(shrug) An awful lot of Americans dislike black people with no real-life experience with them.
Leprechaun tossing contests are generally frowned on here. You’ll note that Harry Connich was not really coming down on them as much as he was removing himself from the situation. He would have been shredded if this was shown in his home country and Youtube pretty much guarantees that would happen.
Don’t feel obligated to walk on American eggshells. If we don’t like it we’ll bitch and moan like anyone else would. Freedom of speech is a 2 way street.
It doesn’t matter if you have experience with a race. If you are mocking them because of their racial characteristics then you are being racist. This ignores the fact that Australia does have an aboriginal population with black skin that has been subjected to deep, longstanding racism. There are a non-trivial amount of white Australians, by far the ethnic majority, that seriously look down on aborigines.
Seeing somebody acting like a buffoon in pitch black makeup and being applauded for it can’t be too effective at making them feel accepted in society, can it? Black face minstrel shows aren’t offensive because there have been X number of them over X number of years, they are offensive because they specifically single out a race for mockery.
Something doesn’t have to be intentionally malicious to be racist. Mammy Two Shoes from old Tom & Jerry cartoons never struck me as a character created of malice. She was an exaggerated stereotype created just for a laugh during a time when those sorts of exaggerated stereotypes were acceptable. But that doesn’t make the character any less racist. Even though the people who made her character probably just did it with the simple intention of making people laugh, they were ultimately doing it at the expense of another race.
Even if you aren’t trying to be mean, you are creating a situation or scene that a person belonging to a minority will see and it will make them feel like they are an outsider to society. They are the butt of the joke. They are fair game because they are different. And, ultimately, whatever your intentions, you are going to make them feel even more marginalized than they already are.
The only thing I have to add is that I think it is an insult to King Billy Cokebottle for him to be mentioned in the same breath as those idiots in the OP. FWIW one of the minstrels isn’t actually white.
Hi, my name is Francis and I’m an Australian.
This discussion is actually pretty interesting, but I feel there are more than a few points being missed. A lot of them by my fellow countrymen, but elsewhere too.
Despite denials of knowledge of the Black and White Minstrels, I can confirm that it did indeed play here on TV. It was a long time ago, and anyone under about 40 probably would have missed it. What is maybe important is that the executive talent for Hey Hey would not be unaware of it. They have been around a long time, and many are steeped in Oz show-biz of all kinds. But, and perhaps this is an odd point - the guys in black-face weren’t made up as B&W minstrels. They didn’t have the white lips and other more clown like additions. The guys doing the skit would not be familiar with the B&W minstrel shows. This is just background.
Here in Oz we have all the pretty usual racism stuff going on. We are more like Europe however than the US. This is because the US is quite special with its race issues, in a manner almost no other country is. In Oz we have the sort of racism that beset New York as the waves of immigrants arrived from Europe. When I was a kid the Greeks and Italians were the new Australians, they got picked on. When I was a teenager it was the Vietnamese as they fled after the war. Then it became other Asian immigrants. Now it is Middle Easterners and Somali and Ethiopian refugees. And, sad to say, some of the worst offenders in racism are the earlier immigrants. The history of New York has much to teach us. Australia has an indigenous population too. At first sight they would appear to be our blacks. But they don’t fit in the same place as blacks do in the US. They sit in the same place as Native Americans do. Sadly they have much the same appalling history, and many of the social and health problems many other native populations are beset with around the world.
The thing that the rest of the world never gets, and the US seems to not understand that we often don’t get is simply this. We never had slaves. It took me a long time to understand this, and to really understand how deep this goes. If we look at someone of colour, or some ethnic minority, we see someone who has a history of maybe: oppression, religious persecution, a refugee from war, famine or natural disaster, or maybe just someone trying to make their way in the world a long way from home who doesn’t speak our language. What we don’t see is someone who comes from a family that our forefathers enslaved.
This changes behaviour in odd ways. The Jackson Jive skit was, to be perfectly clear, not intended as a gentle parody. Australia has a long tradition of reasonably brutal, in your face, parody. Jet back faces and frizzy wigs? Don’t kid yourselves, this was intended to be nasty. White face? No doubt. Probably fuelled by long rumours that this was an intentional bleaching of MJ’s skin as part of his long obsession with altering his physical appearance. This skit was not intended as anything but a reasonably viscous parody of MJ and his life. But it ends with MJ.
What the guys who performed it, and what the show’s producers, and pretty much most of the Australian population, would have never understood, was the manner in which the form of parody used drew from the history of black enslavement, and the concomitant racial oppression.
