Over the last few weeks, the U.S. literary community has had an intense, divisive debate about a magazine that, until this year, almost no one in the English-speaking world had ever heard of, let alone read. The shouting match started after the PEN American Center decided to give the Freedom of Expression Courage Award to French weekly Charlie Hebdo, which suffered a terrorist attack on January 7 that left twelve dead.

In the wake of PEN’s award, two polarized camps have emerged. Opponents of the award—notably Francine Prose and Teju Cole—organized a boycott, on the grounds that Hebdo was a racist and Islamphobic publication which deserved free speech protection but not any prestigious laurels. In response, PEN and its allies have offered two major and contradictory arguments: that the award is for courage not content, but also that Hebdo cartoons in fact had an anti-racist intent.

Strangely, for a debate about a cartoon magazine, both sides of the Hebdo controversy ignore questions of visual style.

Implicit in the defense of Hebdo is the notion that cartoons that might seem racist to American eyes—notoriously, the depiction of the French Guiana–born Justice Minister Christiane Taubira as a monkey—are actually anti-racist when read with an awareness of context and intent. But this privileging of context and intent raises more questions than it answers, since it is entirely possible that a work of art with benign purposes might implicitly carry toxic messages. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was undeniably a novel with a strong progressive agenda: to discredit slavery. Yet it’s difficult to read the novel without cringing at the often patronizing way the slaves are portrayed, which is why “Uncle Tom” has become a byword for African-American subservience to white supremacy.

Intent is important, but not everything. Understanding the ruckus over Charlie Hebdo also requires awareness not just of the cartoons' goals, but of why their message often gets garbled—especially when images can be transmitted instantly around the world to societies unfamiliar with the particulars of French visual satire. The history of Charlie Hebdo can help explain both the magazine’s intent and also the cloud of hostility it generates.