Responding to criticism that a cartoon depicting undocumented immigrants coming through a window to share Thanksgiving dinner with a white family was racist, an Indiana newspaper edited out the stereotyped housebreaker’s mustache, ostensibly to make the cartoon seem less racist.
The Indianapolis Star ran the cartoon by editorial cartoonist Gary Varvel showing a family coming in through the window to share in the holiday meal, with the house owner announcing to his family and guests, “Thanks to the president’s immigration order we’ll be having extra guests this Thanksgiving.”
In the original version up above the male character has a ball cap over his eyes and a rather prominent mustache, which suggest to many a Hispanic stereotype. After being mocked on Twitter the newspaper decided the best course was to remove the offending mustache.
Yeah, except it WASN'T all better and the outrage continued until the executive editor responded with this:
On Friday, we posted a Gary Varvel cartoon at indystar.com that offended a wide group of readers.
Many of them labeled it as racist. Gary did not intend to be racially insensitive in his attempt to express his strong views about President Barack Obama's decision to temporarily prevent the deportation of millions of immigrants living and working illegally in the United States.
But we erred in publishing it.
Gee, ya think?
My favorite part of this story is that they really believed that the mustache was the problem, and not the showing of dark haired, clearly Hispanic, people invading the home of white people uninvited.
Which of course is exactly the kind of thing that fans the flames of racial hatred in this country.
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