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How Racist Is This Festival Poster?

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The organizers of the 2015 Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival in small-town Louisiana are under fire for the poster they have chosen to promote the three-day event this year.

Critics compare the poster, which features two faceless black children (except for their stark red lips), to pickaninny imagery and other racist caricatures of black people, reports The New Orleans Advocate.

Pat Morris, president of the Greater Tangipahoa Parish NAACP branch, called the poster “offensive” and “distasteful.”

“People black and white are saying, ‘Take it down,'” Morris told the Advocate.

“This is kind of like a time bomb waiting to explode,” she also said, adding that a possible boycott is in the works.

The New Orleans artist behind the poster, Kalle Siekkinen, is defending his work.

“African-American children beautifully dressed in a white tuxedo and laced dress as innocent, as that is it should be considered, and I certainly feel that it is (positive) and I’m happy to portray that image,” Siekkinen, who is white, told local NBC affiliate WDSU.

The Strawberry Festival and Ponchatoula Kiwanis Club also defended the poster.

“Art is subjective,” a Kiwanis Club press release read. “It is interpretive. There was no intent other than to pay tribute to the festival and the strawberry industry.”

Festival organizers also noted that the poster pays homage to the work of Bill Hemmerling, a now-deceased (also white) painter of Southern folk art whose work appeared on a Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival poster back in 2008.

“The 2008 poster was immediately embraced by our community,” the Kiwanis Club press release observed, according to the Advocate.

The “facelessness” of the girl in this year’s poster — and in the 2008 poster as well — “does not mean she is a nobody. It means she is everybody.”

The April 10-12 Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival features strawberry-eating contests, a parade, a handful of footraces and sack races, a festival ball (with open bar — no jeans) and an array of live entertainment.

Later in the year, there is the Strawberry Festival Queen Pageant.

Prints of the controversy-causing Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival poster are available at a cost ranging from $25 to $40.

The festival has been a local tradition each year since 1972.

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Eric Owens