rolling "Is This Racist?" thread

I think ‘ex-pat’ might be in with a chance for removal…That woolly term that isn’t quite immigrant or migrant, and already conjures up images here of lobster-red brexit voting Brits drinking ice cold lager in English style bars on the Costa Brava.

ninja hopefully

I think guru and ninja both speak to the degree casual orientalism/anti-Asian racism are acceptable now. People saying "namaste" as a joke, the popularized uses of terms like karma and zen, there's tons more

tbf, I also think of pplains' larger point when I read young people saying things like "I can't watch any TV made before 2015"

xxp Like how the fans of Insane Clown Posse (aka Juggalos) refer to each other?

2xp surely not things like this
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51tYHW4%2B9iL._SY500_.jpg

i think there is a pretty fertile ground for reevaluating ableist slurs bc theres a bunch of them and they permeate our language. i will confess to not consistently checking myself on using them privately.

the namaste stuff tends to present itself as making fun of white liberal orientalism and appropriation which deserves mockery but it's clearly a thin line. was it racist to mock those trudeau-in-india photoshoots? probably some of the mockery was but the shoots themselves also felt kind of racist. idk what the best approach would have been to that

i wish people would take ableist language more seriously but i rarely challenge it unless it's egregious since it just gets treated like a joke or as PC extremism if i do. i hope that changes soon but the backlash against requests to stop using the r-word - which is what i mean by egregious - suggests that phasing out the less obviously grautitous stuff is going to be hard work. i still recommend trying to avoid the language since it forces you to think carefully about why you actually dislike thing/person instead of just assuming stupid idiot etc speaks for itself

yeah, i teach my son to think of that and finding other words to express what he's thinking or feeling.

when i think about people things that ive called stupid, it's never about a lack of intelligence. it could be arrogant foolishness, carelessness, animus, cowardice, bigotry, whatever. i think ableist slurs are so common bc of our collective emphasis on Personal Intelligence as capital (human, social, or otherwise) which is a vestige of eugenics (which brings us back full circle to white supremacy, hurray thread title)

yes and it's interesting that everyone i've ever spoken to who believed in IQ as an objective measure of intelligence/worth (telling conflation in itself) has also had very strong views on things like whether rap counts as music, or whether some people are natural athletes

i still recommend trying to avoid the language since it forces you to think carefully about why you actually dislike thing/person instead of just assuming stupid idiot etc speaks for itself

this really gets at the heart of why this is so worthwhile imo. it teaches you to really think through your negativity and start to possibly re-route your values.

I use those words a lot, typically to describe Republicans or my parents who just won’t listen. I know I shouldn’t, and sometimes I pause before typing them. Fools? Stubborn? Obstinate? Unyielding? Brick walls? Liars? I don’t know. Sometimes I get fed up and just call them fucking i*****

wait, stupid is ableist?

i try not to use terms like "crazy" or "insane" any longer. same with phrases that use the term "blind"

yeah, intellectual disabilities

The problem with "blind" is that I feel like it is the most apt metaphor for most cases where you'd use it, and it isn't always meant negatively. "Blind study" for example - I'm not sure what you'd say instead? But I am absolutely willing to listen to the blind community on what to do in those situations. I also think "stupid" and "idiot" are going to be hard to remove, as they're so embedded in the language. But "dumb" and "lame" are definitely gone from my lexicon.

I'm still constantly confounded by how many people think "spazz" is okay (and I can think of at least two songs I love that feature it heavily so it's not like it was super-easy for me to get rid of it, but it's just... not okay).

i still recommend trying to avoid the language since it forces you to think carefully about why you actually dislike thing/person instead of just assuming stupid idiot etc speaks for itself

this really gets at the heart of why this is so worthwhile imo. it teaches you to really think through your negativity and start to possibly re-route your values.

― Linda and Jodie Rocco (map)

I do think this is spot on, though. It doesn't help instinctive moments but it's absolutely a worthwhile practice to get into.

Lego Police Highway Arrest
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81PLN-9BvPL._AC_SL1500_.jpg

similarly: Ralph Breaks the Internet has visible minorities as the murderers in Slaughter Race, while the rest of the characters in the movie are mostly white.

Duke Detain

omg

vito risked all that for $100 and a...calculator and a baseball?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EnpW8H9UcAAe9GN?format=jpg&name=medium

as an Italian-ilxor, I can attest I have definitely been pulled over by a Lego Cop before, and it sucks

I went to a cute out of the way airshow of vintage planes last week, and one of the major bits of theater was the pretense than there was an escaped convict on the loose, dressed in striped prison PJs, evading the police. In the course of pursuit the man (thankfully played by a white person, it's not that kind of story at least) would, in desperation, grab onto a plane wing and be carried up in the air, only to be SHOT DOWN out of the air by the police, to the approval of all.

