Monday, September 20, 2010

Racist lies from Mallard Fillmore


Here is another letter I sent to the San Antonio Express-News concerning the Mallard Fillmore strip. The last letter I sent was never published.

“People who adopt black children” are, according to the Mallard Fillmore strip in Monday’s San Antonio Express News, “mostly white”.
This is a blatant lie. When you look at all the transracial and transcultural adoptions of anykind in this country it comes to less than 14 percent, and the percentage of white families adopting black children is well below 10 percent which means that more than 90 percent of black children are adopted by black families.
But telling blatant lies is standard operating procedure for the rightwing Mallard Fillmore “comic” strip. The author was apparently annoyed that some liberal commentators pointed out that Glenn Beck’s latest rally in D.C. a few weeks ago was made up mostly of white people, so he decided that gave him permission to make a bunch of “jokes” riffing on racial stereotypes such as the false notion that black people don’t like to go bowling or cycling. But the kicker was the mean-spirited suggestion that black people leave it up to whites to adopt black children. That is absolutely false.
Whenever Bruce Tinsley, the far-rightwing author of the humor-free Mallard strip, tires of drawing grotesque caricatures of politicians and celebrities he does not like — with their eyes crossed and their noses and chins stretching off the page — Tinsley typically turns his wrath on postal workers, school teachers, labor unions, immigrants or any other group of people to serve as the scapegoats of his twisted ideology.
Why does the Express-News continue to publish garbage like Mallard Fillmore everyday?