Dear Editor of F News:

I wish you had allowed me to respond to my accusers and their accusations. If you have any integrity, you will publish this response. I won’t go into all the aspects of the article “What Happened to Michael Bonesteel” that I found to be one-sided and inaccurate, but I just want to address the worst offense:

Quashie’s “quote” by me is not only taken out of context but inaccurate. What I remember saying to Quashie is that the word  n****r was used in historic comics of the 1950s. R. Crumb used it satirically in the 1960s. When I began teaching comics I asked my Art History chairman if I could present R. Crumb’s underground comics and she said, yes, of course. So that’s what I was doing.

After students like Quashie began complaining several years ago, I found that I had to self-censor the way I presented the material, often to the point of not presenting it all. Today, if one actually says the word n****r, particularly if one is white, one is branded a racist even if one is quoting from a comic. That’s what I was doing, quoting from a comic.

Sometimes when I presented a comic, I would use the dialects and accents if the character in a comic seemed to warrant it. Quashie found that offensive. OK, I can accept that criticism. If my use of the word “pickaninny” to describe a racist depiction of African Americans in early comics was inappropriate, I can accept that as well as just one more thing we aren’t allowed to say, even when describing a racist image. But when he quotes me as if I were a racist going around saying that I used to use the N-word but now I can’t, he has taken my words and totally reshaped them into his own hateful depiction of me.

– Michael Bonesteel