...

I wonder if that part of the skit hits different after Afghans died falling off planes? I'm not sure the organizers have that much awareness, sadly. But regardless of current events it was also very troubling to see shooting a prisoner normalized & celebrated.

It's true, once you see things with open eyes you can't enjoy a lot of things. I'm not lamenting that I'm just saying--people who think I'm some kind of killjoy have no idea how many things I'm *not* saying.

yeah any fun had at a "convict" or "criminal"'s expense is gross to me, including if the convict is white and it's just an old timey gag. you just know the laughing people are enjoying the idea of some poor person who is not them being hurt. maybe it reminds me of one of my favorite books i am a fugitive from a georgia chain gang in which the striped prison pjs were not such a fun time. and a lot of counties still make people wear those things!

"calculator and baseball" are probably the front of a safe. the piece is called a mailbox front.

that makes a lot of sense, and i know it's right.

but come on, that's a calculator + baseball

Looks like an ATM that was ripped out of a wall.

why was there a box of fish in the middle of the road

grip the baseball like a curveball in order to access checking

it was planted there earlier so duke detain could use it in pursuit

https://i.imgur.com/QqMQKOS.png

fish basket is the g-rated version of https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BabyCarriage

yeah the fish thing is very very confusing to me

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-M1-V6-sV014/TP2roxpZeQI/AAAAAAAAGCo/kAP7vbr2CR4/s280/LewZealand_and_Fish.jpg

"thug" - racist 99% of the time, right?

i have conservative family members who have discovered the joy of using "thug" lately. needless to say they're now blocked on my phone.

depends on context. plenty of people call police, feds, and/or right-wing militia boneheads thugs. or at least i do. but i'm guessing you're asking about a context where the answer is "yup"

tbh i don't think "thug" is ever a good word

i prefer sadist or bootlicker

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/24/theater/aladdin-broadway-jonathan-freeman-jafar.html

As far as Jafar goes, I never thought of him, to be honest, as anything but a Disney villain. I never thought of him as being North African, Middle Eastern, Asiatic, South Asian. I never thought of any of those things. I always thought of him as being a villain. The makeup that I put on was never meant to be race. It was always villain’s makeup.

sigh

the honest answer, seems to me, is the character is an obvious racist stereotype, repeated so often that everyone agrees to pretend its not for the sake of commerce and continuity and without a celebrity and grass roots accuser to point out the emperor has no clothes, disney is happy to keep on keepin' on.

many people unabashedly love orientalism is how I break it down to an extent

animated cartoons are incredibly fertile ground for race stereotypes, but disney makes too much money off this shit to mess with its basic formula. they offset the racist villain with a de-racinated hero/princess and call it good.

They're currently making a big noise about casting a Latina actress in the lead for their upcoming live action remake of Snow White...but she's still called Snow White.

also there are still comedy relief dwarfs in it

Rolling is this size-ist? Thread

as long as we're here

Deeply strange pic.twitter.com/ycilbi1iNL

— James Kelleher (@etienneshrdlu) January 25, 2022

and speaking of size-ist
https://www.indiewire.com/2022/01/peter-dinklage-snow-white-remake-1234693486/

“I was a little taken aback when they were very proud to cast a Latina actress as Snow White. You’re still telling the story of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ Take a step back and look at what you’re doing there. It makes no sense to me,” the actor told Maron. “You’re progressive in one way and you’re still making that fucking backwards story about seven dwarfs living in a cave together, what the fuck are you doing man? Have I done nothing to advance the cause from my soapbox? I guess I’m not loud enough.”

The original “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was the first full length animated feature from Disney, and remains one of the studio’s most iconic films. Dinklage’s concerns can be interpreted as part of a larger discussion of whether old art can be judged by newer moral standards. As society’s views evolve, the debate over whether problematic works should be buried or studied continues to rage on. For his part, Dinklage doesn’t think the story of “Snow White” needs to be hidden. He just wants to see the problematic aspects addressed, saying “if you tell the story of ‘Snow White’ with the most f—ed up, progressive spin on it? Let’s do it. All in.”

That second graf is such bullshit, fuck Indiewire

i will agree that "As society’s views evolve, the debate over whether problematic works should be buried or studied continues to rage on" is not a particularly helpful sentence; looks like somebody needed to beef up their word count.