So how about you crack some jokes about white male privilege and how it makes a certain demographic group act as though it is entitled to act as rude and obnoxious as it wants just as long it strikes them as funny? Like, for instance, cracking jokes about Indians in the middle of a thread about the alienating unpleasantness of online racism.
You’re right that laughing at “ourselves” is an American tradition. The problem is that “ourselves” always happens to look different than the people doing the laughing.
John, just apologize and move on. There’s no way you’re going to handwave this away (though I am not personally offended, I can understand why others would be).
How about just apologizing for making a stupid and feeble joke? Your sense of humor is usually better than that.
Mocking a native-born second-generation American for being somehow not really American is just tired old racist schtick, even when normally sensible and rational non-racists such as yourself indulge in it.
You’re not being a self-deprecating American laughing at “ourselves”; you’re just mindlessly making fun of teh furriner darky chick.
You guys realize there’s a difference between making a joke about all Indians working tech support jobs in India and saying that she’s a filthy Arab Muslim who should be shot on sight before she flies into a building, right?
The former is like the teasing that goes on between friends, which could be construed as racist by people with large sticks up their bums, but is considered by most people to be harmless. The latter is hatred and viciousness.
ETA: My husband just pointed out that the former is satire; the latter is not.
How do you figure that a white American jokingly pretending not to know the difference between an American of Indian origin and a tech support worker in India is “like the teasing that goes on between friends”? What’s friendly about it?
Oh, you mean that the people jokingly pretending not to know the difference between an American of Indian origin and a tech support worker in India are actually making fun not of the American of Indian origin but of other people who really don’t know the difference between an American of Indian origin and a tech support worker in India?
Oh well, in that case, fine. Even if it’s just an after-the-fact attempt at face-saving, I’m not going to quarrel with it.
If you mean Vanessa Williams, it was Penthouse. I had that issue. The photos were taken by a photographer in New York in 1982, and Williams assumed they would be kept private and that they were destroyed. They were offered to Hugh Hefner, who turned them down on the basis that Williams didn’t authorize their publication and he didn’t want to embarrass her. Bob Guccione exhibited no such scruples however.
Man, I hope none of you guys ever watches anything like Saturday Night Live.
I suggest you take some of your ire, if any is left, over to this thread. You might want to have a word with the OP.
For what it’s worth, I make jokes about privileged white folks all day long-- I have to live and work with a whole slew of them and their WPPs*. So what’s my quota?
White People Problems. Shamelessly stolen by me from SNL.
Maybe it’s my monitor, but omgiaminlovewithdianahayden.
When Indians talk about light-skinned they mean “one shade darker than red-haired people are under the freckles.” It’s a color that does not occur in nature, at least not if you’re Indian.
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