rolling "Is This Racist?" thread

indee-eed

this sentence seems to take things a bit too far:

But more important, they prepare young children to accept immigrant-bashing, stop-and-frisk searches, the forced breakup of Mexican families, the impoverishment of farmworkers, and the racist campaign against the Mexican American students in Arizona.

not familiar with this stuff but I always loved Speedy Gonzales when growing up and I knew that the character was clearly a joke. my wife is Mexican and that's her favorite character, I mean she was thrilled that I was even familiar with it. probably doesn't add much to the discussion but if this is like that and we're saying it's making kids okay with the Arizona immigration laws I'd say that's putting very little faith in the kids

It takes a joke and creates an insult where there wasn't one before.

Had someone approached me at 8 years old and told me that Speedy Gonzalez was bad, that he was mocking me and my family, that it was not a joke but something I should take offense with, I would have cried. A little older and I would have been angered and insulted.

iirc Speedy Gonzales cartoons have alternately been pulled and put back in circulation as latino groups have praised him as a good character

I think all the marijuana smoking refs have been pulled, though

Are you guys making the argument that because you liked Speedy Gonzales, it's not still an awful racist stereotype and caricature?

I mean, shit, I "liked" Hong Kong Phooey as a kid too, it was still a terrible idea

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/03/speedy-gonzales-hispanic_n_4039787.html

FWIW this was how I viewed Speedy -- he was clever, heroic, funny and amiable. I'm not going to tell anyone what to find offensive, but I can certainly understand why a hispanic person might *not* find him offensive.

It's a little more complicated than a handful of people!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedy_Gonzales#Censorship

Despite such controversy over potentially offensive characterizations, Speedy Gonzales remains a popular character in Latin America. The Hispanic-American rights organization League of United Latin American Citizens called Speedy a "cultural icon", and thousands of users registered their support of the character on the hispaniconline.com message boards. Fan campaigns to put Speedy back on the air resulted in the return of the animated shorts to Cartoon Network in 2002.

Is Eddie Murphy as the old Jewish man in Coming to America offensive? Because that's one of my favorite screen characters of all time in spite of the yiddish caricature.

Are you guys making the argument that because you liked Speedy Gonzales, it's not still an awful racist stereotype and caricature?

obviously I'm not trying to say what is or isn't offensive, but that the character isn't pure negative stereotype (he was always the quickest/smartest/most cunning of the bunch) and that going from that to "accepting the forced breakup of Mexican families" is a pretty massive stretch

hah, fair point

Does anyone feel like the whole joke of speedy gonzales is that he is fast/smart &c *unlike other Mexicans*?

I have never ever gotten that impression.

me neither

the joke is that he's hyperactively fast

I have never ever gotten that impression.

I have had that impression in the past

i'm hispanic and i'm not crazy about speedy gonzales, primarily b/c it because it was used by white kids i grew up with as nicknames/slurs for hispanic people

i hate the band name "speedy ortiz", too, especially since none of the members are hispanic

re: gonzales, i generally operate on the notion that stereotyping marginalized groups of people in cartoon form isn't a good practice. i understand though that some latinos are okay w/ speedy.

If nothing else he gave us a great joke on Futurama: "That guy makes Speedy Gonzales look like Regular Gonzales!"

I thought Speedy Gonzales was cool when I was a kid, and I didn't really know much about Mexican stereotypes or know many Mexican people. If someone had told me they were Mexican when I was age 7, I don't know that it would have really registered for me that "that's what Speedy Gonzalez is" tbh. Not trying to pull some "I don't see color" bs, I just think my kid brain didn't really process Speedy Gonzalez as anything other than a cool cartoon mouse.

the sombrero and thick accent didn't tip you off eh

xp to hurting -- i get it that as a 7 year old you might not know that speedy gonzales = mexican. but the character is obviously coded as such and at some point speedy is going to enter kids' consciousness as a mexican stereotype. it wasn't 7 year old white kids calling hispanic people "speedy gonzales" when i was growing up, it was white teenagers clearly aware of speedy's mexican tropes who grew up watching looney tunes.

right though white teenagers are gonna be shitty no matter what, as a Jew I got a ton of the Eric Cartman stuff growing up. though had South Park never existed I'm sure it just would've been something else.

there's always something

Kinda on-topic - I walked into my son's preschool classroom recently and did a doubletake at one of their art projects.

http://i.imgur.com/DNqoLtc.jpg

ladybugs?

Ladybugs.

http://i.imgur.com/ZeScVFZ.jpg

Ladybugs

idgi

me neither

on first glance they look a little like pickaninnies

https://www.google.com/search?q=pickaninny&client=firefox-a&hs=hGy&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=sb&tbm=isch&imgil=VZiXq68eRFwocM%253A%253Bhttps%253A%252F%252Fencrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com%252Fimages%253Fq%253Dtbn%253AANd9GcRjB3x4fYBGQXHqgToKKFoDx_XsCGGCq1yZqjWoMZWS4_5UfWsPgg%253B200%253B160%253Bt9nUouhiNsG82M%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fen.wikipedia.org%25252Fwiki%25252FPickaninny&source=iu&usg=__ZsiM5OF1Crdwx9QnLA5_mMOjFdQ%3D&sa=X&ei=6mByU9ipJqqd8gHfp4CIAQ&ved=0CDwQ9QEwAQ#facrc=_&imgdii=_&imgrc=VZiXq68eRFwocM%253A%3Bt9nUouhiNsG82M%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fupload.wikimedia.org%252Fwikipedia%252Fcommons%252Fthumb%252F5%252F55%252FPicaninny_Freeze.jpg%252F200px-Picaninny_Freeze.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fen.wikipedia.org%252Fwiki%252FPickaninny%3B200%3B160

That's what my first glance told me.

Especially when you first flip the lights on in an empty classroom.

Still don't see it. I see ladybugs.

I just see bugs, I don't see gender.

I guess maybe pplains is the REAL racist here.

...or we are

i figured out that they were ladybugs, but at first i saw BLACK HEARTS which was obv. awesome of kids and teacher both

http://i.imgur.com/yMhheyr.gif

I saw what DJP described, dark faces with red bandannas.

And I am completely racist, thought we'd been over that.

Racist toward LADYBUGS.

Has this been brought up yet? http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/05/11/310708342/recall-that-ice-cream-truck-song-we-have-unpleasant-news-for-youThis

yea, not sure if it was this thread or the other race thread floating about site new answers

That song title

o_O

I just saw lady bugs. I thought the deal was "LADY" bugs named Henry...like no man bugs, ever? I was actually at the kitchen sink this evening, washing dishes trying to figure out what the deal was and so had to return here and there it is....

That song title

o_O

― a strange man (mh), Tuesday, May 13, 2014 4:23 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think it's a little beyond o_O

I won't belabor the point (too late), but this is what I thought I saw at first.

http://i.imgur.com/FkBePHKl.gif

i don't understand why that NPR article is circulating like grumpy cat in 2014 when there was literally a top 10 song with that melody on the billboard singles chart 8 years ago

It's almost like a hip-hop song isn't sufficient enough grounds to talk about something, but it is when the predominately white NPR gives it some shine, hmmmmm

lol I thought about "Chain Hang Low" too

social justice clickbait didn't really exist in 2006 the way it does in 2014 tho