La Cucaracha by Lalo Alcaraz for December 08, 2014

And in any case, Ferguson is just one more in a long, long list of African Americans being killed by cops in this country. Particularly since a black man is killed, on average, every 28 hours by cops or vigilantes.

PS to cepa: Still want to claim Alcaraz doesn’t post comics about Michael Brown or other African American victims of police violence?

“Rodney King” was quite some time ago. Too long ago to have any bearing on what happened in Furguson… However, it is a situation that bears re-reading, just not here. Or, at the most, a paragraph in order to make room for all of the other injustices that have been perpetrated on other minority peoples. And, remember, at one time the Irish and the Italians and the Poles were not considered to be part of the WASP majority, and were treated accordingly by them… ;)

Here is an example of true racism.

Every week a dozen or so young blacks are murder in South Chicago. This is an accepted practice because it is black on black. Is their life worth less that the blacks killed by the police this year?

Again, an example of true racism.

I lived with my parents in their home town of Caborca Sonora Mexico and with my great grandmother in Quitoa Sonora Mexico and have seen pictures of my Mexican Indian great grandfather yet I have never seen a Mexican that resembles Lora’s caricatures.

They are insensitive, insulting and racist.

Okay, here’s Lalo trying to speak for the blacks

Or not. And for someone who complains about Lalo’s “racism,” you sure do have some pretty fixed ideas about race yourself.

who are both rather stereotyped ugly

You know, I’ve never thought of these characters as ugly. What makes them this way in your own mind?

He is copying a theme and format from another artist (apparently can’t come up with an original).

Except that you just have to go back one single day (oh, right, you were there!) to know your parenthetical statement is not the case.

reinforcing its use so impressionable youth will realize it’s okay

Nice concern trolling there, buddy. But context is everything, and the context here takes away the slurriness of a term you seem singularly fixated on. To borrow a rhetorical method from you: Should we replace the names on all those cans that read “kidney,” “navy,” “refried,” or “green”? Can’t have those impressionable kids running into them in the grocery aisles! Yeesh.

justifying his habit of endlessly hammering subjects into the ground

Says the noisy jackhammer hisself! And in any case, these are issues that need to be hammered at constantly, until the situation changes. Notwithstanding your own desire to reinforce short attention spans.

emphasizing the wrong decision of this strip being placed in that section instead of in an op-ed area that has a more immediate deadline

Too bad for you the editors of your paper, and so many others, disagree with you on this one. Just as they did, for the most part, with Doonesbury and The Boondocks. Or do you think they should also be relegated to the editorial pages? Serious question.

Perhaps the message is that all of you readers who like to get entertainment and laughs from comics will go out and change the world based on La Cucaracha, although, if that’s the case, you probably should have done that already.

Change takes time and effort, and those of us who are working on it like to occasionally turn to entertainment as well. For me and a lot of others, La Cucaracha is part of that. And if it educates some folks along the way, so much the better.

Yeah, there are still some people still carrying on over Medgar Evers.

No, Agrestic has all the answers (albeit many wrong ones)

Which ones are wrong? You’re not very good at coming up with those.

Again I say to all you tempted to address her mind-game taunts – resist!

Physician, heal thyself! (Then again, maybe you’re engaged in an internal dialogue here.)

My my Agrestic, I thought that criticizing some for for having dyslexia was politically incorrect or does political incorrectness only apply when it suites you?

Unfortunately spell cheek does not help on proper names.

@agrestic Thank you. I try to remember “My People” (I was born here in ‘57) came over in boats from Portugal and weren’t considered “White” by some though we built little Europes on the coasts.

My my Agrestic, criticizing someone because they are dialectic is politically incorrect or does political correctness only apply when it services you?

Spell check does not work on proper names.

Anyone can parse every part of a statement without too much trouble to make it fit any direction.

Any direction, eh? Please proceed, and show us how it’s done.

How ‘dark’ or ‘light’ must one be to fit your picture of whether we should be considered oppressed or the oppressors?

It’s interesting that you’d put it in those starkly racial terms when you constantly criticize Alcaraz for racializing things. Personally, I don’t consider you either “the oppressed” or “the oppressor,” since I can’t claim to know you. Indeed, for all I know you could be a young white dude making things up about yourself. For all you know, I could be a very precocious dog. So what we really have to fall back on here is what we actually say about things. And what you constantly and consistently express is a hostility to the idea that racism actually functions in this country to make life harder for brown and black people. And look, I’m not saying that it necessarily makes it impossible for all brown and black folks (though sometimes, and for some people, yes, impossible), but it does make it harder. Definitely harder than for white folks in general. It’s like running a race: if you’re made to start a few yards behind your competitors, you’re going to have to run that much faster to even tie them. You may be able to do it, but you have to be that much faster. If you’re just the same speed, you lose.

puts a kink in your mantra that all whites are evil oppressors

This is another time where you need to exercise some reading comprehension, or turn off your rage-red filter. Not I nor anyone else here, as far as I can tell, ever, ever has said that all whites are evil oppressors. That’s just ridiculous on its face. (And why all the concern for white folks? Do you think they really have it that bad?) What many of us here are saying is that the systems that are in place very much favor white folks, all else being equal. And yes, history comes into it. And yes, bigotry comes into it. And yes, social structures come into it. These two short videos are pretty enlightening (and entertaining) when it comes to this, if you are willing to actually listen to what the man has to say. (The first has a single instance of beeped out cursing. The second has a couple that aren’t beeped out.)

Bravo Agrestic…Bravo.