02-08-2022, 06:59 PM
(02-08-2022, 04:11 PM)Dill Wrote: Excellent analysis. Remember the comparisons of Michelle Obama to a "gorilla"?
No, no one remembers that. /s
Quote:I only differ from the bolded in that I think people who make ape/black jokes ARE endorsing the supposed "link" between black people and apes. They help to naturalize what its a specific cultural inheritance, explain it away as a "natural" visual association anyone anywhere could make.
Of course you do, because you, like many far left people, see racism everywhere. An interesting assertion, that racism requires no mens rea. Also, your underlined is a gross, and IMO deliberate, mischaracterization of what is being argued. No one views it as "natural", we view it as common knowledge. Like any racist trope about any ethnicity, it's not a secret. Hence people, of all races, will automatically make mental connections between a situation, occurrence or action that aligns with that trope. Making that connection in no way implicates that person as a racist, it merely reveals they are aware of the trope. In order for a person to be racist there has to be intent to be racist. You may say something racist without having racist intent, but that absolutely does not make a person racist. It is only when the statement is deliberate in its intent to be racist that we can infer the true feeling of the person uttering them. Under your overly simplistic definition nearly every single stand up comedian in the past forty years is a racist.
Quote:Nothing gets the Right agitated quite like the assertion, or even just the implication, there can be racists who don't know they are racists.
Any logical person would bridle at such an inane assertion. Let's use a stereotypical example; an older white lady grabs her purse tightly when a black man enters an elevator with her. If she is unconsciously reacting to implicit bias, that does not make her a racist. Now, if she knowingly grabbed her purse tighter because she consciously believes black men are all criminals, or criminally inclined, that would be conscious racism. But we cannot assign racist intent to her simply because of the action itself. For example, maybe that same lady was brutally mugged by a black man five years ago, and the memories of this occurrence unconsciously makes her react as she did. This does not make her racist. Your position is why accusations of racism are watered down to the point where they almost have no meaning anymore. You're so quick to slap the label on people that the term has lost all real power.
Quote:But that "unknowing" racist is the corollary of any conception of "systemic racism" that I am aware of. Keeping that unknowing unknown is the only way systemic racism can continue, and critique from it be deflected, in a liberal democracy founded on natural equality.
Again, incorrect. Your entire premise is based on the flawed assertion that unknowingly committing a racist act makes a person a closet or "unknowing" racist. You can certainly have unconscious biases, but you absolutely cannot be an unknowing racist.
Quote:When we are speaking of comedy, the latter serves as one public platform upon which racial issues and boundaries are defined and policed, and where people may have permission to say things they cannot in other venues. Arguments about Rogan's comments look mostly like arguments about what racist discourse really looks like and whether it really has any social effect, such as shoring up existing racism and reviving permission for racist inflected humor as it existed in the 60s and 70s.
As it existed in the 60s and 70s? Tell me you haven't seen a standup comedy routine in the past forty years without telling me you haven't seen a standup comedy special in the last forty years. Dave Chappelle, easily one of the greatest stand up comics in history, alone is proof of just how out of touch your opinion on this issue is.
