The Australian’s racist Kamala Harris cartoon shows why diversity in newsrooms matters
On Friday, The Australian published a cartoon that has been widely condemned as racist. Janak Rogers, in this crossposting from The Conversation, argues that the cartoon is more evidence that our newsrooms need to be diverse.
A Johannes Leak cartoon published in The Australian today, in which US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is depicted calling his vice-presidential running mate Kamala Harris a “little brown girl”, has drawn widespread condemnation.
Several Australian politicians, including former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, have described the cartoon as racist, as have a suite of journalists and media observers (ex-Labor leader Mark Latham said he loved it).
I am firmly in the camp that thinks this is a racist and sexist cartoon. As a journalism lecturer with an ongoing interest in the diversity of Australian media, I think today’s outrage shows there is still much work ahead in making newsrooms less overwhelmingly white.
Carolyn Kaster/AP
Context matters
My own view is this cartoon should never have been published, and it has no place in Australian media. I’m glad to see Australian politicians and public figures coming forward and saying it’s unacceptable.
The Australian’s editor-in-chief, Chris Dore, told Guardian Australia that Leak’s cartoon “was quoting Biden’s words” from a tweet the US politician issued this week about young girls drawing inspiration from Harris.
“When Johannes used those words, expressed in a tweet by Biden yesterday, he was highlighting Biden’s language and apparent attitudes, not his own,” Dore told Guardian Australia. “The intention of the commentary in the cartoon was to ridicule racism, not perpetuate it.”
I think Dore’s explanation is unconvincing. Biden’s tweet is clearly referring to girls who look up to Harris. It’s a massive sidestep to say Biden is talking down to his recent vice-presidential pick. The contexts are totally different.
I cannot imagine The Australian published today’s cartoon without knowing it would provoke outrage – and that this outrage would delight parts of their audience. Part of the delight is in the outrage it provokes.
Australia looks backward
It’s hardly the first time, either, that a racist cartoon published in our mainstream media makes us look backward and out of step as a country.
Think back to the embarrassing episode of blackface on Hey Hey It’s Saturday in 2009, or Johannes Leak’s father Bill’s cartoons in the past, and the Herald Sun’s widely condemned Mark Knight cartoon depiction of Serena Williams in 2018. (It should be noted, the Press Council ruled the latter “non-racist” and Knight defended it – unconvincingly – by saying he had “absolutely no knowledge” of the Jim Crow-era cartoons of African-Americans.)
These examples show the work of making sure Australian newsrooms are diverse is ongoing.
There’s still so much room for improvement when it comes to editorial decisions, reporting and making sure we have a range of stories told about who we are as a country. That hasn’t been done well so far in Australia and cannot be done well while the media is largely dominated by white men.
As I wrote in an earlier Conversation article, despite a quarter of Australians being born overseas and nearly half having at least one parent who was born overseas, our media organisations remain blindingly white.
A 2016 PriceWaterhouseCoopers report found 82.7% of Australia’s media workers speak just one language, and speak only English at home. There’s a high prevalence of media workers in the inner Sydney suburbs, it found, concluding that a lack of diversity – in ethnicity, gender and age – is holding back industry growth.
Unless these trends are addressed, we will continue to see work like Leak’s cartoon making it through the gate.
A long history
There’s a long history of racist cartoons in Australian media. What’s different is the response. Today’s cartoon has blown up on Twitter — and yes, I realise it is a place closely watched by Australian politicians and media people but largely ignored by most Australians — but at least the online outcry allows some kind of accountability.
In the past, the media could publish racist cartoons without being called to account. These days, the pushback is manifesting in real time.
Should we all have just shaken our heads and ignored it? I don’t think so. Once something like that is published, the horse has bolted and you have to respond. I think collectively ignoring a racist cartoon won’t remove its prominence or significance.
We are forced to revisit this debate every time a racist cartoon or article is published, or a racist comment put to air. I hope that by revisiting it forcefully enough and by making these points enough times, the conversation moves forward and we can make some progress. I also hope racist cartoons are never published in Australia’s mainstream media again. But I won’t be holding my breath.
