As editor in chief and managing editor of The Signal, we feel that it is our job as the leaders of a campus organization and members of the College community to open dialogue about "Immaculate Deception," a cartoon that ran in the Funstuff section in the April 12 issue.
The cartoon incited a wave of letters to the editor as well as a meeting between some members of The Signal, the Black Student Union and the general College community that we believe bore a starting point for better communication between campus organizations in the future.
The decision to run "Immaculate Deception" was by no means a simple choice made with no consideration of our campus community. We thought long and hard before making a decision, but in the end decided that the cartoon, which used a word that we found equally hateful, did so not to promote hate, but to call out those who do.
What is unfortunate, and what we did not realize at the time, was that students of the College would not protract this message from the comic.
Through the aforementioned meeting, we now understand that though the cartoon did have an important message, the use of a word with such a negative connotation is hard to look past, and many could not look past it to get the real meaning of the cartoon.
We are considering in future issues of The Signal to remove from the Funstuff section any cartoons that are not intended to be read in a humorous context and place them in the Opinions section.
This would distinguish between comics, such as "Immaculate Deception," that are serious in nature and which the creators have a definite message they are trying to convey, and comics meant solely for entertainment value.
We would also like to note that we have censored cartoons before - ones we felt were blatantly hateful and had no deeper message, no purpose other than to promote negativity.
We did not feel that "Immaculate Deception" was a cartoon produced for this purpose, and therefore stand by our decision to run it.
However, we do wish to apologize to anyone who was offended or hurt by the use of the word in the comic. It was not our intention, nor the cartoonists', to be hurtful, but rather it was used to aid a higher meaning.
-Kelly Meisberger, Editor in Chief and
Ashley Marty, Managing Editor
