Racist cartoon or misunderstanding?

Tell me, is the cartoon below racist?

Depending on who you believe, your answer will probably be:

1) Yes, it’s comparing Obama to a monkey.

2) No, it’s a reaction to the chimp who mauled its owner and was soon after shot by police.

3) Wow, what terrible timing.

It’s easy to see why people can’t help but feel this cartoon is racist: Obama is our first black president, he wrote the stimulus bill, and comparing blacks to monkeys is a racial slur that has existed for generations. The NAACP along with the Rev. Al Sharpton have called for a boycott of the paper and for the New York Post to fire its cartoonist. Sharpton was quoted as saying, “The cartoon in today’s New York Post is troubling at best given the historic racist attacks of African-Americans as being synanomous with monkeys.”

Here’s Al Sharpton’s reponse as seen on Keith Olberman’s MSNBC show:

Reaction from the New York Post is short and sweet, seen here:

Wednesday’s Page Six cartoon – caricaturing Monday’s police shooting of a chimpanzee in Connecticut – has created considerable controversy.

It shows two police officers standing over the chimp’s body: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill,” one officer says.

It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill.

Period.

But it has been taken as something else – as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism.

This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize.

However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past – and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback.

To them, no apology is due.

Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon – even as the opportunists seek to make it something else.