Did we read the same OP?
What is that supposed to mean ? What do I have to do to prove to you that despite being a person of Indian origin, I can comprehend English well ? Win the National Spelling Bee ?
When I’ve read this kind of statement by a member of the majority/dominant ethnic group, I view it as a cop out and an excuse to justify not setting limits on their behavior.
First, the concept of freedom of expression is based on the notion that the government can’t sanction you for the content of your speech. It has nothing to do with societal/cultural reactions to that speech.
If you are going to advocate fascism, white supremacy, etc., then the government shouldn’t put you in jail for, but the social and commercial reaction to you should be harsh. People should shun you, you should lose your job, businesses should refuse to supply you or rent you their locations. Those are all things that we as citizens have a responsibility to do.
I don’t buy anyone going ahead and getting into business with that kind of speech on the basis of “freedom of expression.” You’re misusing the concept and abrogating your responsibility to your fellow humans. You’re an accomplice. Saying “freedom of expression” doesn’t relieve you of your culpability.
Second, the “what’s punching up to me might be punching down to someone else” is also a cop-out and another way for members of the majority/dominant group to maintain their social power.
There’s no mysterious calculation here. We have a very solid and understandable grasp of the conditions of European and North American culture. We live in a white supremacist society undergirded by systematic racism. One of the essential components of the racist system is racist speech, including racial epithets, mockery of culture, speech, appearance, etc.
There are theoretically some circumstances in which you might not know who’s punching up and who’s punching down. But if you are a white person in Europe or North America using racial terms and mocking the speech, appearance, culture of non-white people, or failing to do what you can to shut down someone else doing that, then you are an accomplice in maintaining the racist and white supremacist infrastructure. “Freedom of expression” doesn’t give you a place to hide.
I think the issue here is that the “you want to” makes it sound like Mangetout wanted to put on a comic Indian accent, and his OP says specifically that he does not want to. It’s an ambiguous sentence so I think that accounts for Ruken’s reaction.
Thank you for the interpretation, Acsenray. Although, I believe Ruken was completely capable of stating the same (if that indeed was her/his intent) rather than the cryptic questioning of understanding the OP.
For the record, consistent with my post above, the generic “you” in the sentence is used in lieu of “one”, the third-person singular impersonal pronoun, in colloquial speech.
I have known Mangetout long enough on this board to accuse him of any such thing.
Nothing cryptic about it.
I’m a francophone Quebecer. Are we the dominant group in Quebec, as we’re often being told? Or a non-dominant group in Canada, since we’re a minority in the country and most of it operates in English? Or formerly (but not necessarily anymore) a non-dominant group even in Quebec, since we used to be much poorer and less educated than English-speakers who were by far the dominant group economically? (We still are poorer and less educated than anglophone Canadians to some limited extent, though the gap has been in large part filled.) Or maybe we’re actually the dominant group in Canada, as so many anglophone Canadians will claim. After all, Canada being bilingual means that some government job require knowledge of both English and French, and it’s much easier for us to get them since “all the French speak English anyway” (we don’t, but that’s what they believe – or think should be the case) and anyway “French is sooooo much harder to learn than English” (said by unilingual native English speakers who have no idea how hard it can be to learn their language, or any other language for that matter).
So no, finding out who’s dominant and who isn’t isn’t easy. And no, saying this doesn’t make me a Nazi or whatever else you want to claim.
Finding out who’s dominant isn’t easy in some specific circumstances. It’s not at all difficult in Mangetout’s particular circumstance. The possible ambiguity of the situation among white residents of Quebec isn’t a basis for throwing up one’s hands with respect to the white supremacist societies that dominate Europe and North America. I don’t believe for a minute that you find the specific context I described as ambiguous and difficult to puzzle out.
For the record, I haven’t claimed you or anyone in particular is a Nazi.
I’m sorry but you did talk about advocating fascism or white supremacy. I did no such thing. My post was responding to MrDibble who claims that it’s obvious that British people mocking French people is “punching sideways” while British people mocking Indians is punching down. I do agree with the latter part, but the former isn’t obvious to me, and I’m sure some French people would be offended by how they’re stereotyped by the British. I find all ethnic stereotypes somewhat distasteful, but they’re part of humour and aren’t going to stop being so, which is what my “freedom of speech” argument was about. We could get into interminable debates about whether only the government can violate your freedom of speech, or whether a non-governmental group could do so as well (for example, by picketing one of your public appearances, insulting the attendees, maybe assaulting the attendees, or maybe just by threatening to do so), but this has been done to death already.
