When Barack Obama Met Frederick Douglass

[UPDATE: A day after posting this, I'm making this post Public, so that people who aren't Patreon supporters can read it too, in light of bad-faith mischaracterizations of my art popping up. Hope that's cool!!!]

Hi!

I'm going to try to keep with my recent trend of posting backstories soon after I've posted the comic itself. Sometimes this is difficult, as my brain is decompressing after usually staying up very late drawing, but other times it should be doable. This new one is freshly finished, instigating lots of spirited discussion, and also engendering some, ummm, displeased reactions—some earnest and well-reasoned, most (in my opinion!) not so much. E.g.:

The backstory, briefly, is Obama's remarks this past week criticizing "Defund The Police." My view is that as one of the most powerful and influential people on the planet, Barack Obama is uniquely positioned to bridge the Movement for Black Lives with wider American society by explaining what Defund the Police means.  In the full excerpt, embedded in the article and which I'll insert here, he goes about, in some ways, doing just that:

So Obama had a choice: Either serve as an emissary to help get the full message out to "Middle America" and explain a tool of defunding that's been used by the right to eviscerate public welfare projects for over half a century, or do what he's done since folding in his grassroots movement after winning the 2008 Election: Work to eviscerate a movement on behalf of the powerful, in this case by publicly scolding and rebuking on-the-ground activists of the most important civil rights movement in a generation.

I almost didn't draw this because it seemed like such an obvious, self-evident point, but sometimes those are the most elemental and salient, and I don't realize that until I've drawn it and put it out there. Originally, though, I'd intended to "stay in my lane" and have it as "Obama Counsels Moses," with Moses saying "Let My People Go!" and Obama diluting the slogan:

In the end, though, it hit much harder if it stayed within African American history, so I decided to go with Frederick Douglass, aware of the risks.

These were the risks — and I want to point them out partly because the bad-faith attacks like to pretend I don't take any of this into consideration when I'm drawing. As I said, this is not my "lane," and depicting or appropriating another marginalized community's history can be precarious and exploitative. Initial, immediate thoughts revolved around images from slavery itself, but I wouldn't draw that because it's exploiting another people's trauma and would be rightly perceived as going for a cheap laugh at the expense of descendants of slavery experiencing continued subjugation in America. I think I mentioned this in a Patreon post a while ago, but it's like the uproar that surrounded a white artist's painting of Emmett Till's open casket. On a smaller scale, I remember the outrage that accompanied a social media post that included images of lynchings to make a political point. Even if the political point is valid, exposes injustice, and empathizes with a vulnerable community, it can be triggering to that community and exploitative all around. So I knew I couldn't go with images of torture or trauma. But I wanted it to be a figure from slavery for the strongest possible contrast.

I decided on Frederick Douglass partly because he's an icon of American history and is immediately recognizable, but I knew it wasn't a perfect choice.  The one critique of this comic that resonates with me is that Frederick Douglass compromised, he was in certain ways a moderate, he took jobs in American government, and he was in some ways an instrument of American empire. You can read about some of those complications here. But I think the mitigating factors are these: He might have been moderate by today's standards and through today's prism, but at the time he was a radical. Yes, there were abolitionists who were more radical than him, but few if any who were at Douglass's level of American historical fame and survived. The most important point for me is that Douglass was more radical for his era, particularly when he made these remarks—while slavery was still enshrined in law—than Obama is for ours. If anything, Obama is more like Abraham Lincoln than like Frederick Douglass. Just look at Douglass's speeches, which were—unlike Obama's—filled with moral fury, rather than lofty rhetoric guiding pragmatic accommodation. Imagine Obama saying this at any time in his political career—not even in 1857, when a 39-year-old Douglass said it, but today:

Obama explicitly tells us he's more Lincoln than Douglass in The Audacity of Hope, his 2006 memoir whose title carries an ironic cruelty in retrospect. Paraphrasing the same "Power concedes nothing" quote, he acknowledges the necessity of Douglass's intransigence, but ultimately sides with Lincoln's spirit of compromise and "practicality":

So those are my thoughts on the choice of Douglass, but again, I'm receptive to the criticism, especially from Black readers and/or historians (or at least historians who aren't being pedantic and/or comics-illiterate). But for this comic, I think the choice of Douglass more than works, and I disagree with those who would argue that Douglass was the Obama of his time.

