Go back to the 1970’s and Archie Bunker. He spouted off words like kikes, japs, polacks, and hebe.
It exposed the ugliness of racial bigotry to the viewing public. I remember watching and recoiling at Archie’s senseless bigotry. He spouted off the stupidest opinions imaginable.
That character did a lot in changing society’s view towards race & nationality. It’s been decades since I’ve heard anyone use those words in conversation.
All in the Family wouldn’t last two weeks in today’s PC charged world. It would be shouted off the air overnight.
Which is why Antenna TV airs it every weekday evening, along with a 12-hour marathon every Thanksgiving. If it weren’t for the offenderati’s evil machinations, the show would be aired on every channel, 24 hours a day. Even on the PC echo chamber known as the Fox News channel.
There are plenty characters (regular characters, recurring characters, very-special-guest characters) who say offensive things on television all the time - some very, very much worse than the things that could get on the air in the 1970s (when the FCC was a lot stricter, more heavy handed, and controlled a much higher percentage of “tv” than is true today). It’s part of the tapestry of “peak TV.”
On network TV alone, Tim Allen and Cedric the Entertainer are pretty much doing Carroll O’Connor impressions on their shows. Neither is being shouted off the air.
:rolleyes: Gee, what happened to “people should be free to express themselves however they want”, “in all areas of life”, “without fear of public reprisal”?
Oh right, except for all the times that it’s not “appropriate” to “openly express themselves”, the innumerable “unique situations” that “there aren’t any specific rules” to cover. Glad we got that cleared up.
If you keep on making dramatic absolutist in-defense-of-sacred-liberty pronouncements, and then awkwardly backpedaling them through qualifiers and evasions and conditions when your vague pronouncements are questioned, then your position is going to keep on looking silly.
I see. So I should be able to go into the break room at my work and loudly proclaim “I think niggers and kikes should get the fuck out of this company!” without worrying about an enforced speech code?
The Daily Beast did an excellent article on what’s going on in our universities. Just how far PC has been taken.
The graduates of these schools will take this with them into the work place. Some of them will enter management and it will shape how they create employee policy.
If the owner of an NFL team doesn’t want to hire Kaepernick they’re free to not do so.
But if some owners want to hire him and they’re pressured by other owners not to, that’s wrong. It might also be illegal depending on the circumstances but it’s not a violation of the First Amendment.
And if the government is pressuring the NFL to blacklist Kaepernick in response to his protests, that’s a clear Constitutional violation.
Precisely because the term itself is meaningless, you and others here are wasting your time in this thread. It’s a snarl-word with no specific referent–it’s a bogeyman.
And by the way, that’s exactly why so many people think it’s a “problem,” as in the “Hidden Tribes” report mentioned by Corry El . The same thing happened with the term Obamacare, which was also rhetorically positioned as a bogeyman so much, and so constantly, that people thought it was the black plague–until they actually got it, and then the majority realized that they wanted it. So, yes, as k9befriender states, the propaganda has indeed worked on them. Anyone who reads the whole report can see that the problem isn’t that the country is “divided,” but that the country doesn’t know how to process the propaganda.
As long as this thread continues to frame this as a question of speech, everyone is begging the question and wasting their time. This isn’t about speech at all. It’s about an emotionally programmed rhetorical tool used to validate the status quo.
I think the real question here is: “What’s it like to woosh yourself?”
So a comedian was offered a gig with conditions and turned it down. You’ll have to excuse me for not seeing the reason for the drama here. A little silly? Maybe - although “don’t be a bigot” isn’t a high bar to clear in comedy. Abridgement of free speech? Hardly - I’d expect a similar ruleset at any school gig, with the additional stipulation to keep it “clean” if my audience includes anyone below 10th grade. And this was a charity gig for UNICEF. Listening to how the comedian loses hos shit over this would be funny if so many people didn’t agree with him.
“I just think it reflects an attitude among a group of people, people at university particularly, where it seems that they have become places of indoctrination rather than learning,” he said.
“Students are being taught to prevent offence rather than to seek truth and pursue experiences.”
What a fucking tool.
Of course, this depends on you being far more convincing than the racists. Which you’d think wouldn’t be a high bar to clear, and yet somehow Sargon Of Akkad consistently stumbles over it.
When you give a platform to racist ideas, if that platform isn’t an explicit tear-down like Question Time, you will often end up bolstering their shitty ideas. You give them a massive audience, and if the result isn’t that they’re “utterly demolished”, you’re probably going to give them more positive attention than you’d like. That’s part of why debating YECs is such a huge waste of everyone’s time. You’re engaging with bad-faith propagandists.
Deplatforming them does not run this risk - if they cannot spread their ideas, then they’re pretty much contained. And, empirically, it works - heard of Alex Jones recently? Yeah, me neither. His outreach is far lower now that he’s been banned from social media.
Your example is great. Thanks! He was hired by a children’s charity, who wanted to make sure his performance wasn’t offensive. They realized they went too far and apologized to him. The school itself (the student union) made it very, very clear that they do not approve of restrictions on speech. Did you want to try again? I’m not sure I really need to argue with you, since you’ve done a great job discrediting your position.
Regarding your second paragraph, I think the first classic example of racists being given a platform was the Nazi party. That worked out great! A more recent example, but much, much more mild of course, is President Trump and his band of merry racists. All they’ve done is encourage more racist protests leading to clashes and deaths, and more racist hate crimes.
