rolling "Is This Racist?" thread

the jokes itt are moving in a direction

self-fulfilling thread titles

(one of their popular logo they've used for a few seasons now just says "Fuck You!")

i have more than one friend who owns the "GO TO HELL" cap smdh

http://www.phillymag.com/articles/off_the_cuff_february_2012/

Off the Cuff: February 2012
By D. Herbert Lipson
Posted on February 2012

I keep thinking about a blog post that one of our writers here at Philadelphia magazine recently put up. Victor Fiorillo was riding the trolley home through West Philadelphia. A woman sitting near him began yelling at her two young children, a boy and a girl. The girl, probably two, kept sliding down in her seat, which enraged the mother. She started hitting and then smacking her daughter, trying to get her to stop. Her son, who was probably four, said something, and the mother gave him a series of rapid-fire punches.

No one on the trolley—perhaps 20 others—said anything. Except for Victor. “If you hit that child one more time,” he told the woman loudly, “I will call the police and follow you home and make sure they arrest you.”

The mother sprang up and spat in Victor’s face. Then she gathered her children and got off the trolley. The woman, who was black, left with the comment, “That’s the problem with all you fucking white people.”

I don’t know what I would have done in that situation; perhaps, like almost everyone else, I would have remained silent. And that, I believe, is really the problem with all of us, in the face of an inner city that is mostly a dysfunctional mess. We are doing nothing. In fact, we aren’t even willing to talk honestly about what’s wrong; we’re too afraid. We’re afraid of getting the responses that Victor received online to his post, accusing him of butting into somebody else’s business and even of being a racist. How, I wonder, is having the courage to speak up when children are being abused anything but the proper response?

Our fear has us avoiding even a discussion of the real problems. Recently, Nicholas Kristof wrote in the New York Times about two decades’ worth of studies telling us that how children are treated when they are very young has a telling effect on their brains. If they’re loved and protected, their minds develop in a very different way than if they’re ignored or abused—or beaten. As one doctor said, “Early experiences are literally built into our bodies.”

It’s pretty easy to connect the dots, though Kristof, with strong liberal credentials, certainly didn’t. The children that Victor saw on the trolley are going to have miserable lives. They will do poorly at school. They will abuse drugs and commit violent crimes. They will become part of a culture that has Philadelphia at or near the top in several categories nationally: in murder, in poverty, in hunger, in illiteracy.

Is it a mistake to say that? Should I worry that some readers might see me as racist for describing what I fear for those children, who happen to be black? Perhaps I should be like Mayor Nutter, who defined the big initiatives of his second term as fighting crime and improving education in this city. Do you really believe, Mr. Mayor, that you can make a dent in solving those problems without looking at something much more fundamental? It is patently clear that the inner-city family is broken, with abusive mothers, absent fathers, drug abuse and criminal behavior rampant. The Mayor occasionally recognizes this fact in outbursts of anger, but unless we keep shining a light on the crux of the crisis, nothing gets solved.

I realize, of course, that I am on dangerous ground here. But when it is overwhelmingly likely that the two young children Victor saw on the trolley will end up with damaged lives, I don’t think we have a choice. Moreover, ignoring a mother beating her children on the trolley is a microcosm of our larger failure.

We’ve been throwing money at the problems of our urban poor for more than half a century, with terrible results. Facing the truth about inner-city life instead of dancing around it would be a start in a much better direction.
Originally published in Philadelphia magazine, February 2012

why do people seriously conflate criticizing people who happen to be Black with making racist-intoned statements? the article's offensive to me because it assumes that the other people on the bus said nothing because the lady was Black and they were afraid of breaking this imaginary taboo, and not just...Genovese syndrome.

(srsly, watch any situation where someone's being physically abused in public, and all people generally do is stand around, murmuring, and confused as to what they should do).

To clarify my first statement...I'm questioning why the article writer thinks there's this imaginary forbidden zone where we can't offer a personal criticism of someone who is Black, when people do it all the time without being called "racist". Huge difference between yelling at a lady for beating her kids and saying something like "man, what is the deal with you people".

if he wasn't a racist reaganite (looooooool show me this money we're "throwing" at any urban areas) and arguing in bad faith i would point him to the "myth of the underclass" chapter in adolph reed's stirrings in the jug but i kind of feel like to take rants like that at face value is to play oneself.

also if he's advocating taking kids away from poor black parents en masse he should just come out and say it like carl paladino did when he was running for governor of new york. nice company to be in, btw.

anyway, yes, that's racist

http://www.phillymag.com/images/uploads/articles/37370_article.jpg

^^ d. herbert lipson

like a racist Mr. Feeny

it's at least highly fucked to actually write that those children will have damaged (and in his mind "TYPICAL BLACK") lives because their mother hits them. and it's a million times more fucked (and racist) to blame the problems of the black inner-city community on mothers hitting their children.

