Justice & Law Quote by Al Capp

A cartoonist knows that the quickest way to land a punch is to make the premise sound obvious, even when it’s doing quiet ideological work. Al Capp’s line is built like a deadpan campus memo: “Today, at Harvard” pins the claim to an elite, symbolic stage, then “fashionable” turns race into trend-watching, as if power in America now operates like hemlines. It’s sarcasm masquerading as clarity.

The specific intent is to invert the moral grammar of civil rights-era reform. By framing institutional efforts to address historic exclusion as “rights denied” to others, Capp recasts remedial policy as the real discrimination. The word “given” implies unearned handouts; “denied” implies a zero-sum theft. The sentence doesn’t argue; it asserts a rigged seesaw.

Subtextually, the quote performs a double move: it claims to defend fairness while smuggling in resentment as common sense. “Currently fashionable color of skin” suggests not only that racial categories are being opportunistically rewarded, but that the reward is fickle and performative - a social fad rather than an attempt at justice. Harvard isn’t just a campus here; it’s shorthand for liberal authority, a place the reader is invited to distrust as both powerful and hypocritical.

Context matters: Capp, famous for broad satire in Li’l Abner, became increasingly aligned with culture-war conservatism in the late 1960s and 1970s, when affirmative action debates sharpened and “reverse discrimination” became a potent rhetorical weapon. The line works because it turns policy complexity into a crisp insult, offering the emotional relief of certainty: someone else is cheating, and you’re the one playing by the rules.