This text was produced by the nonprofit publication Capital & Predominant. It’s printed right here with permission.
How does a Black artist satirize a racial actuality that has gone approach past satire beneath President Donald Trump? It’s one thing David G. Brown asks himself each week.
The longtime political cartoonist for the Los Angeles Sentinel, the town’s oldest Black newspaper, says developing with efficient responses to the just about each day outrages emanating from the White Home is a problem that usually leaves him perplexed, and for photographs.
However Brown is nothing if not persistent. After greater than 20 years capturing the racial zeitgeist in his weekly cartoons, from the excessive level of Barack Obama’s election as the primary Black president in 2008 to the nadir of Trump and his reelection, one factor Brown has realized is that the combat for justice will at all times face obstacles that should be uncovered.
“It’s irritating and disappointing, the place we are actually, however Black folks can’t surrender, or shut up,” stated Brown, who’s 71 however, regardless of his grey hair and glasses, seems a lot youthful, with the wide-eyed vitality of a excessive schooler to match. “I’ve change into bolder. It’s not the time to be meek.”
Certainly it isn’t. Amongst Brown’s current Sentinel cartoons is one depicting a gaggle of survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s intercourse trafficking admonishing Trump to be “Quiet, Piggy” (a reference to the president’s insulting admonishment to a feminine reporter’s questions) as he descends a not-so-golden escalator of declining ballot numbers. One other recasts the normal presidential seal with the bald eagle sporting a crimson MAGA hat, clutching a bag of money in a single claw, with the phrase “president” changed with “felon.”
As he continues to sort out the transgressions of Trump and MAGA, Brown can also be pausing to look again. A retrospective of his Sentinel cartoons, “Politics, Race and the Media: Two A long time of Drawing My Personal Conclusions,” is on exhibit on the Watts Towers Arts Heart Campus, together with works by the pioneering Black political cartoonist Ollie Harrington. The exhibit, which runs via Feb. 21, highlights work in Brown’s just lately printed guide of the identical title.
Brown’s cartoons are pointed however genteel, reflecting each his seriousness and a elementary optimism. Whether or not they’re exalting Black Historical past Month or exploring the hypocrisies of Trump or different figures, like former GOP stalwart Condoleezza Rice, they are usually rendered in major colours, and are accessible to most readers.
Watts Towers Arts Heart Campus director Rosie Lee Hooks, who curated the exhibition, wrote that Brown’s “high quality of stilled laughter is gentle and divisive on the identical time, displaying the corrupt methods of racism and injustice all through the world.”
That enduring high quality was effectively suited to the second that Brown bought began greater than twenty years in the past. Again then, he was deeply important of George W. Bush (“I believed he was the worst president ever,” Brown quipped just lately) and the neoconservative motion within the nation following 9/11. However then got here the Nice Recession that started in 2007. The downturn hit Black folks particularly laborious, and offered an on-ramp for the election of Obama. It was a pinnacle of Black achievement, and Brown was joyful to have a good time it in his many depictions of President Obama as proof of each racial and nationwide progress (considered one of his cartoons from 2008 presents Obama as an unabashed Superman). However in his cartoons he additionally cautioned that the election of the primary Black president was not the top of historical past.
Nonetheless, Brown stated, “I had no concept what was coming.”
* * *
Brown by no means deliberate to be a political voice. Rising up in a small city in South Jersey within the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s, he aspired to be an artist. Expertise ran in his household — his mom painted, and several other of his siblings drew. However elevating artwork right into a dwelling had confirmed elusive, not only for his household however for Black folks normally. His father, a Navy cook dinner, inspired Brown to get a secure job, ideally with the federal government. And a highschool counselor discouraged him from pursuing artwork in school, Brown stated, suggesting he could be higher suited to “technical work.” That solely made Brown extra decided to make a dwelling via his artwork.
After graduating from Stockton School (now College) in New Jersey with an artwork diploma, he finally labored as a graphics designer and paste-up artist for an promoting company in Philadelphia. However he harbored a deeper ambition to specific himself with artwork and converse to Black experiences rooted in his upbringing. He liked comedian books and the exaggerated heroics in films like Tremendous Fly, with characters taking their cues from the Black Panther Occasion and the Black consciousness motion of the ’60s.
“I bear in mind Captain America, Sgt. Fury, Marvel Lady and all these white Nazi villains,” Brown stated. “My brother and I did a sci-fi comedian guide collectively, and our factor was, ‘Let’s combat for what’s proper!’ That spirit was formative for me.”
Brown’s first foray into cartooning was at Stockton, the place he was the primary editorial cartoonist for the campus newspaper. Although the political points he addressed at the moment had been restricted to issues like decreasing tuition, it’s there that he first felt the ability in being a public voice calling for change.
He relocated from Philly to Los Angeles in 1984, drawn by alternatives for animation and movie work and the gentle local weather. As artwork director at a West L.A. advertising and marketing agency, he additional shored up an already spectacular profession; as a Black man he was a rarity in an overwhelmingly white enterprise, and able of authority as well. By any definition, he had “made it.” Then got here a pivot. In 1992, following the acquittal of 4 law enforcement officials tried for brutally beating Black motorist Rodney King, the town erupted into 5 days of fires and protest.
“I may see the smoke from my residence window in Mid-Metropolis all the way in which to downtown,” he recalled.
The unrest shook Brown out of his career-centered complacency and made him decided to assist his adopted metropolis by specializing in younger individuals who, he realized, had misplaced hope. With a modest $2,400 grant from L.A.’s Division of Cultural Affairs, Brown started fulfilling his longtime dream by creating a comic book guide starring the Phoenix, a winged crimefighter and mystical determine rising from the ashes and disillusionment to point out younger folks a brand new approach ahead (in later points that he funded himself, it was the L.A. Phoenix). Three thousand copies of the preliminary black-and-white comedian guide, which Brown printed together with his personal cash, had been distributed to libraries throughout the town.
For Brown, that comedian was the launchpad into an entire new work world of social justice messaging, schooling and neighborhood constructing that was powered by his artwork. He turned a type of one-man cottage business, taking up graphics and academic tasks for organizations such because the Vehicle Membership of Southern California, Los Angeles Worlds Airports, the Getty Basis, the Cultural Affairs division and the California African American Museum. He developed a comic book guide workshop for younger folks, known as Tales From the Youngsters, and taught artwork and graphics for Los Angeles Unified Faculty District excessive colleges. And he did all of it whereas protecting his day job.
“I at all times had facet hustles,” Brown stated, laughing. Changing into a cartoonist in 2003 was simply a kind of hustles. However it had historic continuity: He took over for Clint Johnson, the veteran Sentinel cartoonist who’d spent 45 years within the chair.
Brown has been at it solely half that lengthy, although given all that’s occurred on the racial entrance the final twenty years, it usually feels to him prefer it’s been longer. He walked away from his day job years in the past, he stated, as a result of he didn’t have the time for it anymore. However the actual motive was that he’d discovered his calling — his true profession. And 22 years in, it’s one thing he can’t think about ever retiring from. He stated he is aware of he’s wanted.
“It’s vital for me to be there for younger folks, to mannequin for them,” he stated. “I’ll by no means cease instructing, whether or not it’s being in a classroom or elsewhere. It’s all about inspiring the following era.”
That is from Erin Aubry Kaplan’s column, The Arc, which examines the persistent boundaries to racial justice and alternatives for progress in an period of receding Black presence in Los Angeles and California.
