rolling "Is This Racist?" thread

question is not "is this racist" but what is best way to tell friend this is uncool

yr gonna have to explain this one to me

pvmic

re: the tupac shirt, at A3C this weekend I stood behind someone wearing this jersey (except black instead of red):

http://picture-cdn.wheretoget.it/gzk9ip-l-610x610-t-shirt-biggie-smalls-shirt-biggie-smalls-jersey-dope-illest-hip-hop-biggie-smalls.jpg

ok so oprah heads all good i guess

what exactly is the racist part of that

oprah heads sound suspect to me idk

was bojack horseman racist

tbrr i don't think i would actually call that person out on the oprah thing, it just made me go hm

bojack horseman just kinda sucked, maybe it got racist after the first episode, no one will ever know

yeah I don't think the Oprah thing is per se racist. I mean at worst it strikes me as in the vein of campy Arnold from Diff'rent Strokes photos (i.e. it's "lol 80's media and hair" more than "lol black person"), at best maybe she just likes Oprah.

idk strikes me as lol oprah

its just weird

bojack horseman sucked for sure, and its main character is way too similar to archer

there was a discussion here years ago about white ppl using pictures of black people in lolzy ways in twitter profile pics etc

probably itt but i have no idea what to ctrl-f for aside from j0rdan

Ah I remember that

Whiney called out a dude for using a picture of a 70s basketball player in a way that was like "lol afro" and then all the white people on ILM spent hundreds of posts trying to separate their uses of rapper profile pics from that

still not sure if my T.O.P. profile picture was racist, though i felt validated when my mother mistook him for me

yeah it shouldn't be difficult to see why it's questionable enough to go in this thread, unless you're oh haha never mind

Whiney called out a dude for using a picture of a 70s basketball player in a way that was like "lol afro" and then all the white people on ILM spent hundreds of posts trying to separate their uses of rapper profile pics from that

― 龜, Monday, October 13, 2014 6:02 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

looks like it was just you v whiney but idk i didn't keep reading. i dont think its weird to use a rapper as your avatar if you are a fan of rap music any more than it was to have a poster in your room of an artist or athlete as a kid (or a "print" as an adult, ha)—it's the LOL dynamic that makes it weird ... i dont really think this is angsty white guilt parsing per se. a person who only used white athletes in their avatar would prob seem a lil suspect too

rolling "Is This Racist?" thread

thanks for finding that, i had the hubris to try opening a 9400 posts here and then chrome took ten minutes to crash

everyone is racist

We get so bombarded with images of these media celebrities that they become part of our visual language. While it's probably worth interrogating how we use the images and why, it's not realistic to expect people not to use them. I mean these are media personalities, and they're full of camp and caricature. Maybe it's not cool for a suburban white kid to put Gucci Mane as his avatar or w/e, but if so, then why is it ok for him to drive around mouthing the lyrics in his car and mimicking the videos, or to listen to it at all for that matter? I get why there can be racism in this, I just think the average teenager gets sent a pretty confusing message about how he's supposed to digest it all.

so all this Cosbygifs shit is racist as hell

the reason white teenagers get mixed messages about their consumption of black culture is because there's no pure-of-heart, correct way for white teenagers to consume it.

lorde

oh lorde

But srsly I feel like there has been a schizo relationship to black pop culture ever since there has been widely distributed black pop culture, and it seems like the channels of media distribution kind of want people to have that relationship to it, because that's what makes it feels subversive and dangerous and guilty. Sorry if this is the kind of shit that is already taken for granted on ILM/ILX, some of you guys are always two steps ahead of me.

Like clearly this stuff is intended for white consumption, but white people are supposed to feel a little teensy bit like maybe it isn't.

Ohhh lorde please talk to this sucker cause they killin hip hop

couldn't bring myself to type it :D

http://I.imgur.com/SiwVMtl.jpg

This obv doesn't beg the question if it is racist, for it so so obv is. It's getting that time of the year again where Sinterklaas and his blackfaced 'helpers' are on their way. In recent years the debate about this has heated up more and more. The more traction the anti-Black Pete movement is getting (even though prob 95% wants things to stay the same/doesn't care), the more grim the racist counter reactions are, bringing up the vilest racism I've ever seen.
The Zwarte Piet discussion lays bare how racist this country really is, and still most people are blind to it. Reactions like "if you n-word don't like our tradition then fuck off to your own country" are common (even though most are born here, or in my case, born here and white btw and also against it). I won't go into the 'pro' camps 'arguments', as they are too depressingly stupid. But it comes down to: it's tradition, he's black because he came down a chimney (O RLY? Did he get those lips and earrings from going down a chimney as well?) etc.