When I visit the US, I find it interesting and still disturbing to watch social interactions that are clearly tainted by that history. Last time I was in Texas especially.
One of the key ideas I always try to keep in mind when working with anyone, indeed interacting at any level, is the critical part our sense of self has. How we define ourselves, our sense of purpose, self pride. It really makes no difference who you are, this is part of what makes us a human being. If you attack that part of a person you attack them in their soul. I am quite aware that calling out “boy” to a Black American in the South is about as targeted a slur as I could manage. But, sadly, most of my countrymen don’t understand that. And, moving back to interactions in Australia, no such slur exists here. Nor in almost any country outside the US.
My take on the skit on Hey Hey? Idiotic, and not intended as the gentle parody that many are making out. But similarly, not intended as a racial slur in the manner in which a US citizen would take it for. I can’t imagine what idiot allowed it to air. But judge it the same way you would judge it if it has been parodying a well known Asian singer and the guys were painted yellow with slant eye make-up. Pretty nasty racial stereotyping, and not fit for TV, but not the level of deep hurtful racism that is perceived in the MJ version.
My take as an Australian is that the producers of the show are clearly idiots with no understanding of how YouTube has made anything capable of going globally viral.
In Australia we have no “racial issues” because our black population has no voice at all. we genocided them so completely that their voice is effectively non-existent in mainstream culture. Saying we had no slavery in Australia is awfully ignorant, look up “blackbirding”. We’ve just been much better at hiding the evidence from ourselves.
I mentioned King Bill Cokebottle to get across that we can’t claim ignorance, we do have a history of associating blackface and racism but because there’s no one significant to complain we don’t see a problem with it.
Very well said, [BOLD/]Francis[/BOLD].
One question that I have: If something is racially offensive, is it therefore racist?
To portray this is “awfully close” to blackface is to be so completely removed from reality as to not reside in the same universe.
Now that is a deep question. I would have to say no. It depends upon context. In particular it depends upon intent. Words are a good place the start.
If someone is in a French restaurant in the US, and calls out “Garcon!” to a black waiter, it that racist? If the waiter took deep offense, which I suspect he might, does that transform the cultural mismatch into a racial slur? What if the person calling out “Garcon” was French? What if he was from the deep south and was positively relishing the idea of calling out “boy!” and getting away with it? What if the person was French, and called out “boy!” because that was the translation? Is he an idiot, ignorant, or racist? Sadly a lot of people are just fools.
Causing offense in such circumstances is usually all about the intent. You can be deeply offensive with the most innocuous words if you try, and be inoffensive with the vilest words. Where we get unstuck is where we are conditioned to associate offense with the mere words themselves. People are racist, and their intents racist. But words in isolation are just words.
One of the touchstones for me about the use of loaded words is the point where the denigrated subject takes control of the words. A good example is “queer”. It wasn’t so long ago that that was a pretty loaded and offensive term for homosexual. Having clear connotations of aberant behaviour. Then, sometime ago, it got approriated. Now you see gays worldwide openly identifying themselves are “queer” as an action of defiance and more deeply, as a way of turning a label that sought to degrade them into one that forms part of their identity, and from which they draw strength. One day I fully expect to see loaded words for blacks in the US go the same way. But it is lcear that the wounds are vastly deeper, and much still remains before it can happen. Whether I actually live to see it happen is another matter. I rather hope I do. (It almost worked with NWA - but they didn’t get to use their full name - just far too early.)
(Emphasis mine.) This doesn’t follow. The men performing the skit were all students in medical school when they appeared on the show in 1989. They must be in their early to mid 40s now.
Not American, never heard of a minstrel show. The skit is obviously and blatantly racist. They are not parodying the jackson five in any way, they are parodying black people.
But racism is racism, whether it’s towards people with a lot of clout or towards people whose opinions aren’t taken seriously. You’re making it sound like Aborigines are viewed as so backward and primitive that it doesn’t matter what people say about them. And if that’s what the average Australian feels, that’s very horrifying to me.
:smack: Aren’t you the same poster who said that if gay kids in your high school had stepped forward and said that they had a problem with the phrase “That’s so gay,” that you just wouldn’t care. And conservatives wonder why people think they’re bigots.
And what the rest of the world doesn’t seem to get is that most Americans didn’t have forefathers who owned slaves in America. Most of us have families that came here after slavery was already abolished.
When there was a big hue and cry for black Americans to get “restitution” from the U.S. Government (read: taxpayers), my first thought was that during the slave-owning era of American history, my ancestors were all living in Europe. Why should I have to put up cash for this?
