural critics with the same mix of pitty and disgust the critics look at poor populations. And things continue on the way they were before.