Racist? yes, NO?

[Sacred Jellybean]

They're TRYING to be hurtful towards overweight people, they're TRYING to make fun, put down, and laugh at people that are overweight. They purposefully make the fat character gross, they purposefully make the fat character a greedy unattractive mess. But 'They drew that African American with big lips!!! THAT'S RACIST!!! oh the artist was black, it's okay ^_^' , I mean holy shit dude. Holy shit.

It depends on the degree to which the caricature is demeaning. Simply drawing a black person as someone with a wide nose and big lips isn't really racially insensitive, it's just the artist trying to put accuracy in his renderings. Drawing a black person with such facial proportions in a manner so exaggerated that it becomes ugly and ridiculous is pretty much just as demeaning as marginalizing fat people by stereotyping them all to be disgusting pigs.



Black people are from the south and like watermelon, there's nothing racist about this!

On WW2 pops: It's war! Hate the enemy, sponsor your allies. In WW2 we fell in love with the dutch and Canada, that's also around the same period that the UK became a major part of our collective. Whether it was bridges in government or types and styles of clothing. Regardless of who your enemy is, you do everything you can to make fun, belittle and hate them.

And you see nothing wrong with hating every person who's a part of the race that we're at war with? Even the people in our own country? Even in a case like the War on Terror where it's fundamentalist muslims that have been combatted, not all muslims? The problem with this kind of propaganda is it's just one more motivation for people to blindly resent, harass, degrade, or even physically assault or kill any person who belongs to that race. In a melting pot like America, that should be a huge concern.

Unless I've been oblivious to it, you really don't see that propaganda to that degree any longer, and rightfully so.

You can giggle at a Osama spoof on SNL or Family Guy but Japanese are off limits? The cartoon of some arab decapitating a jew is funny because that's actually happening and it looks that ridiculous. If we can throw a joke out about a guy strapped with TNT calling out for his 70 virgins, we can make a joke about an ignorant and confused Japanese.

I don't think all dark humor that draws on that kind of thing is wrong and contemptible. I've laughed at muslim fundamentalist humor before and don't feel guilt for it. I laughed my ass off when watching Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead when that joke was turned on its head when a muslim worker at a fast food chicken restaurant (hired thanks to affirmative action :FuckYou: ) learned that the zombie chickens would take over the country if they were ever let outside and decided to blow herself up to save freedom and democracy.

The point is, humor and free speech are different from government-sanctioned propaganda.

A culture mind you, that America thought of historic and beautiful until they aligned with Germany. Then they became enemies, and you do everything to make that enemy feel less of themselves and feel every ounce of our hate. To every man, woman and child.

Fucking christ, can't we leave the hatred and xenophobia towards an entire group of people (for something that they aren't responsible for, only their government) to our fucking military? Can't that be their job? I'm just not comfortable with getting overly-nationalistic and accepting this kind of behavior and mentality as normal. It's fucking creepy.

This is funny to me (aside from comparing eating fruit to committing crimes), doing crack and stealing a stereo and... eating chicken? Srsly? So almost every ad for Popeye's chicken or KFC is racist because it depicts black people eating southern styled foods? I already explained watermelon, another southern favorite. Why so Southern? This may come as a shock but the civil war wasn't even that long ago, and most blacks, almost the entirety of blacks in the United States were in the south. Though they've died off, it wasn't too long ago we had people alive in the 1950's that remembered the end of the civil war, my mom was a child when she had to use the Whites Only bathroom. Blacks are almost exclusively from the south, so southern styled foods are in the family, passed down from great great grandma etc. Watermelon, fried chicken, barbecue anything from the south you can think of, but a black with cornbread isn't as funny as a big awkward slice of watermelon. My mom was raised on a farm in Alabama, we eat the same shit and everytime my mom tries to make collard greens I go get Taco Bell.

Granted, portraying black people eating certain foods isn't exactly the most harmful stereotype, so I'll drop this one. Something about it just seems rude and demeaning. Would you feel comfortable giving any of your black friends a nice big watermelon for his birthday? I mean, come on...

You're just as brainwashed as the other damn people around here. First, I was using just the picture: A modern depiction of a young black male. I could use other references, there are characters on that show with huge lips, low bros, midnight skin, and big and just plain big and stupid. I happen to agree with almost everything i've seen in Boondocks, the episode where Martin Luther King woke up from a coma and went to do a speech, but called everyone a worthless bunch of niggers because he was so angry at the way 'blacks' had become was not only hilarious but profoundly deafening. There are white people who work on the show, does that mean they're racist? That's fucking retarded.

