On the same day that the New York Post ran an editorial cartoon that many consider a racist satire of President Barack Obama, the attorney general of the United States laid the smackdown on the whole country for being a "nation of cowards."

In other words, Wednesday was not a big day for subtlety.

The editorial cartoon depicted two shaken police officers standing over the bullet-ridden body of a chimpanzee. One cop says to the one who did the shooting: "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."

It was not one of editorial cartoonist Sean Delonas' better efforts. The cartoon yokes the Post's current obsession with the violent chimp shot dead by cops in Stamford, Conn., on Monday with the paper's hostile editorializing on the Obama stimulus package.

Post Editor-in-Chief Col Allan denied that the cartoon was a reference to the president's Kenyan background or a warped assassination fantasy.

The Rev. Al Sharpton tried to put some of the reaction to the cartoon in perspective by reminding folks that the outrage against the Post isn't happening in a vacuum "given the historic racist attacks of African-Americans as being synonymous with monkeys."

Mr. Allan tried to reclaim some moral high ground for his tabloid by accusing the Rev. Sharpton of being an opportunist. Perhaps Mr. Allan sounds a bit naive because his roots are in Australian journalism. Obviously, aboriginals have never been compared to subhuman primates in the Australian media.

Given his color-blind history, Mr. Allan probably isn't aware of American journalism's grim track record when it comes to racist political caricature. He doesn't seem to have much of a clue about the Post's history of stoking racial resentment to sell copy, either. If he did, he wouldn't be so dismissive of the suspicion and outrage the cartoon has generated.

Having said this, I don't believe it is accurate to call the cartoon racist. Insipid, yes.

The appeal of Sean Delonas' work lies in his principled misanthropy and willingness to portray New York as a bastion of urban grotesqueries.

Mr. Delonas hates everybody, but his cartoons have always reflected a burning contempt for liberals, celebrities and the state's menagerie of politicians. There's no evidence that race baiting per se is the point of his work.

I believe Mr. Delonas linked the Stamford monkey shooting to the Obama stimulus package because he couldn't come up with a better idea. If anything, such a superficially provocative Delonas cartoon indicates that he's lost a step and gotten lazy.

Mr. Delonas wouldn't feel any compunction about illustrating his bigotry if he truly felt an animus toward blacks. Like the anti-Catholic cartoonist Jack Chick, a fellow mad genius of right-wing resentment, Mr. Delonas is full of hang-ups that are primarily ideological.

As a cartoonist, Sean Delonas is less guilty of racism than the knuckle-dragging newspaper he works for. If anything, he's guilty by association. If black folks boycott the New York Post, they should do so because it is an embarrassment to journalism, not because of a cartoon that isn't clever enough to rise to the level of racist code.

Meanwhile, black folks have to be a little more discriminating -- and sophisticated -- about who we're willing to dub "racist."

In a speech at the Justice Department, Attorney General Eric Holder insisted we were "a nation of cowards" because "we don't have the guts to be honest with each other" about racial issues. Displaying a more confrontational style than his boss, Mr. Holder conceded that we "have done a pretty good job in melding the races in the workplace," but "certain subjects are off limits and that to explore them risks at best embarrassment and at worst the questioning of one's character."

There's no arguing with his premise, but you have to wonder why the nation's first black attorney general made his point in such a hamfisted way, especially when the memory of Barack Obama's "race speech" in Philadelphia last March remains so vivid.

While most young people are refreshingly free of racial hang-ups, older folks on both sides of the racial divide continue to be in denial about the extent of our mutual alienation. The race problem would probably disappear if everyone born before 1985 simply shuffled off this mortal coil along with their Archie Bunker-George Jefferson era rationalizations.

Still, engaging Americans in an honest conversation about race requires a velvet touch and a gift for indirect truth-telling. There are too many idiots running around who insist they "don't see color." You can't tell them that they're racist and expect them not to resent it. Truth is usually found in subtle line drawings -- not hastily scribbled cartoons.