Black Reaction to Tasteless White Humor.

Attorney General Eric Holder,
Attorney General of the United States of America
U S Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, D C 20530-0001

Dear Attorney General:

I know that I do not have to tell you or most Americans that for the past eight years the Constitution of the United States has been decimated and the Rule of Law has been totally ignored.

I inferred from listening to candidate Obama and now President Obama that one of the important initiatives of his Administration is to restore the application of both the word and the spirit of the Rule of Law and to abide by a full implementation of the Constitution of the United States of America.

Based on this premise, I am calling your attention to an extremely dangerous and damaging climate and atmosphere in this country where a cartoonist is allowed to depict the President of the United States as a chimpanzee murdered by two uniformed policemen. The imagery that this conjures up is not at all humorous. It is vile, vicious, malicious and inciteful which most certainly poses a threat on the life of the President of the United States. This would not be tolerated in most countries throughout the world; and, must not be tolerated here in a country whose credo is that citizens are guaranteed the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I assume that that applies equally to the President of the United States. In looking up the definition of the word, treason, I find that an act of treason is an act wherein the life of the head of state is threatened, the act is treasonous. I, therefore, call upon you, as the Nation's chief law enforcement officer, whose duty it is is to insure that the human and civil rights of citizens are protected, to arrest and charge the cartoonist, Sean Delonas, with high crimes and treason. Delonas has planted the seed where haters, the lunatic fringe and copy catters could easily be aroused to fulfill the mission of the message of the cartoon.

There can be no denial that the cartoon specifically references President Barack Obama, when the words, "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill." Who is considered the sponsor or advocate of the stimulus plan now known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act? We have attributed ownership of that plan to the President. To add insult to injury juxtaposed in close proximity is a page which addresses the President's stimulus package. When one connects the dots, the end point leads one directly to the President of the United States.

Using a broad interpretation of torture, meaning extreme anguish of body or mind; agony, many Americans are very anxious and agonize over the safety of the Present of the United States who has had several death threats directed at him. I consider this not only traumatic for those of us who believe in the Rule of Law, but we feel tortured by being in a constant state of anxiety. This should not be tolerated in a Democracy. The mental health of the Nation is more important than one individual's devious behavior.

I will not rest until I see Sean Delonas removed from the general population. Ours is a popular President according to the most recent poll where President Obama outranks Jesus in popularity. As such, such a person is a figure of envy and a target for the deranged. Delonas appears, in his inflammatory cartoon, to be appealing to the base instincts of human behavior and that is dangerous.

Expecting swift action,



Helen L. Burleson, Doctor of Public Administration
(708)747-0919


(Feb. 19, 2009) | The New York Post issued an apology “to those who were offended,” while maintaining that the cartoon was not intended to be racist.

Original Post | Gov. David A. Paterson, Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, the Rev. Al Sharpton and others expressed concern on Wednesday morning over an editorial cartoon in The New York Post that showed a police officer telling his colleague who just shot a chimpanzee, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”

Critics said the cartoon, drawn by Sean Delonas, implicitly compared President Obama with the primate and evoked a history of racist imagery of Blacks. The chimpanzee was an apparent reference to the 200-pound pet chimpanzee that was shot dead by a police officer in Stamford, Conn., on Monday evening, after it mauled a friend of his owner.

Speaking at a conference of the New York Academy of Medicine on Wednesday morning, Mr. Paterson said that while he had not seen the cartoon, he believed that The Post should explain it. Given the possibility that some people could conclude the cartoon had a racial subtext, Mr. Paterson said the newspaper needed to clarify its meaning.

“It would be very important for The New York Post to explain what the cartoon was intended to portray,” Mr. Paterson said in response to a question about whether the cartoon’s depiction of a monkey was racist, as Mr. Sharpton has suggested. “Obviously those types of associations have been made. They do feed a kind of negative and stereotypical way that people think. But I think if it’s enough that people are raising this issue, I hope they would clarify.”

Senator Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, said in a statement: “I found the Post cartoon offensive and purposefully hurtful. This type of cartoon serves no productive role in the public discourse.”

City Councilman Leroy G. Comrie Jr., a Queens Democrat, called for a boycott of the newspaper. “To run such a violent, racist cartoon is an insult to all New Yorkers,” he said in a statement. “This was an unfortunate incident in which a human being was seriously injured- not an opportunity to sling dangerous rhetoric. It is my belief that The New York Post owes an immediate apology to this city for demonstrating such terrible judgment and insensitivity.”

Mr. Comrie urged New Yorkers to “demonstrate their displeasure with the New York Post by writing letters to their advertisers and simply stop purchasing a publication that clearly has no respect or sensitivity for people of color.”