Still, Aaron MacGruder was at the helm and it was probably mostly his idea (and even he took flak from some leading figures of the black community, like Al Sharpton). If it was a white person in his shoes that was responsible for the episode, yes, it would be racist. Because of the historical context of black people being disparaged by white people in power. White people calling black people ignorant and worthless is much worse than a black person making the statement that his own people are acting ignorant and worthless when they have much more opportunities today than they did in the past. It's just the way things are, and it's not hard to see why.

I assume you know who Al Jolson is (Jewish white guy who did an amazing act as a black jazz singer), who also spawned the cartoon character Bosko (a black boy who's naturally inclined with music and resembled Jolsen in his make up). It's a vaudeville art style.

Look at today's art style concerning girls: We have anime super cute prepubescent types who could resemble a preteen but with large breasts, though sometimes flat chested to boost the prepubescent appearance. Its all based on the 'cuter and more innocent, the hotter' and for the most part any guy can agree. Then you have the American super graceful, wispy type. Think Dee Dee from Dex's Lab or the cast from Sixteen, then you have Disney who says a beautiful woman has hands and feet from a 7 month old, still wispy and ultra graceful. Then you have the universal badass woman, not really Samus Aran (the buxom blond), but the warrior types of women. Usually depicted in very intense realism, veins and bulges and etc. Anime didn't even exist in the 1960's except for a new show called Astroboy that spawned a lot of creationism in Hollywood and Japan alike. All we had Disney's graceful princess or the Tex Avery curvy red head. How did we get to prepubescent girls? Because the audience grew in to anime style, and super cute became the audience evolved. The art styles in depiction that have changed and evolved over time: The hips disappeared to being smaller than the shoulder's width. Round breasts are replaced with stubby handfuls, smokey, half closed eyes replaced with huge, bright eyes like on a confused deer. The style evolved to match the tastes of its audiences. The same thing happened with the 'Bosko' style of art when depicting any black. Why?

Cameras and projectors sucked ass back then. It was hard to tell on screen who was black. Today, we can actually light appropriately as blacks soak up more light, so if you lit your scene for white skinned people and put a black in it, you wouldn't see them! Back then, the problems were a thousand times worse. By making the lips much brighter than the skin and using a stereotypical hairstyle of blacks it was easier for the audience to see it was a black on screen. For a time, it was even argued if Micky Mouse was black because, well, he is.

Not all blackface was used to lambast and demean black people, but from what I understand, most of it was. I might be wrong about that, though, I've only read it second-hand from other people.

*I'M* being obtuse? In a thread where it's claimed that any characiture of a race can qualify as potentially racially insensitive!? Oh, I cant help it if there's an actual bigot or racist who twists historical reference so he can voice his hate upon a particular race, but taking things from media with no hate intended and trying to make it hateful is just as retarded.

You act as though there are only one or two people who used a particular word and ruined it for everyone. Enough people used it that way to change the meaning of the language into something racially-charged. Therefore, even though not every person who uses these words isn't trying to be racist, it's easy to infer as such all the same, making it racially insensitive. This isn't that hard to grasp, so yes, you're being obtuse.

Entirely? Is a little bit okay? Oh look, 50 years from now there isn't a single scrap of evidence that Germany taught school children that Jews aren't human beings. In that episode (and other cartoons where that happens) they're referencing Al Jolson and/or Bosko. A vaudeville Jazz musician depicted as a black man. If we're going to play that game, then I want every scene of Dave Chappelle depicting a stuck up white guy removed from media because it offends me. Now tell me that's not retarded.

Maybe I'm just misunderstanding you, but is this directed towards me? Did you completely miss my point? I said things like this SHOULDN'T be erased and censored.

And you can't really lay claim to the same amount of victimhood as black people, so you can't get as upset when seeing White Chicks, or seeing Eddie Murphy or Dave Chappelle do Whiteface. Being called "Cracker" isn't nearly as painful as a black person being called "Nigger", because your history doesn't involve slavery and persecution and inequality that even exists today. So yes, it's retarded, but not the way you meant.

And by the way, in case you bring up Tropic Thunder with Robert Downey Jr. in blackface, I wouldn't call that racist, because its content is different. It's making fun of two things: 1) white people stereotyping blacks (and it was counter-balanced by a black person being present calling him out on it) and 2) actors who go through ridiculous lengths to prepare themselves for roles (such as Christian Bale losing all that weight for The Machinist).