It doesn't. It's a pretty good cartoon, I think. Those guys are either counter-phobic, and really do see racism where it isn't, or they're trying to pull chains.
Condi doesn't have thick, or fat, stereotypical African labial development, and the cartoon doesn't convey that she does. It would be easy enough to demonstrate this by producing links to examples of racist caricatures of Africans. I won't do that, but anyone who is amazed to hear this news about what racist imagery actually looks like is free to blow their minds by googling.
cep-news.org
What Condi does have is a rather pendulous lower lip that appears more pendulous and pronounced than it really is because of a chin that recedes in relation to it. This has been shown in the caricature. Caricatures exaggerate and in their nature are unkind, of course. Condi's upper lip is neither thick nor thin -- but she calls attention to her lips with faithful application of an unusually dark lipstick. Her normal lip/mouth movements are more noticeable than they would be if either of two things that are the case, weren't the case: One, if her lipstick were not so dark, and two, if her teeth were not unusually large for the scale of her facial features and facial bone structure.
A further influence on the caricature is the theme of the cartoon. She was portrayed as a parrot.
Here's a cartoon of a parrot.
biblepicturegallery.com
Being portrayed as a parrot, Condi is in the act, in the drawing, of making utterances. From the photo, blabbing is what the cartoonist had in mind.
So: a pendulous lower lip, a small chin, large teeth, the inevitable very dark lipstick, and the parrot conceit, that is, parrot-as-mouthpiece, will yield something like that cartoon.
Those who claim they saw racism in that caricature were playing a little game. Either that or displaying ignorance of the nature of political cartooning.
Projection is another possibility.
Including sexism in the attribution is so dumb that it makes me think it was just being silly for the fun of it, though. |