You’re going to be very horrified, then.
That’s more or less what I said, yeah (although, for context, there were about four gay kids in a school of 1200. They weren’t a significant group and the “We don’t care” attitude would have been extended to any tiny group demanding special treatment). Not sure what the “conservative” thing has to do with it, though. I’m largely apolitical.
This is true. But things never quite work that way. “Forefathers” was not intended to be simple genetic heritage, but a rather broader term. I’m Australian, my parents emigrated from England in the mid '50s. Should I feel the least bit part of the enslavement of the African American? The answer is yes I should. My mother grew up in Manchester, who’s industrial might was built atop the cotton industry, and my father grew up in the South and was educated at a university that was substantially built with tobacco money. Not to mention the massive wealth of a substantial part of England that was built on top of the proceeds of the slave trade.
When a European emigrated to the US they entered a country that gave them huge opportunity. The underpinning might of the economy was built on the slaves backs, and even if your personal lineage did not own slaves, your personal comfortable position in life was so provided. Of course it hasn’t been about slaves per-se for a long time. But the freedom riders are still in living memory.
Not that the rest of the world is much better. Someone earlier pointed out the Black-birding trade in Australia. (I was quite aware of that when I wrote. The difference is that the blackbirded slaves all went home - if you walk down the street in Oz and meet a Polynesian Islander, they won’t be the descendant of a blackbird, and you don’t think of them in those terms.) I’m not trying to lecture US citizens about their own country (really!) We had exactly the same debate here about restitution for the damage done to our indigenous population. And the same cry went up. “My family wasn’t here when the bad stuff happened.” Mine wasn’t. Doesn’t matter. I benefited. However, in the end I don’t support monetary compensation. That is the disease of the modern world, the idea that money buys absolution. The damage is not about money. It is about loss of self. What matters is that a previously oppressed, exploited, denigrated, group be able to live life to the maximum without the taint of being branded inferior, and suffering under a new oppressive social structure. Now that is hard to do. Here is Oz it is hard. I can only begin to imagine how hard it is in the US.
Except for the ones who died during terms of servitude, of course. And I’ve heard that there are a few tens of thousands of descendants of those folks still living in Queensland, which seems to imply some stayed.
Truth is, outright slavery exists today in many parts of the world, whether legal or not regardless of whether it is actually called slavery or something else. It is related to the topic at hand. But the other part of the topic at hand is the mocking of people different than you, when it steps over the line, and how to define that line.
Sorry. I don’t buy this.
If you’re saying I owe people money because my skin is the same color as the skin of some turkey who abused their great-grandparents, that’s a pretty racist attitude. My dad didn’t get any free rides when he came to this country. He worked his butt off, and so did I.
I think it’s wrong for me to get any preferences because my skin is white, but it’s also wrong to blame me for what some other white dudes did 150 years ago.
This is a fascinating description of how the high-and-mighty Brits continued to profit from American slavery long past when the importation of African slaves to the UK should’ve “freed” them. :mad:
British Cotton from the mid part of the 19th Century onward tended to come from India, not the US. Tobacco also grows in more places than just the US.
Incidentally, The Royal Navy and the British Government also invested significant time and resources in trying to stop the Atlantic slave trade in the 19th Century, and despite their unofficial support of the Confederacy during the US Civil War, it was pretty clear that even if the CSA had “won”, they’d have to get rid of slavery fairly soon after the conclusion of the conflict anyway.
Or, to put it another way: Someone whose parents moved to Australia from the UK in the 1950s has nothing at all to do with Black slavery in the US in the early-mid 19th Century.
No, I didn’t say that. I specifically don’t believe you anyone any money. What I do say is that you should recognise those benefits that you got from that history. That is all. I don’t doubt you and your father worked very hard. But you didn’t make your success from bare earth. There was an economy in existance before you arrived. There was infrastructure, jobs, customers, wealth to be had. In most countries on this planet a lot of the wealth derives from the labour of an underclass. And the US is no exception. Even after slavery ended, there has been an institutionalised structure that has made it harder for some to break out of this underclass. You and your father may not have had any free rides, but you were not placed into this underclass either.
My thesis is that none of this is about money. Confusing the issue with money gets people riled up. They suddenly start thinking in terms of stuff that is theirs being taken from them. Like I wrote, this is a modern disease. You can’t buy absolution, and people talking of monetary compensation are doing little more than this. They are idiots. It won’t help, and typically will only make things worse. Mostly a stupidity of the politically correct who are liberal with other people’s money. The subtle racism of their attitudes is curiously poisonous, but is a different debate.