Jinkies! Lightfoot overreacts to ‘Scooby-Doo’ dig, underreacts to Christopher Columbus’ atrocities
As cartoon critiques go, the controversial image posted on Twitter Wednesday evening by the Chicago Teachers Union was a misfire — a logically problematic, easily misconstrued and, in the end, unfair attack on Mayor Lori Lightfoot.
The drawing showed the crime-fighting cast of the old TV cartoon series “Scooby-Doo” — Shaggy, Fred, Daphne, Velma and their Great Dane companion Scooby-Doo — standing over a seated Lightfoot, who is bound by a rope and wearing the uniform of a Chicago police officer.
Fred, the blond guy, has just pulled from Lightfoot’s head a disguise she has been wearing of a male Chicago police officer.
When a reporter asked Lightfoot about the image at an unrelated news conference Thursday, the mayor said she hadn’t seen it, but from the description she’d heard she said it was “clearly racist” and “deeply offensive,” as though the teachers union was using “a playbook from the right wing.”
But no. The playbook in use here belongs to the left, the liberal critics who even during the 2019 campaign carried signs and chanted slogans insisting that “Lori is a cop!” This accusation was based on Lightfoot’s service as chief administrator of the Chicago Police Department Independent Police Review Authority, president of the Chicago Police Board and chair of the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force, as well as her six years as an assistant U.S. attorney. The hard lefties, including CTU leadership, preferred Lightfoot’s opponent in the runoff election, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle.
And the cartoon was meant to highlight Lightfoot’s recent refusal to endorse the battle cry “defund the police” or to support efforts in the City Council to remove police officers from the city’s public schools.
Ideally, of course, the image would have shown a multiethnic group of people, instead of four white people, unmasking Lightfoot. Alas, Hanna-Barbera created the iconic “Scooby-Doo” franchise in 1969, when all-white casting was the norm.
Also ideally, the image would not have shown Lightfoot tied up, as any drawing of an African American in bondage carries a suggestion of slavery. But the nearly ritual conclusion of “Scooby-Doo” episodes featured the plucky young crimefighters — “meddlesome kids!” — catching and hogtying or otherwise shackling previously disguised villains before dramatically unmasking them.
The drawing was intended to play off these familiar cultural reference points to make the point that Lightfoot has only been masquerading as a police reformer. But by Scooby logic, then, the character tied up in the chair should have been dressed in a mayoral pantsuit and the big reveal should have been that there was a Chicago police officer hiding behind a Lori Lightfoot mask.
The other way around makes very little sense.
If I’m guilty of overthinking this, so is everyone who dialed up the umbrage meter to 11 at this clumsy salvo, which the CTU quickly removed from its Twitter feed.
The proper response to this isn’t to fixate on tropes from a 51-year-old cartoon but to point out that Lightfoot is, in fact, championing incremental — not radical — changes in police training, practices and accountability. She is, for instance, behind the idea of police licensing. And she recently drew the ire of the Fraternal Order of Police when she called for the summary firings of officers who covered up their badge numbers during recent street protests and the officer who flipped off protesters. Lightfoot also quickly and strongly criticized the officers seen on surveillance video relaxing in the South Side office of U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush allegedly at a time when looting was taking place nearby.
Maybe Lightfoot would have been happier if the CTU had instead erected a statue of the “Scooby-Doo” tableau. Then she might have defended it as a way to “educate our young people, in particular, about the full history” of awkward boomer iconography.
That was the feeble excuse she offered Thursday for not having Chicago join in the national movement to remove statues of Christopher Columbus from public places of honor. In recent days, as part of the cultural re-evaluation prompted by the police killing of George Floyd May 25 in Minneapolis, protesters have beheaded a
Columbus statue in Boston, toppled one in St. Paul and threw one into a lake in Richmond, Virginia. Locally, protesters have vandalized Columbus statues in Grant Park and Little Italy.
But while officials in San Francisco, St. Louis, Sacramento and even Columbus, Ohio, have removed such statues, Lightfoot said she wants them to remain, just as she has earlier said we shouldn’t rename Columbus Day in Chicago to Indigenous Peoples Day, as it has been in, well, Minneapolis and scores of other municipalities.
But Madame Mayor, if the indirect suggestion of slavery and racism in a political cartoon gets you into a lather, just wait until you hear about Columbus.
He was a depraved tyrant who oversaw the torture, enslavement and mass eradication of the native peoples he encountered in the New World. He cut off their hands and cut out their tongues. Talk about deeply offensive. Statues don’t offer that “full history.” In fact they conceal it with their simple message of honor and glory. A statue is not in invitation to interrogate the historical record, but a suggestion to ignore it.
Columbus is the one who should be unmasked. And Lightfoot is the one to help do it.
Re: Tweets
The winner of this week’s reader poll to select the funniest tweet was “We’re gonna have to retire the expression ‘avoid it like the plague’ because it turns out humans do not do that,” by @JennyENicholson.
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