I really enjoy political cartoons.

I mean, I really enjoy political cartoons.

I can spend hours reading them,

laughing heartily at some,

slowly nodding my head in agreement with others,

and still others, just make me throw my hands up in total frustration.

I'm drawing to the truths that political cartoons tell.

Truths about the human condition revealed intentionally and unintentionally,

subtly, and not so subtly.

My obsession led me to write an essay a few years ago titled Remaking History,

Barack Obama political cartoons and the Civil Rights Movement.

I used political cartoons that focused on Obama's election to examine contemporary

understandings of the civil rights movement.

Of the many cartoons that I analyzed, one stood out as especially revealing.

Immediately after Obama's election, cartoonist Duane Booth tweaked a familiar image of Jim Crow,

a black man, drinking from a public water fountain designated for African Americans while standing next to a fountain reserved for whites.

Booth replaced the colored label above the fountain the black man was drinking from with

the word house.

So the familiar Jim Crow signage of white and colored now combined to read White House.

It was a clever play on words, one that testified through the great distance that African Americans had traveled since the era of the Jure segregation.

Booth called it water under the bridge. But his cartoon revealed something he did not intend.

It illustrated the mistake we usually make in how we teach the obstacles to racial equality.

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