"if only Yo Gotti had gotten more hugs..."

i think he's making a generally valid point (broken homes & families do make broken people, not always, but with depressing predictability, and this can become a self-perpetuating cycle), but doing it in a way that at least edges into outright racism.

I think a teeny tiny valid fact about early childhood development is just a briefly glimpsed mile marker on the way to his racist conclusion.

otm

The children that Victor saw on the trolley are going to have miserable lives. They will do poorly at school. They will abuse drugs and commit violent crimes.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_C-J2golFlhk/Sc_NWIU8NGI/AAAAAAAAAI8/yWCfyonEExw/s400/crystalball_468x317.jpg

We’ve been throwing money at the problems of our urban poor for more than half a century, with terrible results. Facing the truth about inner-city life instead of dancing around it would be a start in a much better direction.

Using the deplorable plight of two black kids to call for spending less money on programs like Headstart is despicable. Or, wait, is he really calling for government to step in and put all black kids in foster care? Or, is he calling for a moon-landing program to make poverty and ignorance disappear? Or, what the fuck is this guy's point, anyway?

I think a teeny tiny valid fact about early childhood development is just a briefly glimpsed mile marker on the way to his racist conclusion.
--drawn to them like a moth toward a spanakopita (Laurel)

Yeah, like abused kids turn out fucked up, but why does he think black people have a monopoly on hitting their kids?

the rhetorical way in which he injects race into the issue - midsentence, or via the totally shitty passive clause "who happen to be black"

like he knows exactly what kind of territory he's entering and is very explicit about that, but still tries to hide the ball

whiney otm. it's not really crystal-ball territory to say "if your mother abuses you in public, you're going to be fucked up," though, you kind of have to be stupid to not already know that

OTOH to say "here is how they'll be fucked up" is where he really steps up his racism game - there's a thousand ways those kids might deal with the damage they're getting

Yeah, like abused kids turn out fucked up, but why does he think black people have a monopoly on hitting their kids?

exactly. he could have made the same point by saying, "hey, all you black people: stop hitting your kids," but didn't have the guts.

I think 'increases the likelihood of you being fucked up' or some such is preferable to 'you are going to be fucked up'. Pedantry, I suppose, but the latter statement seems to reduce people to simple cause and effect.

well, we're into personality & style differences here I guess, but I'm perfectly ok with "if your mother abuses and berates you publicly, you are going to be fucked up."

and buzza OTM, the predictive/condemnatory "are going to have miserable lives...will do poorly at school...will abuse drugs and commit violent crimes" bullshit is inexcusable. maybe those kids will survive their upbringing, maybe they won't. either way, withdrawing funding from inner city aid programs probably won't help.

he's not really talking about any of those kids' lives, he's invoking the specter of the inner city welfare queen mom as symbol of the degenerate moral character of the black underclass, that hoary old chestnut. maybe he's written an editorial extrapolating from the penn state scandal that rich old white dudes who coach athletics are destroying the moral fiber of this country and their offspring are going to rob you and rape white women, but i doubt it. funny how this rhetorical move seems completely superfluous as american political culture veers further and further from any kind of commitment to the public sector, thanks to his rhetorical ancestor, ronald reagan. i guess this discourse has just settled in for the long haul.

i realize you guys were actually trying to engage the words he wrote in good faith but it all reads like code to me.

ha well yes it is true that reading everything as if it were being said in earnest is sort of my involuntary specialty

it's also true that i read everything that includes the phrase "throwing money at the urban poor" through a paranoid lens.

stirrings in the jug is a really good book btw

just because i'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not after me racist

looks like the entire underclass chapter is on googlebooks

is it racist that insurance company More Than puns on Morgan Freeman's name and impersonates his trademark voice-overs but uses a white Morethan Freeman to sell insurance?

e.g.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8X4rST4YvY

i'll say no

sorta dumb tho.

probably couldn't do it in the US tho, the thought of which is kind of making me rethink

Yes.

is it just coincidence that our best-loved and most dignified african american celebrity, the star of glory and driving miss daisy, is named freeman DO YOU SEE

More of a personal affront to MF than a racial one, imo.

Read something to the effect that he gave his permission but isn't exactly a fan

struggling to see how it's in any way racist, assuming the guy in the ads is also the voice actor?

this all Compare the Meerkat's fault basically (were those racist?)

i think they might be, yeah

Accent. Verbal blackface.

okay, really?

Well, *I* find it creepy and tasteless, and that's what I come up with.

morgan freeman's voice is neither an "accent" nor "verbal blackface"

he has a very slight twang because he's from Memphis

That is not Morgan Freeman's voice, and the attempt to sound like him is based primarily on accent and very little on the other aspects. And that is not simply regional.

his voice is much more distinctive than his accent, which imo is quite soft?

...and it's the other way around for the voice-over guy, which is my point, and I hope someone not on a gotcha quest knows what I'm talking about.

gotcha