Trayvon Martin: Offensive cartoon pulled from University of Texas student newspaper

theGRIO REPORT - A speech blurb spoken by the woman says, 'And then, the big bad white man killed the handsome, sweet, innocent colored boy'...

TheGrio Staff

Mar 28, 2012

The Daily Texan, the University of Texas student newspaper, briefly pulled from its website a controversial cartoon about the media coverage of the Trayvon Martin case on Tuesday, the same day the paper is distributed.

The cartoon appeared in a section titled, “A Matter of Opinion.” It was taken down yesterday at 2:20pm, and then republished at 4:50pm. On their website, The Daily Texan’s editor says that it was temporarily removed in order to “alleviate web traffic and prevent the web site from crashing.”

Stephanie Eisner’s black and white cartoon critiques the media coverage of Martin’s death, which continues to receive priority news attention as the story develops.

A white woman sitting in a rocking chair engraved with the words “the media,” reads to an awe-struck little girl, from a book titled, “Treyvon Martin and the Case of Yellow Journalism” (note: Trayvon’s name is purposely misspelled).

A speech blurb spoken by the woman says, “And then, the big bad white man killed the handsome, sweet, innocent colored boy.”

The words “white” and “colored” are capitalized, underlined, and have arrows pointing at them. The words “big” and “bad” are bold, while adjectives used to describe Trayvon are written in script, and the word “innocent” uses tiny hearts in place of dots above the letter “i.”

Gawker reports that the student paper pulled the cartoon from their website on Tuesday afternoon, however since then The Daily Texan has put it back on their website, along with the following statement:

A controversial editorial cartoon on the Trayvon Martin shooting was published Tuesday on the Opinion page of The Daily Texan. The Daily Texan Editorial Board recognizes the sensitive nature of the cartoon’s subject matter.

The views expressed in the cartoon are not those of the editorial board. They are those of the artist. It is the policy of the editorial board to publish the views of our columnists and cartoonists, even if we disagree with them.

A PDF copy of the print edition can still be viewed online.

Follow Briana Lopes on Twitter at @briananikohl