Were Charlie Hebdo Cartoons Too Racist To Run in U.S. Media?

  

The American media doesn't run cartoons with African-American politicians looking like big-lipped "Little Black Sambo".  Neither had they run any of the Charlie Hebdo Cartoons that precipitated the tragic attack in Paris, because they were xenophobic, racist and offensive.  Would you consider cartoons showing nuns masturbating, Muhammad in pornographic poses or Boko Haram sex slaves depicted as welfare queens, politically informative or funny?  

The murder of 10 innocent journalists in Paris and the subsequent attacks that killed four hostages are reprehensible crimes.  But tragically, that doesn't make the Charlie Hebdo victims martyrs for the cause of free speech.   The New York Times has an insightful article entitled:  Charlie Hebdo Attack Chills Satirists and Prompts a Debate.  It cites an essay written by Jacob Canfield, a 24-year-old cartoonist in Ann Arbor, Mich.,who argued that however sympathetic the public was to the tragedy that befell Charlie Hebdo, it might not want to blindly repost cartoons, which were in fact offensive "super-racist material".  Canfield noted:

Charlie Hebdo is a French satirical newspaper. Its staff is white. Its cartoons often represent a certain, virulently racist brand of French xenophobia. While they generously claim to ‘attack everyone equally,’ the cartoons they publish are intentionally anti-Islam, and frequently sexist and homophobic. 

All societies have standards of decency, which are arrived at either through religion, tradition or  consensus, with this last being the path taken by secular democracies like the U.S. and Western European nations. This is not an easy process, however.  It can be wrenching, chaotic and slow.

Americans believe in free speech.  But there are a thousand subjects I can rattle off the top of my head that the public would find offensive, decide that it had nothing to do with free speech and certainly would not have found funny.  When's the last time you saw a U.S. newspaper printing a cartoon of a pedophile having his way with a toddler?

It is sad but not surprising that this French tragedy is occurring at a time when anti-Muslim xenophobia has reached a fever pitch in that nation.   Admittedly, the U.S. still has a long way to go, in terms of broadening and deepening its cultural sense of itself to accommodate religions and ethnicities that did not come over on the Mayflower.   But the French might learn a few lessons from the few successes we have had, for instance,  in re-defining what the American First Family can look like.