In all of that, it’s hard to see clearly that you acknowledge perpetuating a falsehood or that you have any regrets for doing so.
As should be evident, Willie Horton is not the furlough program, and Al Gore never mentioned Willie Horton.
Well, you quoted it. It’s a pity you won’t read it.
Regards,
Shodan
Not wanting to burst your otherwise excellent post but what percentage of the 69% of white burglary suspects are considered hispanic?
To add to my earlier list, I just saw a new show on my television:
True Jackson, VP
Having watched for 5 or 10 minutes, it would appear that the main character (black female) is smart and talented. The dufus is her friend Ryan (white male).
And, of course, making white males the butts of jokes in commercials and sit-coms is nothing more than the spread of post-1970s Political Correctness into the media. This is obvious when we consider this abbreviated list of pre-1970s leading characters:
David Crabtree
Harry Dickens (with Arch Fenster)
Oliver Wendell Douglas
Dobie Gillis
Fred Flintstone
Ralph Kramden
Amos and Luke McCoy
Fibber McGee
Tony Nelson
Rob Petrie
Chester A. Riley
Danny Williams
Also the shows with horses as the main character. Ever notice how they are always the “smart and talented” ones? So smart they can talk? It’s just not a realistic portrayal of society at all! In reality, most horses don’t talk, yet here one is, talking. Shit, Hollywood is soooooooo damn PC! Bunch of tree-hugging bleeding hearts sucking up to those lazy, shiftless, good-for-nothing equines.
The problem is that Blacks weren’t very regularly portrayed in the 50s and 60s so it’s difficult to generalize. There was Amos and Andy and that was a comedy with a lot of foolishness in it. (I believe on radio they had been portrayed by white men.) There was the program Beulah which didn’t do as well in television as it had in radio despite the good actresses who played her. I don’t think it lasted too long. (Again, her role had been played by a white man on radio.) Beulah was about a maid and it was also a comedy, but Beulah had a lot of savvy.
I can’t think of another regular fictitious storyline involving Africian Americans until the 1960s. Cosby played with Robert Culp in I Spy and he played as an equal partner! That was just unheard of. He was so young and cool. And Diahann Carroll played in her own show Julia where she was a nurse. Mission Impossible had Greg Morris as a regular.
Sidney Portier had begun playing dramatic roles on live television in the Fifties, but not on a regular basis.
That’s all I can think of before 1970.
I would have thought that too until I saw The Eleventh Hour this week. The main characters of the show are a white male detective and a white female detective. This week they added a young guy who looks a lot like Forrest Whittaker did twenty years ago. And he acts plenty goofy, but he’s likeable. It never occured to me to associate his goofiness with his being Black. So maybe it can be done after all.
I don’t know where you live or how old you are or what you do for a living or where you get your impressions of blacks. I live in a city in the South. For twenty years I worked in schools which were mostly black. Fifteen of those years, the schools were about 95% to 98% black. About half of my colleagues were black and most of my administrators were.
There is no reason why blacks shouldn’t be portrayed in a very positive light. The same can be said of the white kids that I’ve taught and the few from other cultures. They can be spirited and full of mischief and that’s a good sign. As teenagers, their job is to rebel. But these are decent human beings and if you have some other image in your mind, you are just wrong and you need to know the truth of it. You are not a stupid person and you shouldn’t nurse ignorant ideas. Such thinking makes you appear faded and sound out of tune. I don’t know how else to describe it. I’m not trying to insult you personally and please forgive me if what I have said has hurt your feelings. I’m talking about how ideas like this seem to me – not how you are.
Fine, so don’t assume it. Makes no difference to me or my argument.
Yes there is a reason. For one thing, it’s politically correct and biased to repeatedly use the formula of the black character who is (relatively) smart compared to his or her white dufus friend.
I still wonder though, why all this is such a problem for some people.
I think it’s inevitable that any society’s TV will go through a period where ethnic minorities are first the butt of many jokes, in line with racial perceptions. But then later, as society evolves and racism is seen as unacceptable, the majority group have to be the dumbasses because of queeziness about using minorities.