I’m happy for you that you live in the UK, which has less of a racist past than the US, but here in the US, we had many local Nazi sympathizers during the War (Henry Ford! Other prominent businessmen), and we have Nazi sympathizers in the White House right now or in the recent past – Bannon and Miller spring immediately to mind.
Re-reading, my last two paragraphs are really hijacks from this thread, but I thought your proposal to give racists a soapbox so they can be shouted down really needed a response.
I watch Frank Lima and there are a couple of things that stand out:
He’s pretty old-school.
He’s not out to hurt anybody.
He’s talking about different ethnicities in a milieu where he’s not punching up or down, just sort of sideways.
I think the latter point is important for people who are in a tiff about PC. Many of us grew up in a social milieu where we were aware there was some racial tension, but just saw ourselves as working-class folks. We engaged each other from the only starting point we had (stereotypes) and discarded them as we came to know each other as people. Nothing demeaning or nefarious was intended. I don’t know if the black folk saw it exactly the same way, but it seems like we came out of it more or less as equals.
I experience the same thing when I visit folks I know in Japan. We engage each other frequently on stereotypes and misunderstandings about one another. Some of them are kind of offensive, some are so bizarre I’m left speechless. But everyone seems to understand that some temporary skin-thickening is in order because mistakes happen when reaching across a cultural divide.
I’m not suggesting a return to the time when we could say the same things we used to 50 years ago. Once you’re no longer naive about certain words being hurtful and oppressive, the definition of kindness must shift to discourage their use. But I do have some sympathy with people who feel like talking to, or about, different people carries a risk of shame for being ignorant of other cultures, or for just not keeping pace with what seems like a steadily accelerating treadmill of euphemism.
Of course there’s a place for non-politically correct speech. Twitter. Reddit. Gab.ai. The more a space deems intercultural politeness as a threat, the more it turns into an absolute sewer populated mainly by the dominant culture. Few people are fully aware of those places because they’re shit-awful places to spend time. Spend a little time on gab.ai and see if you don’t agree that norms of cultural respect are kind of a good thing.
Frank Lima probably wouldn’t do well at Antioch College, but I watched him on YouTube where the comments seem to be mostly adoring. I imagine this is very funny in a multi-cultural place like Hawaii where different ethnicities are more equal.
But doing this bit in my city wouldn’t go over so well.
In summary, I think the death of benign non-PC discourse is greatly exaggerated by people resistant to the idea that there’s a time and place for everything, and that it’s a good thing to be politer than you feel like being.
Knowing and understanding the origin is sometimes critical before dismissing a term/word as politically incorrect. As I mentioned above, ‘yobo’ is an affectionate Korean term for darling. So if you hear me calling a Korean woman, yobo, don’t think I’m being racist or calling her a bad name.
I used to think that manong and manang were racial slurs against Filipinos and while it can be used that way, they mean older brother/uncle and older sister/auntie in Ilocano. So again, if you hear me calling a Filipino man manong or a Filipino woman manang, I’m addressing them in a respectful way.
We call one of our closest family friends from Japan is Pada-san, short for yopada (yopparatte iru), Japanese for drunkard. He was given that name by my parents and their friends because he loved to drink and often drunk. With the -san a respectful honorific addition to his name. To this day, I don’t know his real first name.
I’ve never watched any of Cedric’s material. But name one time when Allen’s show came anywhere close to using the sort of language that Archie Bunker did.
The point of Archie Bunker’s bigotry and racist comments was to place him in a negative light and show the stupidity of having those types of views. In the beginning (I watched the show from the first episode at the time), he was a thoroughly unlikable character. It was only in the later years, especially after Edith died and he adopted his little girl, did he really mellow out. Two memorable episodes were the one where Sammy Davis Jr. kissed him on the cheek, and Cleavon little appears in a burgler with a heart.
When Norman Lear made the spin-off, Maude, he made Maude the antithesis of Archie as a too liberal, too progressive, without really living what she preached.
A couple more examples of the importance of understanding the origins, meanings and use in context of some words/terms that would/have been deemed non-PC. KPop group BTS (Bangtan Sonyeondan / Bangtan Boys) who are making headlines in the U.S. and the world, had the words nae ga (I) and nee ga (you, used informally) censored in their hit song Fake Love because some American radio and TV shows thought it would be taken that why were using the “N” word. https://www.sbs.com.au/popasia/blog/2018/05/24/bts-changed-fake-love-lyrics-bbmas-avoid-offending-anyone, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C2z4GqqS5E. SIGH
Also, in formal (Beijing dialect) Mandarin, na ga or jee ga means ‘this/that or this/that one’. But in some Northern Mandarin dialects, it’s pronounced nee ga (note that in both Korean and Chinese, there’s a very slight pause between the first and second words). So Mai nee ga means “Buy this (one)”. Should these Mandarin words be deemed non-PC and censored just because Westerners don’t understand the meaning and context?
I’m not sure if African transplant to China, Ghana Baby (Wode Maya) was making a joke or not (he likes to play around round with people in his videos), but he seems genuinely upset when a customer says “Nee ga, nee ga, mai nee ga” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHaGDVpbQaQ . He ends the video on a great note as he explains that nee ga has nothing to do with his being African and is a proper Northern dialect form of ‘this’.