Minority cartoonists to protest under-representation in newspapers

by Marisa Treviño of Latina Lista

11 cartoonists of color will draw the same strip depicting a white reader grumbling about a minority-drawn strip.

A common complaint in the newspaper industry among columnists, cartoonists and editorialists of color is what Latino cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz, who draws the comic La Cucaracha, describes as the “one-minority rule”:

For whatever reason, and I’m sure this is also true of other industries but with newspapers I have personal experience, the assumption is that all people of color tend to think alike.

So why bother employing more than one columnist or cartoonist of the same ethnicity, they’re just going to say the same thing or draw the same strips.

How stupidly wrong and ignorant is that line of thinking? Unfortunately, that archaic attitude prevails too often in the newspaper industry.

Well, some have had enough. To be specific — the cartoonists.

Among the groups who are most affected by this attitude are the cartoonists of color. Today’s comic sections are grossly under representing cartoonists of color.

It’s not unusual to find a Sunday comics section featuring, say 38 full-color comics, and only two are penned by cartoonists of color. You do the math.

Well, 11 cartoonists of color have done the math and they don’t like the answer. So they have banded together to protest in this Sunday’s editions of their comic strips.

Each of the 11 will draw the same comic strip to illustrate this mentality. The strips will depict a white reader grumbling about a minority-drawn strip, complaining that it’s a “Boondocks” rip-off and blaming it on “tokenism.”

Of course, the only drawback to this protest is that your local paper has to carry these cartoons in their line-up — chances are they probably don’t.

Which goes to show that an industry that is bleeding readers at a faster rate than a ship takes on water has a long way to go, with little time, to figure out that people read newspapers for news that is relevant to their lives.

Comics are another extension of that relevancy to readers’ life experiences — who are smart enough to know that no two people think totally alike.

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