On Wednesday evening, the Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz, also weighed in, saying:

My office has received complaints about this so-called cartoon, and I can see why. If its disturbing connection to reprehensible racial stereotyping was unintentional, it just proves once again how disconnected The Post is from New York City and its residents. And for such a weak joke? There’s no excuse. The ‘editors’ overseeing such content should be ashamed—and held accountable. The Post is always quick on the attack, so now we ask that they do the right thing and apologize to all who were offended by this tasteless cartoon.

A newsroom employee at The Post, who spoke on condition of anonymity because employees were not permitted to comment on the matter, said its newsroom received many calls of complaints on Wednesday morning after the publication of the cartoon. “Every line was lit up for several hours,” the employee said. “The phones on the city desk have never rung like that before.” Many Post staff members were dismayed by the cartoon, the employee added.

The cartoon was on Page 12 of Wednesday’s edition, next to the paper’s Page Six gossip column. On Page 11, the reverse side, was a photograph of President Obama signing the stimulus bill into law in Denver.

Mr. Sharpton, who has been an unflattering subject in cartoons drawn by Mr. Delonas in The Post, said in a statement on his Web site:

The cartoon in today’s New York Post is troubling at best, given the racist attacks throughout history that have made African-Americans synonymous with monkeys. One has to question whether the cartoonist is making a less than casual inference to this form of racism when, in the cartoon, the police say after shooting a chimpanzee, “now they will have to find someone else to write the stimulus bill.”

Being that the stimulus bill has been the first legislative victory of President Barack Obama (the first African American president) and has become synonymous with him it is not a reach to wonder whether the Post cartoonist was inferring that a monkey wrote it?

In a statement, Col Allan, editor in chief of The Post, denied Mr. Sharpton’s assertion that the cartoon was “racially charged.” Mr. Allan said:

The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington’s efforts to revive the economy. Again, Al Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist.

A 2001 cartoon by Mr. Delonas depicted Fernando Ferrer, the Bronx borough president who was seeking the Democratic nomination for mayor that year, kissing the buttocks of Mr. Sharpton — a depiction that was widely criticized as demeaning, and even racist.

In a phone interview, Mr. Sharpton said he planned to hold a protest outside The Post’s Midtown offices at noon on Thursday.

“What does shooting a chimpanzee have to do with a stimulus bill?” Mr. Sharpton said. “This raises all the racial stereotypes we are trying to get away from in this country.”

He added: “I’m not speaking on behalf of the president or the chimpanzee. I‘m speaking on behalf of the offended African-American community.”

Mr. Delonas has drawn ire from a number of groups for past cartoons in The Post. In 2006, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation denounced a cartoon of his that showed a man carrying a sheep wearing a bridal veil to a “New Jersey Marriage Licenses” window, a reference to the State Supreme Court’s ruling that year requiring the state to grant same-sex couples the same legal rights and benefits as heterosexual couples through civil unions.

Andrew Rojecki, associate professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago and co-author of “The Black Image in the White Mind” (University of Chicago Press, 2000), a study of racial attitudes and their relationship to mass media content, said he found the cartoon deeply troubling.

“Of course I would say it’s racist,” Professor Rojecki said in an interview. “There’s no question about it.”

He added, “The cartoonist, whether he did this consciously or not, was drawing upon a very historically deep source of images about African-Americans that African-Americans do not have a lot of control over.”

Such images are harmful on a number of levels, he said. “Even people who do not harbor deep-seated prejudices, because they have stereotypes deeply embedded in their consciousness, may react unconsciously when those associations are triggered,” he said.

Professor Rojecki rejected Mr. Allan’s assertion that the cartoon was devoid of racial content. “It strains credulity to imagine that there is any association between a chimpanzee that was shot because it had attacked someone and a bill that has successfully passed through Congress,” he said. “It makes no sense. What possible explanation could there be?”

Jan Nederveen Pieterse, a professor of global studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of “White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture” (Yale University Press, 1995), said, “I agree the cartoon is racist, without a doubt.”

Professor Pieterse, who is Dutch, said that portrayal of non-Westerners as primates became well-established in both the United States and Europe in the late 19th century, and has affected not only Blacks, but also the Irish and Chinese, for example.

“It’s absolutely outrageous,” he said of the cartoon, “and I think people are concerned because it sets a nasty, mean, very aggressive tone. You can’t get any lower.”

(7/29/2009-BOSTON)White Police Officer Calls Prof Henry Gates a jungle monkey.
Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis placed Police Officer Justin Barrett, 36, on administrative leave pending the outcome of a termination hearing.

"Commissioner Davis was made aware of a correspondence with racist remarks and removed the officer of his gun and badge."

The email describes Harvard Professor Doctor Henry Luis Gates, who was arrested and briefly detained earlier this month at Harvard, near Boston, as a "banana-eating jungle monkey" .

The city's mayor, Tom Menino, was quoted referring to Barrett as a "cancer in the department" and calling on him to be fired.

Gates became the center of a national debate on racism when he was charged with disorderly conduct after arguing with police sent to investigate a suspected burglary at his home near Harvard University.

