When I first saw the editorial cartoon on the news the description made it sound like there was a piece missing and they were highlighting the incendiary part. A few hours later I got an email from my father, which was part of an email chain mail, which talked about the racism of the cartoon.

“There they go again,” I thought to myself. I thought someone jumped on the obvious little part of the news and didn’t get the whole story. I was so up in arms about someone not getting the full story I decided to write this article and show the whole cartoon in context.

Well, don’t I feel like an idiot now!

I got to the Page 6 editorial section and guess what? This was the whole cartoon. No panel before it mentioning the chimpanzee incident. No nuanced context to chart how you go from a rampaging chimpanzee to Obama and the stimulus package. Nope, what you see is what you get.

No wonder people got pissed off!

After I saw the whole picture, saw there was no context to it, I struggled to see, to try and fit how the chimpanzee rampage went to the stimulus package. I tried to figure out what the artist might have thought. In other words, I really tried to look at the image objectively and tried to find how I could explain this as not being racist.

I can’t.

I feel about this the same way I felt about the Obama food stamp cartoon that came out during the election. I wanted to give benefit of the doubt, but once I saw the full image, once I heard the ‘explanation’ of the person who passed it on, ignorance is not an excuse that can’t be used for showing such racist filth. Considering the history of black people in this country, you would think the artist, the editorial staff, the printer; someone in the chain of command at the paper would see this and understand how MANY people would find it offensive. You would figure even if it passed though all those eyes and made it to print, after getting thousands of protesting emails you would figure someone would fall on the sword and apologize, not come up with a weak comment talking about the greater context of the editorial. If it takes you that long to explain it then it’s not that clear.

So, New York Post editorial board, you didn’t think an illustration of two police officers shooting a monkey and saying “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill” wasn’t going to be interpreted as racist? Shame on you!