David Wharton at Ed Cone's on the Rhino Cartoon

If John Hammer says these guys were supposed to be white,
why don't they look like the other white people Geof draws?

Why would the cartoonist choose to portray the convicts speaking in a phony,

minstrel-show dialect?

(African-American English doesn't inflect 3rd-person plural verbs

with "-s" as the cartoon does in "builds" and "pays.)

Is he making a real attempt to represent black speech,

but is too ignorant to do so?

Or is he being intentionally provocative by evoking a form of entertainment

that is particularly demeaning to black people?

And why choose to portray both convicts as African-Americans?

In any case, I have a hard time seeing the cartoon as anything but a deliberate racial provocation

-- one that I find both disgusting and depressing.

David Wharton