My name is Susan Cohen. I am a faculty member in the Department of Business Administration, and for more than 10 years, I have been a member of the Board of Directors of the Illini Media Company, the parent company of The Daily Illini, The Illio, The Technograph, Buzz and WPGU radio. For the past seven years I have been president of the Board and thus have been intimately acquainted with all of the issues involving the DI and publication of offensive articles, ads, editorials and letters to the editor.

I write to express my utter dismay at the response of many in the campus community to the steps taken by the DI and its editorial staff in response to the cartoon printed in the paper Nov. 5. The cartoon was offensive not only to Jews (of which I am one), but to many other individuals who do not want racist expressions of any form to be published in the DI. The strip had been rejected, but not discarded, and thus appeared in the paper in error.

The fact that the strip was published as a result of procedural errors does not get the DI and the editors off the hook, and Evan McLaughlin and his staff have dealt with the consequences in a professional and timely fashion. The decision to suspend both the editor who made the call to put the strip into the paper and the cartoonist are correct and indicative of the seriousness of the situation.

What dismays and saddens me is the series of letters in the paper over the past several days expressing dissatisfaction with how the DI has dealt with the publication of the strip. The dissatisfaction is not because the paper was not hard enough on the individuals concerned, but because they were too hard because the cartoon was not a big deal. In Tuesday’s paper, a letter writer wrote that the cartoon was perceived as “overly anti-Semitic.” What is “overly anti-Semitic?” Is that like a little fascist or a wee-bit pregnant? A little racism of any form does not belong in the DI. Period. Racism is insidious in its effects – we tolerate a little, because it is too much trouble or too inconvenient to do anything about it. What happens is that our tolerance levels keep getting higher and one day, we find ourselves tolerating hatred in its most despicable form.

There also have been letters saying that this cartoon was just the norm for the artist and that he makes fun of lots of groups (the popularity of South Park was used as a point of reference to justify the writer’s viewpoint). There is a huge difference between being offended because of what I would call “potty humor” and being offended because someone is appealing to a reader’s fear or hatred or distrust of groups of individuals who have different religious beliefs, cultural backgrounds or sexual preferences. I personally don’t think that crass humor belongs in the DI – it demeans a serious, award-winning newspaper. Racist humor of any stripe does not belong in any newspaper and most certainly not in the DI.

I am a staunch believer in First Amendment rights – I would defend anyone’s right to state his or her opinion. Freedom of the press means that we cannot be prevented from printing, but it does not mean that we must print. Part of a journalist’s responsibility is to know where to draw the line. I believe that our editors have learned a lot from this situation about where the line should be. Sadly, I also have learned a lot – that at best, there are individuals on campus who are truly na‹ve about what racism is and what it does to a community. At worst, there are individuals who have racist beliefs themselves without really knowing it. The bottom line is that it is too easy to hate what you don’t understand; look at the current world situation for evidence.

Susan Cohen

University employee

president, Illini Media Board