Australia’s largest national newspaper is refusing to apologize after publishing a cartoon showing former Vice President Joe Biden calling Democratic California Sen. Kamala Harris a “little brown girl.”
“The Australian” newspaper, a conservative publication founded by Rupert Murdoch, sparked backlash for what many viewed as a racist cartoon. The image depicted Biden smiling and noting that Harris would “heal a nation divided by racism.”
“So I’ll hand you over to this little brown girl while I go for a lie-down,” the cartoon showed Biden saying. (RELATED: Trump Floats False Kamala Harris Birther Theory After Being Given Every Opportunity To Refute It)
Here’s your little reminder of how ludicrously racist Australian commercial media are. This is in the country’s only national daily newspaper: pic.twitter.com/7oN7bjRWLO
— Ketan Joshi (@KetanJ0) August 13, 2020
“The words ‘little black and brown girls’ belong to Joe Biden, not Johannes, and were uttered by the presidential candidate when he named Kamala Harris as his running mate yesterday; he repeated them in a tweet soon after,” The Australian’s editor-in-chief Christopher Dore wrote in a note to The Australian staffers, Reuters reported.
Here is the editor-in-chief of The Australian newspaper’s full response when asked why his cartoonist called @KamalaHarris a “little brown girl”.
He says those are @JoeBiden‘s words … pic.twitter.com/7fGiRLg0y9
— Dave Earley (@earleyedition) August 14, 2020
Biden tweeted Thursday that “little girls work up across this nation – especially Black and Brown girls who so often may feel overlooked and undervalued in our society – potentially seeing themselves in a new way.” (RELATED: Media Rushes To Police Criticism Of Kamala Harris)
The cartoon was made by illustrator Johannes Leak. Dore added that Leak intended “to ridicule identity politics and demean racism, not perpetuate it,” Reuters reported.
Australian Labor politician and shadow cabinet minister Andrew Giles decried the cartoon as “offensive and racist” in a tweet.
Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, named Harris as his running mate Tuesday. Harris’s father and mother were born in Jamaica and India, respectively.