Making fun of the majority group is far less serious than the other way round. Nobody’s going to watch a commercial with a white burgler and think “Whites…damn burglers the lot of them”. They only have to look at the faces on their (drug) money to see that’s not true.
Sure, if the subject is cleaning or cooking or raising children. Forgive me if I forget to play the world’s tiniest violin for this sob story. We men, especially white men, make more money, have more opportunities in life, and are taken more seriously on average. Taking a few lumps on TV is really a small price to pay.
Now, if you want to talk about how queer men are portrayed in TV, then we’ll have something to talk about.
Cite?
I’m not familiar with the commercial in question, but it sounds like it portrayed one single case. Do you truly believe that it is not possible for one single white man anywhere to have ever abducted a black girl?
Are you reading the same thread as I am? Nobody’s angry, we’re just being snarky about the “twist” in this thread, which we all saw coming from a mile away. You’re neither as subtle nor as clever as you seem to think you are.
Those amuse you? Because, what, they’re unrealistic? Are you saying that there are no black doctors?
You clearly don’t watch the same shows I watch. Scrubs, a long-running and very successful network show, often has Chris Turk, a black character, acting like a total doofus. He’s a smart guy, because he’s a doctor like almost everyone else on the show, but he puts his foot in his mouth all the time. Dr. Huxtable’s son in the Cosby Show was often portrayed as an idiot, as was Will Smith’s main character in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. In Sanford and Son, the title character, a black man, was one of the biggest bumbling idiots of all time, and his friends (all/mostly black) were not often portrayed in a positive light either, despite the fact that the show had a large black audience. The black children on the Bernie Mac Show were often portrayed as positively idiotic, and (although I haven’t seen the show in years) I don’t remember Bernie Mac’s character always being portrayed positively, either. Boston Legal had a black female lawyer who was a loud, annoying, lonely, selfish busybody, often contrasted to a white male character who was brilliant, principled, and sexually successful (often nailing the hottest women in the firm)–and that, all on a show whose liberal political screeds were spread so thick that even I, one of the most hard-left-leaning people I know, sometimes walked right out of the room in response. Psych has a (smart, granted) stuck-up black busybody working for a much more successful white guy who exemplifies cool in the social engineering tradition of Ferris Bueller. That’s all off the top of my head–and I hardly even watch TV. What’s your excuse?
Just two hours later:
Moving the goalposts again, eh? So it begins.
And here comes the ham-handed false accusations and the demands for an apology. Really, why do we still bother with this guy?
Boston Legal. I don’t remember the black lawyer’s name, but her white bosses and coworkers put her down a fair bit. And then there’s Clarence, the transgendered black male secretary with a weight problem, regarded with something between pity and contempt by most of the generally-white cast (although he does unbelievably score a few dates with his attractive white boss). And again, this is all on a show that defined left-wing political screeds as dialogue.
Speak for yourself.
Hostile Dialect,
Hostile Dialect, Narcissist
For me, putting aside the issue of whether these practices are offensive (or mean-spirited as I noted earlier), I believe that political correctness is a destructive force in America.
I don’t debate with this poster.
I see this thread has gotten pretty far removed from the issue about whether or not any actual statistics back up the proposition that it’s unfair to use white burglars. I want to thank you for being willing to show actual statistics.
The Brinks commercial is very clever. It uses a burglar but it implies that the woman (and her kid, if I remember?) are in personal danger. Essentially it conflates a premeditated burglary with robbery and perhaps even murder. That makes it pretty difficult to decide on a statistical basis what the burglar/robber would look like. One suspects the typical burglar would be very bummed that someone is home and more afraid of an enraged woman protecting her home. But the commercial makes him appear threatening and violent (when he busts in the glass, for instance).
