The accusation is that you regularly take what people do say, and turn them into strawmen in order to rebut them. People in this very thread have said “no, that’s not what I said.” But then you insisted right afterwards that this is what they said. How can you have a discussion about things when one party argues the other party is saying something different than what they said.
You want specifics? I can do that: this very reply. You have accused me of saying something I didn’t say. I did not say that your views about history are incorrect. I said that you do not find history relevant in your views over what is and is not racist. As such, discussing the history isn’t going to change your opinion about this. You thus will not be enlightened.
I am not (in these comments) arguing your views are wrong in this. I am saying that there seems little reason to keep arguing with you when you don’t accept anything we consider relevant to actually be relevant, and you keep on arguing against things we didn’t say. If we can’t be on the same page, argument is pointless.
Especially since you agree with the main thesis of the thread that Noah’s joke was not offensive. While I would be interested in you explaining why this is the case, since your view of racism is so completely different, and I can’t see the logic, but it’s really not important.
There’s not much reason to convince someone they are wrong when they come to the correct conclusion.
It’s funny because white people don’t understand Xhosa. It’s a delicious (and harmless) in-joke amongst Trevor’s home community against a population that until recently was openly oppressing them. It’s not even “punching up”; it’s a light tweak of the nose.
I’ve observed that, the smaller the set of people who get a joke, the funnier it is to those who do get it. Xhosha-speakers are a fairly small set of people, as the world goes, so that in itself makes it funny, at least to them on the first audience of it. Then everyone else gets to laugh with them, once we hear the real translation.
Sometimes a joke is offensive because of history. And sometimes a joke is funny because of history, and how it inverts certain stereotypes.
White people have historically stereotyped Black people as ignorant, while systematically denying them educational opportunities. Maybe this is relevant to whether it’s funny vs. simply offensive for a member of one group to make fun of the members of the other group for not knowing something – don’t you think?
