It’s not because it’s less than perfect. It’s because it’s got exaggerated looks that are stereotypes. The huge lips, the big kinky hair, the pitch black skin. Like the “Mammy Two Steps” character in Tom and Jerry. If someone unfamiliar with the culture saw it, they wouldn’t get it. But it’s playing on a racist stereotype.
I mean, if someone made a doll that was meant to be Jewish, gave it a huge nose and starting selling them, you wouldn’t think they were trying to be offensive?
Then again, this is the Dope where there are posters who generally think “Jewed him over” is a compliment to the Jewish financial ability. :rolleyes:
An action can be racist without the actor being racist. The act on the show WAS racist, I’m sorry there are no two ways around it. Are the performers racist? Well, I dunno, the act is the only point of reference I have, but it is such limited evidence that I would not feel comfortable calling them racist anymore than I would feel comfortable calling them oblivious or ignorant.
You know that there were black cabbage patch dolls, too, right? Oddly enough, no one ever called those dolls racist, despite them being poor representations of black people. You know why? Because those dolls didn’t deliberately draw on imagery that has a long and well-documented history of racist stereotyping.
I’d disagree with pretty much every point of that.
People were offended, sure. The term “offensive”, however, is an objective rather than a subjective term like “offended”, and while it’s apparent that it would have been considered objectively offensive in the US, it wasn’t to its audience. If American commentators want their moral standards to apply to others, that’s nothing new but it doesn’t make them right.
On the other hand, it clearly made a play on racial characteristics, so I’d say that “racist” is a pretty good description.
I don’t think this can be pointed out often enough: if you don’t want Americans offering their opinions about your TV shows, then the very first thing you should not do is invite an American onto your TV show for the express purpose of offering his opinion on the performance.
I’m not sure I get this post. You say “If American commentators want their moral standards to apply to others, that’s nothing new but it doesn’t make them right.” But then in a following statement you say that you think the skit was racist. Is racism immoral or not?
Yeah, really. There are people who see a few more shades of grey than that.
The fact that aboriginies are genetically more prone to certain diseases than white people? Racist. And therefore obviously - and I quote - “always wrong”. The fact that Africans have more fast-twitch muscle fibres than white people? Apparently “always wrong”.
But if that works for you, I’m obviously not going to change your mind.
So what about caricature of National stereotypes? There was that Simpsons episode a few years back which depicted all Australians as backwards, poorly educated beer-swillers who lived in a country which had only recently installed electricity and had silly names for everything. Would you consider that OK?
The problem wasn’t the idea, it was how badly they did it. Every single caricature missed the point, so badly that if you hadn’t been told they were parodying Australians you would not have been able to pick what nation they were trying to parody. It was clearly written by someone who had never been here, and possibly never even met an Ozzie. We just watched it bemused.
Australians love to take the piss out of everything, and curiously, we enjoy taking the piss out of ourselves possibly more than anything else. We do get into trouble.
I don’t think anyone here in Australia actually found the episode offensive- as you say, it was very poorly executed and I agree most people would have been bemused rather than offended by it.
The point that I’m making is that if it’s not OK to caricature people’s racial characteristics for entertainment, then how is OK to caricature people’s (alleged) cultural characteristics for entertainment?