The above image is from today. Not the 50s or 60s, no, from today. A right wing political party (who are in office!) in rotterdam hung black Pete dolls on lamp posts... Yes, that's right. They hung them, to make a case for 'black Pete is not going away and fuiud'. You can't make this stuff up. Mayors have said it's a case of the people to decide. And our idiot prime minister famously said 'I can't change BP's appearance, because black is what he is', embarrassingly referring to a black friend he has who doesn't have a problem with it (*weeps*).

Sorry for going on but I needed to vent. Never before have I felt so out of touch with nearly 95% of the people of this country. The 'debate' tears through family relations and friends. Yet still I'm optimistic. Every year more and more people are pleading for a reform of some sorts (make Pete of all colors, not just black etc). And I believe in ten years things WILL have changed for the better. But man, the whole white reaction when even suggesting to change things a little are so aggressive, so 'you can't take this from me! This is what defines us Dutch!'. It is so godawful depressing,

/end of rant

http://I.imgur.com/SiwVMtl.jpg

Amazing... Imgur removed the image. That's all you need to know really.

http://I.imgur.com/h6JRH64.jpg

http://www.whitenessproject.org/

DEPRESSING. Especially the comments about slavery.

The area of town where my wife works has all these Halloween decorations up around the various civic and arts institutions, giant wooden articulated cutouts that look like zombies and goblins and whatnot. But a great many of them look a lot like traditional blackface figures, much like Le Bateau Ivre's picture, that I can't believe someone didn't say "Hmmm, maybe we need different stuff." The first time I came down the street and saw one I did a double take.

xps
Is it only me that's struggling to see exactly what the project has to do with 'whiteness'?

I think that's one of the insights of the project

I'd considered that angle but the 'whiteness project' can hardly trade on its failure to get white people to talk about what it means to be white. If one of the big insight is supposed to be that most white people conceive of race in term of the 'other', then it has shown us nothing that we weren't familiar with.

I said this in someone's fb feed today but my impression of the clips that I've seen is that at least part of the project is to give people enough rope to hang themselves. Which I enjoy to maybe an uncharitable degree, and which granted has a short shelf life after which it's just piling wrongness and trauma on top of wrongness and trauma, but I can enjoy it for a little bit at least.

It's also revealing that white ppl seem to want to talk about whiteness by talking about non-white people instead of any intrinsic qualities of "whiteness"--it may rather turn out to show that the concept of "whiteness" is hollow in a lot of places and already defined by it's...hm "opposite" may not be the right term because nurturing a binary relationship is totally not helpful given the infinite spectrum. But anyway defined by what it is not. That it's to some (maybe a large) degree only propped up by its opposition?

Sorry, you did basically say that in fewer words, but I think you may be overrating how familiar people are with that possibility?

Anyway I came here to say that one of my relatives is really upset about MObama's vine co-opting a Lil Jon song to promote the consumption of a healthy fall vegetable. Her affronted concern trolling for the dignity of the office of First Lady is delicious.

i'm guessing "turnip for what"

whiteness as a whole has been defined by our treatment of non-white ppl, when they actually talk about being white they just bring up their specific ethnicities rather than race cause there's actually something else to talk about there

xp

Exactly! She was so mad she wouldn't even tell me WHAT video, I had to go searching youtube.com and guess at which MObama attack ad it was mostly likely to be!

Well that whiteness thing isn't going to get very far. If you're inclined to say things like, "I don't get the whole discrimination thing," you're likely to view a "whiteness project" as the product of elitists.

Those responses are the embodiment of "whiteness" - avoiding dialogue with outsiders is a tactic if exclusion. So is the refusal to think about discrimination, to consider another's view.

"tactic of" exclusion, I meant.

they sound honest though - isn't that the point? to get their honest, biased views?
actually, i don't really know what the end game is here with it either

This was where I saw it, fwiw:

http://www.salon.com/2014/10/15/why_the_whiteness_project_is_so_mortifying_partner/

People are talking about it like we are here so maybe it's good idk