For robbery (taking something by use of force, threats or intimidation) of course, the statistics are markedly skewed in the opposite direction: 42% white and 56% black (an over-representation of blacks in the robbery category by a factor of more than 4). For all murders/non-negligent manslaughter it’s about 50% each, so again blacks are markedly over-represented. http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t4102006.pdf
I think it’s silly to pretend advertisers don’t pay very close attention to every nuance of every face they show, and it would be a terrible decision to show a black man threatening anyone in an ad. Such a decision would certainly contribute nothing to the product being advertised. It would simply become a distraction.
And what matters is not the color of someone’s skin but the content of their character. That is related to an individual, independent of the average behaviour of any cohort. To the extent that advertising can lift up and promote positive role models, we are well-served.
Well, aren’t you special! Somebody give this man a cookie and a pat on the head, stat!
It’s a good thing he went out of his way to point out that he wasn’t talking to me, because otherwise I would have interpreted his silence as debate.
As for me, it must be my birthday. Happy birthday to me!
Hostile Dialect,
Hostile Dialect, Narcissist
I think you raised a number of points that were quite damaging to his assertions. He had to respond, but he couldn’t respond, hence his response.
That’s incorrect. I don’t debate with Hostile Dialect for reasons unrelated to this thread.
I didn’t read his argument, but if you would like to paraphrase it, I will try to respond.
And then I can ask him if he “likes you likes you.” I’ll pass you a note in math class with the answer.
Ehh. White male accepts because he knows that most non-beer non-truck advertising is not aimed to pandering to him. I’m okay with advertisers thinking I’m not going to buy their widget because they portray me in a flattering light in a stupid 30 second ad. I’d actually hate to be a member of a demographic as to which the marketing studies had shown that such a flattering portrayal of me, or a bumbling portrayal of the not-me group, would suffice to change my spending habits.
I do have to take issue, if only for form’s sake, though, with the demographic makeup of the “criminal gang” in “Rumble In The Bronx” – I think I could prove to a scientific certainty that Bronx gangs don’t look like that. Not that I was offended, just amused.
I’m interested in hearing a response to the 30 Rock point. Admittedly, as a comedy, all the characters are to a greater or lesser extent chuckleheads, but the smartest three characters are all white (Tina Fey, Alex Baldwin, and that aging bald guy), and the most insane character is black, and the dumbest character is a woman. The show is very smart about race relations, too, playing off of stereotypes in a fairly layered fashion. Minor spoiler:
In one episode, Tina Fey decides that Tracy is illiterate. People mock her for it because it must be a racist assumption, although she has good sitcom reasons for making it. Tracy figures out what she thinks, and while he clearly literate, he takes advantage of her, first by pretending to be illiterate so he can get out of work, and later by playing off her white guilt. Tina realizes that she shouldn’t buy into stereotypes: her black star isn’t illiterate, just lazy.
Does this break your theory about television, brazil? Answer soon–I’m holding my breath!
Possibly it’s a counter-example. I would need to check it and get back to you.
Sure, but wasn’t that lack of ethnicity a matter of neccesity? It’s different to make a movie in Asia, which a huge pool of talented and trained actors and another to make one in America.
They needed guys with a certain level of training, whether it was for stunt work or martial arts or the combination of both. I don’t think you’ll going to find guys in sufficient numbers in the demographics of the bronx…however the movie was made to take advantage of the popularity of karate movies, that those communities were known for.
Who could resist Jackie Chan in the bronx…sign me up!
I find it interesting that that issue struck a cord with you, even an amused one. Most people who’ve seen that movie comment on the skill of Chan and how he did a good portion of it, with his leg in cast.
The characters are unimportant, as they are in most Chan films; just extras to be kicked in head and I don’t think anyone really expected it to be a realistic representation of the bronx, because it couldn’t be and have the level of fighting that a Jackie Chan movie usually did; there just wasn’t enough American people trained to work in the film.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you that gang certainly didn’t represent what a street gang in the Bronx would look like in reality, but since when did a Jackie Chan movie deal with reality? In fact how often do most movies and tv shows do?
Anyone for rumble on Staten Island?