Belgian Paper Apologizes Over Racist Images of Obama Used in Satire
Last Updated, Tuesday, 10:34 a.m. | One of Belgium’s leading newspapers, De Morgen,
apologized on Monday to readers offended by a satirical feature
published two days earlier that used racist images of President Obama to
mock his strained relationship with the Russian president, Vladimir
Putin.
The editors of the left-leaning Flemish daily
explained that the premise of their “admittedly tasteless joke” was
that the Russian president had been asked to submit an article about Mr.
Obama but sent instead two racist caricatures
— one photograph captioned to suggest that the first African-American
president of the United States was a drug dealer, and a second that was
digitally altered to give the president and Michelle Obama the features
of apes.
In an editorial published on Monday under the headline, “Is ‘De Morgen’ Racistisch?”
the newspaper, with roots in the country’s socialist movement,
essentially absolved itself of the charge, suggesting that regular
readers aware of its stance against racism understood that the offensive
images — published as part of a special section on the American
president ahead of his visit to Belgium this week — were intended to satirize how racists think.
Some readers, including the Nigerian-born writer Chika Unigwe,
who has lived in Belgium, argued that publishing the images revealed an
unacknowledged racism in Belgian society, even from the editors of one
of the country’s avowedly “progressive” newspapers.
According to a partial translation
of the Morgen editorial from the Belgian state broadcaster VRT, the
editors argued that their mistake was in assuming that the context of
the images, in a regular satirical section of the paper, would make it
clear to readers that no offense was intended, but when the images
circulated online that context was lost. When “you consider the fragment
apart from its context, which is a properly worked out satirical
section, then you don’t see the joke but just a picture evoking sheer
racism,” the editors wrote. “That was a risk we didn’t consider enough
beforehand.”
“We wrongly assumed,” they added, “that
racism is no longer acceptable, and that in this way it could be the
subject of a joke.” The editors went on to suggest that they had
overlooked the fact that the racist trope of comparing Africans and
their descendants to apes is still common.
Absolving themselves of the charge of
harboring racist intentions, the editors concluded with an apology to
anyone who was offended. “In this case, we plead guilty of bad taste,”
they said. “We continue to be on the side of those that are battling any
form of racism.”
The newspaper also suggested that the
backlash to its failed satire was stronger outside Belgium because
racism is more of a problem in other countries, including in the
Netherlands, where the news site Joop published a copy of the full-page satire, showing the fictional Putin op-ed article beneath a stream of fictional tweets from Mr. Obama in Flemish.
Ms. Unigwe was unimpressed by the apology and
noted that a sidebar on the satirist responsible for the section, Marc
Van Springel, said that he was shocked by the response.
In a Twitter conversation with another
critic, who suggested that the paper’s apology was obscured by the
editorial’s “pseudo-analysis” of satire and racism, the Morgen
journalist Bart Eeckhout acknowledged in blunt terms that the editors were wrong to publish the images, but insisted that anti-racism was a cause close to their hearts.
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