Article of the Week 28: Racism Cartoon

This week, I decided to focus on a cartoon based on something that has been bothering me for some time. This image satires the extremely black and white journalism used in today's international reporting. Our soldiers cannot do wrong, as seen in the image. The American soldier has a list of excuses while the Afghan person who committed the same act has only "Hates Freedom." This kind of unfair treatment is criticized in this cartoon through quite obvious satire. On top of this, the man is shown thinking hard, presumably about the other reasons a person from Afghanistan would kill an American soldier. All of this occurs when one of the excuses for the American soldier is "likes movies." The final statement this cartoon is trying to imply is that as Americans, we give our own troops too much leniency, while other races are discriminated against and seen in an unfair light for the same or similar actions. There is really no reason why this should occur, but it happens all of the time in journalism. Only recently has this finally turned around and less prejudices are shown to foreign peoples. It can only be hoped that this trend continues and that cartoons such as this one are no longer necessary.