Why was this thread resurrected anyway? Mangetout posted that some commenters on his YouTube page said he should read scam emails with an Indian accent, which is both ridiculous (these emails aren’t from India anyway) and offensive. And he wanted to know if we agreed with him that the stereotypical “Indian accent” was actually pretty racist and offensive, which we did. But now people want to show that Mangetout was actually being a monster by asking this question? Or that I’m defending oppression? What about Corry El who wonders why it’s “punching up” to make fun of lower-class white mannerisms, when it’s usually a middle-class or upper-middle-class mob who does so? There was no need at all for all this angry internet vigilantism.
I never accused you of it.
What do you mean they “aren’t doing to stop being so”? There is much less ethnic stereotyping in humor today than there was in 1990, or when I was a child in 1975, and less than in decades before. This isn’t an enduring fact of life. Society has steadily worked to break down these aspects of society. And they couldn’t have done so with the attitude “they’re part of humour and aren’t going to stop being so.”
The rest of your post seems to be written from a thread I’m unfamiliar with. I would ask for clarification, but I suspect I will remain confused.
Lorde got some push back in 2013 for her song “Royals” as many felt it was attacking black culture. Lorde, who is from New Zealand, said she didn’t view her song as an indictment of black culture she just viewed it as American culture in general. Was she punching up, down, or sideways? If I poke fun at songs sung by wealthy black entertainers involving drinking Critsal, conspicuous consumption, misogyny, etc., etc. am I punched up or down?
I suppose that might be deemed another odd exception that proves the ‘rule’ that ‘punching up/down’ is a highly useful metric for evaluating what is correct comedy or social criticism generally. But I also tend to doubt it. It’s a reasonable goal for personal conduct that I should try harder to avoid being harsh to people in a less fortunate or lower ‘power’ situation than I am as compared to people in a more fortunate situation, as I perceive it, OK. As a supposed objective metric for where cancel culture mobs are justified to go ape shit about stuff, there’s a serious amount of inconsistency in application of that principal IMO, not a little.
In general, shaming/shunning in recent times has a tendency to be a fairly small group trying make their perceptions and standards the dominant ones. They say it’s just ‘society imposing its norms’, but really it’s a pretty small (political) minority using those tactics to try to establish what shall be ‘universally despised’. Looking back at history, any of (what we, naturally, as people now view as) society’s more enlightened (actual) norms were at one time minority views. Along this slippery slope I can see how people can convince themselves that pretty much unlimited (short of violence) aggression in pushing for further norm changes that only a small minority now support puts them ‘on the side of history’. But it can backfire, either directly in a political way, or the general corrosive effect over time on yes, free expression. The fact the US constitution doesn’t prohibit shun/shaming (calling for people to be fired, demonstrations that amount to harassment etc) in furtherance of minority views is quite beside the point. It doesn’t endorse shun/shaming in furtherance of the actual societal consensus either. It’s just not the same issue as govt suppression. Although it’s indirectly related, and I’ve rarely encountered internet shun/shamers who were 1st amendment zealots.
I’d not heard of this. From what I can find, it seems one woman argued this in one article, but her argument was poor and people didn’t agree.
Her argument was really “we all know what she’s really thinking.” :rolleyes: She equates rap culture with black culture. She quotes all the lyrics, but ignores most of them.
The song is about how, even though the speaker didn’t come from money, same as these other people, she’s not going to make a song about praising wealth and being unrelatable. She’s not going to be the bragging asshole that permeates so much of hip hop.
This is no more racist than Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop.” Criticizing the trends of a genre is not in and of itself racist.
As for your question: as a general rule, it would be punching up. The only way it would be punching down is if it were coded, and not really about the music.
That said, you fall into the same trap of saying this is only black entertainers. It’s not. Many black entertainers aren’t like that at all. The criticism is of mainstream hip hop and rap.
What appears to have happened is that the thread was raised for the innocuous reason that someone was agreeing with that The Minstrel Show was not seen as racist at the time, while also saying that Kabuki theater was a different case.
This brought the thread to the attention of a poster who hadn’t seen it before, and who happens to actually be from India. They disagreed with a single statement in the OP, but the way it was worded looked like they were actually attacking Mangetout. Turns out, it was a misunderstanding–they were using generic you. Turns out they weren’t saying anything bad about the OP at all.
Entirely separately from this, another poster saw it and was indecisive about whether the accent would be offensive or not, and brought up the punch-up/punch down concept, which is what changed the topic of the thread. In that topic, Ascenray replied to you, and you misunderstood his post as calling you a fascist.