President Barack Obama became embroiled in the uproar when he said police acted "stupidly."

But the email has reignited the controversy and dealt Boston's police a severe image blow just when they and the White House were hoping to calm tensions.

The email allegedly written by Barrett lambasts Gates for getting into an altercation with police.

"I am not a racist, but I am prejudice towards people who are stupid," reads the alleged diatribe -- containing frequent grammatical and spelling errors -- against Gates and local newspaper the Boston Globe.

"He has indeed transcended back to a bumbling jungle monkey."

Racial Bias Rampant in Foster Care System. Black, Hispanic and other minority children in the United States are far more likely than white youngsters to be taken from their homes and placed in foster care according to Steve LeBlanc of the Associated Press.
Racial or ethnic prejudices — conscious or unconscious — can lead social workers to see abuse or neglect where none exists, these experts say. A white social worker in Boston looked at the dark spots on the Black child's body and assumed the youngster had been beaten. The family denied it, but the social worker insisted.
It turned out the child had "Mongolian spots" — harmless skin blotches common among black children. The social worker's mistake was discovered before the parents got into trouble. But researchers and policymakers say such episodes are fairly common.
The experts caution that stereotyping on the part of social workers is just one factor in the racial gap, and probably a small one at that. Other factors — higher rates of poverty, inadequate housing and child care, for example — are believed to be major contributors to abuse and neglect among minorities.
Nevertheless, stereotyping is enough of a concern that cultural-awareness training for social workers has been instituted in 45 states, many of them in the just the past few years, according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.
Nationally, Blacks make up about 15 percent of the childhood population, yet account for 34 percent of children in foster care, according to the GAO report. Black children on average stay in foster care nine months longer than white children, the report said.
The report said "bias or cultural misunderstandings and distrust between child welfare decision makers and the families they serve" was one of several factors accounting for the gap, along with poverty and lack of access to services.
"Once we are reported, we are more likely to be investigated. Once we are investigated, we are more likely to be placed in foster care. Once we are placed in foster care, we are less likely to be returned to our families," said Sondra Jackson, executive director of Black Administrators in Child Welfare.

In overwhelmingly white Utah, Black children were in foster care at more than six times their proportion of the state's population, according to the GAO. In five other states — Wisconsin, Iowa, New Hampshire, Wyoming, and California — black children were four times more likely to end up in foster care.
In Massachusetts, 7 percent of children are Black, but 19 percent children in state care are Black. Hispanics are 11 percent of the child population but 25 percent of those in foster care. White children are 79 percent of the population, but just 60 percent of those in state care.
"People come with biases and how those racial biases play out is of real concern," said Bill Brown, area director for the state Department of Social Services in Boston.
The problem is not just black and white.
When Vietnamese and Cambodian immigrants began moving in large numbers to Lowell, a mill city outside Boston, social workers started hearing troubling reports of children with odd, circular marks on their bodies.
"Our first reaction was that the children were being battered or bruised or spanked," said Zevorah Ortega-Bagni, a state social services investigative supervisor.
Social workers were actually seeing the effects of a traditional healing practice known as "cupping," in which a cup is heated and placed on the skin to draw out illnesses. Far from abuse, the marks were a sign that parents were doing their best to care for their children.
Researchers say minorities are no more likely than whites in similar socio-economic circumstances to abuse or neglect their children. But minorities are more likely to be poor, with blacks nearly four times more likely to live in poverty than others.
Kandida Garcia, a child welfare investigator in Massachusetts, said her Puerto Rican background gives her an edge when dealing with parents of a similar background — especially in emotionally charged situations.
"Another worker may target them as explosive because they are loud in nature, but I would have a different view," she said. "I could explain that this mother is not being aggressive; she is advocating for her child."
Other social workers said it took years of on-the-job experience to recognize their own ill-founded assumptions.
Virginia O'Connell, who has worked as a social worker for three decades, said it wasn't always easy to distinguish between true abuse or neglect and instances in which families were doing their best under difficult circumstances.
"I went out to homes where there were kids sharing mattresses on the floor," O'Connell said. "It was my values versus the customs and values of a family I was visiting. I really had to look at my own values and realize I couldn't make judgments based on those."
In Massachusetts, one of the states to adopt cultural training, the 2,800 social workers and supervisors are shown videos, engage in role-playing and talk about their own heritage and their assumptions about others. An Associated Press reporter asked to sit in on a session but was denied for fear it would inhibit open discussion.
However, the GAO found there was little evidence that such "cultural competency" programs have helped.
Other strategies to reduce the gap include creating multicultural teams of social workers, recruiting minority families as foster parents, and relying more heavily on "kinship caregivers" — aunts, uncles or grandparents who can step in during a crisis.
Frances Darden, a Black woman who has been a foster mother for four children, said the state should recruit more black social workers and foster parents.
"I don't know if they have the experience around our culture to handle the situation," she said. "Our ways might not be the same as they would do."