Jesse Jackson as Steppin’ Fetchit. Mexican president Vicente Fox as a dirt farmer scrambling to gain entry into the United States. Scott Evertz, the openly gay director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy, as a limp-wristed transvestite saying he just wants to spruce up the White House.
Readers wouldn’t tolerate those stereotypical depictions – which were made up for the point of illustration – so why have anti-Asian stereotypes been so prominently employed in the wake of the Chinese spy plane crisis?
Consider:
- Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Pat Oliphant, never one to shy away from controversy, ignited a furor last week when he published a cartoon depicting Jiang Zemin as a crazed waiter with buck teeth and thick glasses trying to serve Uncle Sam a plate of cat gizzards. “Apologize, lotten Amellican!” he screams.
- An expressionless Chinese man stares out of the April 16 cover of Business Week. His left half is clad in Communist Chinese military regalia, while his right half is in business attire, and he wields a wireless phone in a clenched fist. The image, combined with the caption – “Contain or engage: the U.S. dilemma over a growing power” – suggests that lurking beneath China’s push for free trade is the threat of militant totalitarianism. Even if a businessman is Chinese American, he is portrayed here as an invader, looking to conquer.
- At the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference in Washington, D.C., editors stressed the importance of newsroom diversity. But later, the editors also laughed it up at a comedy troupe skit about the plane incident in which a white man wearing a black wig and thick glasses impersonated a Chinese man shouting, “Ching-chong, ching-chong!”
Stereotypes are rarely flattering. Their use may be inherently problematic. But satire and commentary rely on caricature, exaggeration, and lampooning. President Clinton was often depicted with a bulbous nose and ruddy cheeks. President George W. Bush is often shown with ears of Alfred E. Neuman proportions.
The difference is that Asians of varying nationalities are lumped together and caricatured as an entire race, using stereotypes that have been strangely resilient in an era of political correctness.
Clinton does have a remarkable nose. Bush does have ears that stick out. But Jiang Zemin does not have buckteeth and Chinese people do not eat cat gizzards. What is ascribed (incorrectly) to the many has been grafted onto the one.
Keith Woods, Poynter ethics faculty member, says a lack of dialogue about Asian stereotypes makes their use not only more prevalent, but also more insidious. “We have become very practiced about recognizing and objecting to stereotypes in the context of [black and white],” says Woods. But when it comes to the depiction of Asians, “there are fewer watchdogs with their eyes open. . . . It gets through with less objection.”
“It seems to happen whenever there is a negative story concerning an Asian country,” says Victor Panichkul, president of the Asian American Journalists Association. “There’s always a catalyst and then it seems to really mushroom from there, and there’s this regression to the use of stereotypes.”
Panichkul cites last year’s coverage of Wen Ho Lee, the Chinese scientist accused of stealing American nuclear secrets. Although all but one of the 59 charges against Lee were eventually dropped, the media were quick to convict him. (After the case against Lee fell apart, The New York Times took the unusual step of publishing a 1,600-word article saying it had rushed to judgment.)
Perhaps Asians are still perceived as outsiders and foreigners in a way that Hispanics and African Americans are not, says Evelyn Hsu, former president of the Asian American Journalists Association and director of Poynter’s high school journalism program.
“Cartoonists have the ability to synthesize so many streams of thought into one image,” Hsu says. “But when it comes to this topic [of Asians], it always reverts to the crudest image. Is it because we’re not fully integrated that you can use other cultural markers to signify us?”
For example, when relations are tense between the United States and China, anti-Chinese jokes often focus on stereotypes of Chinese-Americans, not the Communist Chinese. Jonah Goldberg, editor of National Review Online, wrote on April 4: “I will be in favor of apologizing [to China for the spy plane incident] the moment they apologize for all of those menus they keep leaving outside my front door.”
This is a joke he has used at least six times for NRO in the last 24 months to comment on everything from China’s WTO aspirations to its alleged espionage of nuclear secrets. That does not mean, however, that Goldberg has a grudge against the Chinese, he tells Poynter.org.
Lee Salem, editorial director at Universal Press Syndicate, says stereotype is a “necessary” part of working in editorial cartooning. “Given the panoply of tools that are available to artists, some rely on caricature, some rely on stereotype, some rely on irony,” says Salem, who edits Oliphant’s cartoons. “The art form requires the reliance on stereotype oftentimes to make the message quickly available to readers.” However, Salem says, one of the weaknesses of stereotyping is that it often makes people so angry that the point of the cartoon gets lost.
“I’ve had groups of schoolteachers call me screaming at me because they are characterized as old and fat and carrying rulers, and they aren’t all old and fat and carrying rulers,” says Signe Wilkinson, a cartoonist at the Philadelphia Daily News. “Cartoonists are the keepers and creators of the stereotypes. That’s what we do, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing.”
Oliphant seemed to agree with that sentiment in a 1997 interview with Harry Katz. In reference to his drawings about figures such as Al Sharpton and Alan Greenspan, Oliphant says, “These are people who just have an appearance that lends itself to caricature, and you’re not going after their personal beliefs, or their race, or their ethnic origins.”
Stereotypes create a minefield not only for cartoonists, but also for editors. “The St. Petersburg Times or any other newspaper that published Pat Oliphant’s cartoon is as culpable as he is,” Woods says. (The St. Petersburg Times is owned by the Poynter Institute.)
For Woods, the use of negative stereotype is never appropriate. “You are trading on something that has been used in our history as tools of oppression and genocide. We’re not talking about his right to caricature in his drawing. It’s the arena in which he’s working that’s so dangerous and destructive.”
So is going after a person’s race completely off-limits for the commentator? After Salon wrote a scathing review of his April 4 column, Goldberg responded on National Review Online: “What I did … was make fun of some Chinese stereotypes, as I often do with Jews, gays and, most of all, the French,” he wrote. “They may have been dumb jokes. They may have been juvenile. But they weren’t racist and it’s dumb to say they were.”
When asked by Poynter.org why he had repeated the joke so many times, Goldberg said, “I wasn’t trying to make a profound statement about Chinese Americans. I was trying to make a light-hearted joke that played upon what is in my mind among the most harmless stereotypes around.”
Maybe Goldberg could have picked his battles more carefully.
For Wilkinson, stereotype is a tool to be used carefully, and only to send a message: “The difference is whether you use the stereotypes just to define and make a point, or do you use them to ridicule the people just for the sport of making them look stupid.”
