You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Showing posts with label race. Show all posts
Showing posts with label race. Show all posts

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Uncle Remus redux on PopMatters

PopMatters, as of this morning, is featuring, on its front page, my essay on the historical implications of Disney's upcoming return to 2-D animation (which is originally what drew me into the topic, but the controversy surrounding the first black Disney princess was too juicy to ignore) . All I know is that those hours I wasted as kid popping in Disney VHS after Disney VHS have turned out to be good for something, sort of. So which is is it: pop-culture minutiae or trenchant commentary on the state of American race relations? OR BOTH? You decide.

Friday, December 26, 2008

Stuff White People Don't Like: Supercilious, Faux-Racially Insightful Humor Blogs

Stuff White People Like: White people like creative writing, ha ha! Vintage clothing, ho ho! Girls with bangs, he he! Yuk yuk, it's funny because we're so lame! The blog is ostensibly written as if it's addressing people of color as some kind of "field guide to whitey," but personally, I'm not aware that any of my friends of color have ever read it. Nor am I aware of any ofThen again, people of color don't have any strong affinity for Jeff Foxworthy or Pluggers, either, nor do their elite hip urban literati friends. SWPL is no different from these, it's just that instead of defining "white" in terms of this:





It's now defined as this:





In fact, this site's sole raison d'etre is so that a certain type of white person who's never identified with their trailer-dwelling brethren over yonder, the target of traditional "cracker" humor, can allay their guilt by pretending to understand what people of color think is ridiculous about them. The fact of whether it's operated by a white person or a person of color is more or less irrelevant, as far as I'm concerned, since it's clearly written by someone who comes from the very same culture he or she is lampooning. Which is exactly why I find it so disingenous, because, at it's core, this isn't "stuff white people like": it's stuff hip educated urbanites of any color like. Quite simply, this is class conflict, and yet it's being wrongly framed as a racial one. Yo homies, SWPL has taken race-baiting to a whole new level.

 
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