Instead, he was just arguing that the fact that something can sometimes be ambiguous doesn’t mean it has no value. There are circumstances where it isn’t ambiguous, and his example was with white supremacists. They try to argue they’re punching up against the “SJWs” or “The Jews” or whatever. But there is no ambiguity in that situation.
Your situation in French Quebec is complicated. But I would generally say it’s okay to punch up against the government, but not the people. However, I’d argue that minority/majority status isn’t the problem. It’s the difficulty in defining a group that is being oppressed vs. a group that is relatively unoppressed.
“Always punch down” still works though. If can’t tell which way is up and which way is down, then you don’t punch.
It doesn’t hold at all. The point of the joke centers around the absurdity of some heavily accented foreigner reading from a script claiming to be “Bob from Tulsa” on some sort of customer support line. There’s also a layer in the joke about how stupid the company must be if they think they can foist “Bob” off on us in an effort to save a buck.
The joke’s not about the accent or nationality of the call-taker; they just happen to be predominantly Indian these days. If they were in say… Hungary, the joke would be no more or less funny if “Bob” had a thick Hungarian accent. Now if the joke was intended to make fun of “Bob” because he’s Indian, or imply something derogatory about Indians, then that’s a different story.
Personally, I’m kind of torn about Apu on the Simpsons. The joke was originally a very time-and-place sort of thing; in the late 80s, when the show premiered, a huge number of convenience stores WERE staffed by Indian immigrants whose grasp of US niceties, etc… was less than perfect. So the character was kind of a mild dig at the stereotypical immigrant convenience store clerk of the time, not some sort of hostile jab at Indians in general.
But I can see how people might take it that way; the accent is comically exaggerated for sure- in reality, they range from nearly unintelligble, all the way to Priyanka Chopra’s nearly non-existent one, with most being closer to Chopra’s than the other end of the scale.
I think the real distinguishing thing is whether another accent could be substituted in the joke without it falling flat; if the answer is yes, then it’s probably not racist, or at least not specifically so for a particular group. If the answer is no, then it probably is racist.
I don’t know what to make of the power differential idea; on one hand, you have Scots who in general seem to like Groundskeeper Willie, despite his being a much more hostile portrayal of Scots than Apu is of Indians. I have to feel a lot of that is due to the perceived power differential between the two, with Willie being a white guy, and Apu not. And maybe it’s because Willie is SO outlandish, while Apu isn’t- could a more ridiculously stereotypical Apu have been paradoxically less offensive?
For a recent example, a number of my Chinese friends were offended by a British TV presenter repeatedly doing the “ching chong” thing in a segment. He had no specific point to make and just found it funny to make fun of another language.
On watching the clip, I found that the twat in question was Piers Morgan, so I had to tell my friends that if they want to slap him, there’s rather a long queue.
Oh good grief. Just when I thought my opinion of him couldn’t sink any lower (not that I tend to spare a lot of brain cells in his direction on any account).
I didn’t fall into that trap because I didn’t argue that only black entertainers have similar lyrics.
Update:
Welp, because I always include a FAQ break in my videos, I decided to tackle this specific FAQ in my latest upload. Unlike other FAQs where I have gone into some depth of explanation, I chose to answer this one with simply ‘because I’m not a racist’.
Quite the little shitstorm that seemed to cause (I did actually add narrative text pretty much to the effect of the points we all seem to be in agreement about in this thread).
So now I have:
[ul]
[li]People accusing me of ‘virtue signalling’[/li][li]Others arguing that prejudice against Indian people is ‘not technically racism’ (because the dictionary says racism is something very specific).[/li][li]People in flat denial that the scammers I deal with are NOT in fact from India (including my personal favourite: “How is reading the scammer emails in an accent racist? They’re all from India you fucking liberal moron. Unsubbed. Fuck you”)[/li][li]People playing the ‘you’re a bigot yourself, because you hate bigots’ card[/li][/ul]
and that’s only the tip of the iceberg, it seems.
And you know what? I’m not sorry. It’s been a bumpy ride, but I have come to the conclusion that my scambaiting videos might have inadvertently provided a cosy little harbour for people with horrible views, up to now.
I’m not sure in myself if that means I have to stop doing them altogether, or if I can continue, and use them as a platform to confront more of this bullshit.
Reading through those comments is depressing.
You did the right thing, Mangetout.
It didn’t feel like it had been the right thing, right after the reactions started rolling in, but I am more and more convinced it was for the best.
People want to unsub because of it? Buh bye! I would rather the channel failed altogether, than be supported by that, or provide safe harbour for it.