novapsyche | (no subject)

I know it's silly of me to continue to watch the thread over at MSNBC over the Imus controversy. It's degenerated even from where it was two days ago. I think I read it because like a train wreck it is so grotesque you can't look away.

There are people who chastise Black people for being "thin-skinned" and overly sensitive. "It's just a word! Get over it!" Or, "I haven't seen you chained and picking cotton lately." As

greeneyedkzin said over in

ginmar's journal, "Once again, we have a demonstration of how 'cancha take a joke' is asking less-privileged people to be complicit in their own denigration."

Then you have people who switch roles and claim victim status. Someone actually said, "It has become a social stigma to be a white person." Someone else stated that while Blacks are allowed to call each other the N-word, if a White person says something racial then "they" (Blacks) want to kill them. Kill them.

Remember, this controversy started out by a celebrity, who happens to be a Caucasian male, saying denigrating things about basketball players, who happen to be black and female. But somehow, the conversation (if you want to call it that) has drifted into Blacks wanting to kill Whites.

Then you have people who equate racism with a fad, like bellbottoms. "People of my generation have gotten over racism." "It's so 1990s."

I really fear for the future of my country.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

We need a climate where it's not acceptable for people to make racist comments without penalty.

In that case it has to be all-encompassing. Racist comments (of the Gibson ilk) and racist jokes (Mencia et al) are often too close together to tell the difference. Often it's a matter of tone, delivery, context, and yes, even race of the speaker. While 90-95% of the time you can tell the difference, satire's a fine art form and often intent is the only difference between hate-speech and mockery of same, and intent isn't always easy to discern. (Especially in print form.) For example, is Apu on The Simpsons a perpetuation of a racial stereotype, or mockery of that stereotype? Or maybe both? Mockery of a thing DOES perpetuate it. Fighting over it DOES perpetuate it. You want the stereotypes and hate-speech to go away? Get rid of all of it, then. And on both sides of the aisle. No more of black guys saying, "Hey, my nigga!" to one another, no more rap songs talking about bitches and hos, no more of any of that. As long as it's perpetuated on one side, the other will use it. You don't hear Jews calling one another kikes, do you?

Picking and choosing comments to slam just because it's a slow news week makes things worse, not better. Especially when it's a guy like Imus, whose entire career was built on being a shock-jock. People listen to him HOPING to be offended, just like Howard Stern or Ice-T (back in his rapper days) or a hundred others, so when he says something offensive it's hardly a surprise. What you're talking about is basically cutting out an entire segment of "acceptable" speech, and while I think it's a great idea I don't see it happening any time soon.

Please be clear that I'm not talking about censorship, but public *censure*. Calling people on unacceptably racist talk, every time, is what I'm talking about.

I realize that it can be hard to draw the line, but I think that's where you leave it up to folks to go with their conscious, whether they think, like the commenter below, that Mencia and his ilk need to go as well as the Imus-types, or whether you're OK with people who make racially-charged jokes that make fun of stereotypes while you will not support comedians, artists, and so on who make blatantly racist jokes or comments.