Australia has a rich tradition of editorial cartooning, and Johannes Leak is shaping up as one of the greats. It’s not entirely surprising, perhaps: his father, the late Bill Leak, was indisputably one of the best ever. Johannes has inherited not just his father’s sharp eye and draftsmanship, but his unerring talent for pricking the over-inflated bubbles of elite self-righteousness.
“If you had to define humour in a single phrase,” wrote George Orwell. “You might define it as dignity sitting on a tin-tack. Whatever destroys dignity, and brings down the mighty from their seats, preferably with a bump, is funny. And the bigger they fall, the bigger the joke.”
By that metric, Johannes Leak has just told the joke of the year.
At the same time, like his late father, Leak has mercilessly exposed the deep-rooted racism of the left. And they are not at all happy about it.
What has the left flock all fluttering and squawking is Johannes Leak’s cartoon lampooning Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s words about “brown and black girls”. But there was not a single feather ruffled about the terms when Biden originally used them.
The irony of the left’s shrieking outrage over Leak’s cartoon is that he has, almost verbatim, used Biden’s own words.
It’s another example of the imputation that everybody on the right is racist and nobody on the left could possibly be.
Those on the left are so blinkered ideologically that they cannot see, or cannot admit, that their condescending identity politics and tokenism are rooted in racism.
Keep in mind: the Democrats have not just nominated an old, white man with a decidedly problematic history on racial politics (from eulogising racist “Dixiecrat” Storm Thurmond, to co-writing the infamous 1994 law that paved the way for mass incarceration of black Americans), not to mention some disturbing habits in the proximity of little girls.
In their stampede to push Biden’s campaign, they are prepared to ignore his racist remarks about “brown and black girls” and (disturbingly) his repeated assertion to the African-American community: “If you have a problem figuring out if you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
Biden’s “Brown girl” (his words) has more than enough of her own baggage, be it her descent from slave owners (enough to get her shoved in a harbour, if she weren’t a Democrat), or her record of incarcerating thousands of black Americans – including withholding exculpatory evidence to secure convictions. Then there’s her declaration, during the primaries, that she believed the women accusing her new boss of sexual misconduct.
But who cares about all that? Kamala Harris’s sole qualifications, as touted by Biden himself, are her sex and race (a decidedly fluid entity; the half-Jamaican, half-Indian Harris bizarrely claims to be “African-American”). Reducing her, as all “identity” groups, to the colour of their skin and their gender. Not human beings who deserve to be recognised on the basis of merit.
But instead of being offended by this blatant playing of the identity politics card, which stereotypes people with racial tropes, the left takes to the barricades over a cartoon that uses Biden’s own words against him[…]
Imagine the left’s reaction had US President Donald Trump announced the appointments of Small Business Administrator Jovina Carranza as “bringing hope to Mexican girls” or Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao as “bringing hope to Asian girls” — let alone referring to them as perhaps “brown” or “yellow”.
One only has to remember the meltdown over former president George Bush (the elder) affectionately referring to his part-Mexican grandchildren as “the brown ones”. Those kids weren’t offended by their doting grandfather, but the left took it on themselves to be offended for them.
Because the left just know better than their racial pets.
It is assumed by those on the left that they know better than we do, that they know how we think and feel — or how we should think and feel[…]
Why do those on the outraged left feel they have every right to speak on behalf of “brown and black women and girls” around the world, such as me? We little brown and black girls can speak for ourselves.
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