Janak Rogers, Associate Lecturer, Broadcast Journalism, RMIT University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Joe Biden
Johannes Leak
Kamala Harris
Kamala Harris cartoon
The Australian
The Conversation
Are you not aware that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden do not like each other and Kamala Harris has a long list of unsupportive postures to Biden?
Maybe do some research before you make a call on whether or not he is talking down to her.
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An expat friend who lives in the States was the first to bring this to my attention. At first, I thought it had to be a fake – surely, even The Oz wouldn’t publish *that*.
Christ on a bike. Johannes is certainly “honouring” his father – in the worst possible way. Beyond disappointing.
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Optics vs Intent. Interpretation vs Substance.
The cartoon looks like a critique of Biden using the systemic racism narrative to win an election and exposing the irony of his condescending language. Even as a left-leaning thinker I find that blatantly obvious and explains why I seem to have more in common now with the centre right than I do with my own political constituency.
As much as I’d like to see more diversity in our media, I’d also like to see more cognisance of optics. The Australian may well have understood the response this cartoon would generate, although I argue not to the degree which it has. They have failed to see the bigger picture here. The audience also has a responsibility of their own, which is to understand the substance. We need both to have a conversation in good faith in order to get anywhere culturally.
The current cultural hegemony is well and truly to the left, which for whatever reason, seems to be going pretty haywire. Thus, it’s never been more important to engage in nuanced conversation between left and right. The cartoon in question isn’t nuanced (a fundamental requirement for the time we’re in) and neither are the “woke”, who’ve metastasised an otherwise credible BLM movement for their own feelings of moral superiority, and are all for “diversity and inclusion” except for when it conflicts with their ideology.
Can somebody explain to me where the grown-ups went? It’d be good to have some of them in our institutions. Black, white, brown. All colours for all people but just some grown-ups, please?
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Would love to see your evidence that Harris and Biden do not like each other, given that she was one of the first prominent Democrats to endorse his presidential bid and he has just selected her as his VP candidate. Seems like a strange line of logic to suggest that he was “talking down” to his running mate at a public campaign event.
Maybe do some research, perhaps?
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You are the one who could research. Biden didn’t say the words in the cartoon. He made a general remark, such is common in such cases, that kids would be inspired to see a woman of colour in the VP stakes. Nothing at all like the comment in the Leak image and nothing like the rationale you offer, incorrectly.
The cartoonist is a vapid desperado, chasing a version of celebrity.
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What a petulant, false narrative this article is. An embittered millennial pseudo-activist no doubt, calling everything on Earth to the Moon “racist”, with zero self awareness. BTW, you might want to bin it and publish an apology before you’re the receiving end of a stomach-churning letter from Johannes leak’s defamation layers. It crosses the line. It will prove very expensive.
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Its promoting thought and discussion on an important issue. Is that a bad thing? What would be worse is a world where cartoonists – everyone – is too scared to think and speak. That’s where we are heading.
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@Michael look at you raging with long-words against millenials and gleefully frothing on about people getting hit by ‘stomach-churning’ lawsuits. I bet your co-workers are really missing you, buddy.
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@Corey
This is probably the most intelligent comment I have seen on Mumbrella.
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oh so the left are outraged when someone used the exact and language that bidden himself used. He referred to “little black and brown kids everywhere”. So the cartoon lampoons him on his own language and somehow it’s RRRRRRRacist!!!
You woke left are a joke. Your trying to collapse society with your perpetual outrage bulksh#t. Everything’s racist and your outraged at everything. The other side didn’t give a toss. Idiots all of you. Another prime example here on display.
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Great comment Corey. If only public forums demonstrated this level of nuance & maturity in it’s content. I seldom read Mumbrella, however by all appearances they, like other entities, have become an extension of the woke mob ( I could say culture but I feel mob is a more fitting description ).
As Corey has already mentioned, the commentary within the cartoon should be obvious. Context matters – possibly the only thing in the article I agree with. According to the author, the problem is white men. Perhaps Mumbrella should be Wokebrella…
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