Thing is, I don’t agree he’s acknowledged the harm (at least, in the article linked). He’s instead tried to play it off as a joke someone didn’t like or something that was acceptable in South Africa but not here. It’s just a joke that went badly. What I don’t see is any acknowledgement of how this stereotype is harmful to the Aboriginal people, nor really any understanding of why they are actually upset. Instead, he claims that old chestnut that people are just choosing to be angry.
What’s worse is that he presents himself as the guy who does understand these things. He talks authoritatively on racism due to his own experiences. He couldn’t even hold his own father’s hand as a child, because it could get his father in trouble. He of all people should be able to understand this, but he is refusing to do so.
Instead, he is doing exactly what racists in this country tend to do when called on their racism. He’s turned it around as being their fault, because they are just choosing to be angry. He’s trying the different time and place excuse. He’s talking about a “slippery slope” and reframing racism as just “a joke people didn’t like.”
And, well, if he can’t understand the problem, and is going to make excuses for it, then it doesn’t matter that he says he’s not going to do it again. How can you avoid doing something again if you can’t understand what you actually did?
So I would argue none of the important parts of an apology that you described are present. What I desire from him is not some sort of ritual. It is merely that he would actually do that which you say is important.
CNN reports that the person who first shared the tape was LaVonne Bobongie, an Australian music photographer active in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community.
She tweeted once on the subject. Oddly the tweet didn’t go viral: it was retweeted less than 100 times. I don’t know which media outfit got the first scoop, not that it matters. https://twitter.com/_LaVonne_/status/1020884782484340736
Anyway, Kevin Drum’s point doesn’t really apply here AFAICT.
Fighting Ignorance
Google that, and you will find pictures of folk in primitive gear who have spent their entire lives under the hot sun. Unsurprisingly it shows on their skin. But that’s a sliver of the actual Indigenous Australian population. Browse the twitter feed above and, well, people in their twenties look like people in their twenties. Plus Western standards of beauty, which are, you know, Euro-centered. The racism in this topic is unpleasant, as is the meanness. Punching down.
Are you serious? He has a whole offensive routine about little people that he offensively calls “midgets” and says they experienced slavery in the Wonka factory.
I like watching his interviews, but those are prepared beforehand. If you watch his interactions with the public, pulling out stereotypes is something he does quite frequently when speaking off the cuff. He does it to people from the stereotyped group, not just when he thinks they won’t see it; he’s an unoriginal jerk, but he can’t be accused of hiding it. See for example his ‘French rap’ to a Frenchman; hint, there actually is such a thing as French rap and it doesn’t sound like that.
There is always a big difference between a person’s public persona and the private one(s); none of us behaves exactly the same way at work, alone with out SO, or out in the park with our kids. Noah’s presenter-doing-a-script and off-the-cuff personas are also quite different.
Oh, and yes: “Africa won the World Cup” is racist. It’s the view of someone who believes that if you’re black you’re African, no matter where you’re actually from.
Are there French Trap rappers? That was his joke, not just French rappers. I have a real hard time getting offended by his bantering with a bunch of French people who are laughing like crazy–although I skipped through that bit, the jokes I heard were gentle wordplays off of accents and teasings about how passionate one dude was about French fries not being French.
I liked that bit. The guy noting that French fries were not French was equally passionate that he eats them. I thought that whole bit was just a fun exchange.
I went looking for any explanation he might have given for not apologizing. He didn’t appear to say it directly, but this reporter gave the reason the writer thought Noah alluded to.
If that’s the reason, I might see his point. Yesterday I saw a video of a progressive who didn’t like Noah’s interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They pulled out another old joke that they were offended by, showing how Noah’s interview was invalid since he was on the wrong side of another issue.
That would have been at least 3 apologies in one week. I’m sure he gets many more demands for apologies through social media based on his past body of work.
There’s this cool thing a body can do, though: you can apologize for shitty thing you’ve done, and not apologize for things that weren’t shitty. And another cool thing you can do is you can reflect on your own actions and words and decide which ones you think were shitty and which weren’t.
Apologizing for shitty things like mocking Aboriginal women wouldn’t actually force him to apologize for non-shitty things like joking about Africa winning the World Cup.
Yep, and if he did that, he’d be on the right side of those two issues in your mind. But in each of those issues, the person on the other side requesting an apology thinks that what he said was shitty. So now if he apologizes in some cases and not others, there will be people who think he’s even more shitty for choosing the wrong things to apologize for.
There was one French guy in the audience, where did you hear a bunch of nonexistent people? Most of the people laughing are, at a guess, American. The French guy wasn’t part of a French group, he lives in the US and there was no mention of other French people.
And while I’d only heard the word “trap” for a type of music recently, yeah, mixing hiphop and electronics (which is the definition I find, I’m sure there is actually more detail to the genre) is something that’s done by French rappers.
Ah–I misread the title. Thought it said “chats with a French audience,” not “with a French audience member.” All the same, there’s very little to find offensive in that bit, IMO.
I’m sure it is. How the hell is that relevant to his riffing off what this one dude would sound like if he decided to do trap rapping?
Of course they face criticism. That’s what the request for apologies are.
But apologies don’t make the issue necessarily better. He could just be adding more criticism by apologizing for some issues and not others.
btw, the clip that the progressive brought up was something about police in another country shooting children. I don’t know the context, but it didn’t sound good.
His excuse is bullshit. If he said, “I think my joke about aboriginal women was fine,” then he would at least be making a claim. But to say, “Nah, if I apologize for this then I’d have to apologize for other things too” is just idiotic. He gets to choose what to apologize for and what to stand behind, and he gets to face criticism for his choices, because that’s how it works. By choosing not to apologize for his aboriginal joke, he faces criticism; for justifying his choice with such a bullshit excuse, he faces more criticism.
Edit: wtf with your link–a 22 minute talking heads talking about Trevor Noah talking about or to OC? Yeah, Ima pass.
OK, sure. Or he could choose not to apologize for any of it and face more criticism for that.
Either way, he’ll get more criticism. Not only that, I bet if he apologized, he’d get more criticism for not apologizing well enough on top of the criticism for not choosing the right issues to apologize about. He’s already done the part about not doing the material anymore and making sure others don’t play it and saying that when he learned it was offensive, he stopped.
As you say, that’s the life of a public figure.
Every person or group requesting an apology thinks their issue deserves one, so someone will be mad either way. If it’s a choice between apologizing and facing criticism and not apologizing and facing criticism, not apologizing is less complicated.
Is this issue more worthy of an apology than some of the others? I don’t know. He does a lot of racial based comedy, so most of the issues would be around racism. That could be a lot of apologizing. Then if he apologized for all his racial based comedy that offended anyone, would that come across as genuine?
If he apologized even just to those three issues that I saw just this last week, would he come across as more caring? I doubt it.
Trevor Noah’s bit is at 14:33. I suspect that if some people saw it, they might be upset by it. But again, I don’t know the context.
Jesus Christ, man, this is a shitload of navel gazing. You may as well discuss the syllable-count in his joke, for all its relevance.
The point of the whole thing isn’t to minimize criticism. It’s to reflect and to do right. Jabbering about how criticism works, and how people respond to it, is super obvious and super irrelevant.