Another tension or challenge with this comic was, obviously, the risks of racial caricature. This is a particular challenge for political artists, especially of the visual-grotesquerie variety, as any exaggeration risks playing on tropes of historic vilification. I'm not unfamiliar, to say the least, with bad-faith misrepresentations of my art along these lines, but usually it focuses on drawings of Jewish communal leaders. For Obama, I wanted to place him in my visual pantheon of ghouls, that's how repulsed I was by his remarks this week (and, by extension, by his near-total absence during four years of Trump Administration atrocities). I decided that drawing him as a sleazy/wormy guy, a la Jared Kushner, would be ideal because it would shine a light on him that's rarely depicted without falling into racial tropes. If wormy is an anti-Black trope, it's certainly not the dominant one, so I felt it was a good choice. I was self-conscious about not overdoing his lips for the same reason, as that is a dominant anti-Black trope. But in the end it didn't matter; one person even said the differently-drawn lips were a sign of racism. Another person said the big ear and teeth were a Jim Crowe visualization. To this I'd say Obama has big ears, and it's formed a bedrock of visualizations of him since he first ran for national office. The teeth charge is less easy to defend, because it is a more prominent element of anti-Black caricature than, say, ears, but again, Obama is known for his toothy smile! So it's a challenge to do it right, but I thought focusing on worminess, avoiding common tropes but not denying certain physical attributes, was best. And here, for what it's worth, is my art next to the primary source image I was using:

Ghoulish, but hopefully not racist.

With Frederick Douglass there was a challenge mixed with a benefit: He is the "hero" of the art, the model I'm clearly highlighting to contrast Obama's mealy-mouthed bromides, so I didn't want to draw him ghoulishly. That's always a challenge, when one element of the comic is ghoulish and another is earnest and/or flattering, but so far people don't seem to have minded the tonal differences in my work. The benefit here, though, was that by drawing Douglass more flatteringly, I would hopefully convey that the Obama exaggerations were not done for the purpose of racial caricature but for my usual purposes of illuminating powerful people as ghouls from the inside out. I wouldn't have gotten that if I'd drawn Moses (which would have drawn the usual ignoramus charges of antisemitism to boot). 

Frederick Douglass was 39 when he made these remarks, and although I could have drawn him at any age, I wanted it to be as close to 39 as possible—which left out his more iconic later gray-haired images. His cheekbones were mesmerizing, and I looked forward to drawing that, but I couldn't find any photos of him with his mouth open—and the single illustration I could find of a speaking Douglass didn't really resemble him:

So I used my imagination. Two notes on the following screenshot: As I noted in depth last week, I've been struggling with a new drawing tablet, and you can see evidence of that in the initial blotchy marks on his beard, because it's still hard for me to control the lines on this thing, especially when doing initial sketches. The positive note to mention, since I've been griping about tools lately, is I found a really great piece of image organization software that runs much more smoothly and intuitively than constantly rearranging images in Mac's Preview. It's called  PureRef, and I can assure you that appearances notwithstanding, this is not a paid endorsement!—but the images on the left (and on the left in the Obama screenshot above) are via the PureRef app:

I actually thought in the end I drew him fiercely and handsomely, but inevitably enough, I've gotten remarks saying it's racist, or that he has crazy eyes, or he looks like he's on meth. At some point we just have to concede this is how I draw, and art-illiterate ignoramuses who expect everything to be photorealistic will be displeased.

Finally, I should note that after deciding on Frederick Douglass I was debating between two quotes—the one I went with, and another quote, from when he was 31 years old: “The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery.” Obama would have been parsing the quote out in the interest of preserving white men's happiness, and finding ways to spread happiness without infringing upon whites. But in the end the more compact "Power concedes nothing without a demand" was more immediately relevant to "Defund the Police," although honestly, aside from the aforementioned rejection of Moses, "Let My People Go" would've been an even more tactile corollary, as it's a literal slogan.

And now for some process. I felt bad I had to cover up Obama's arm with his long quote, but that was the best way to make it fit. At any rate, maybe it ameliorates the "homophobia" charge by the person at the start of this post, who seemed to be arguing that Obama's pose was what made the image homophobic (?).

Thank you for your support!

Eli