When Your Own Race Is Being Poked Fun At In Cartoons.

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%Crazy_in_<3%

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Hi, this recent news about the supposed upcoming release of the Censored 11 cartoons got me thinking about a few things considering racist cartoons. I know that a long time ago, back then, that things were different (albeit not in a good way) and that was just many with that train of thought of the way they perceived other races. But while there may be some of y'all who don't mind cartoons making fun of people who aren't the same race as your own, I wonder how do y'all feel when there are animated pieces that display racism towards your own ethnicity? If there are any who do mind the latter, do y'all feel hypocritical and contradictory because y'all are okay with them when other enthnicities are being ridiculed? For me, I fall somewhere in between, because even though I'm not a big fan of the Censored 11, I'm okay with most of the other cartoons that mock other races. How I feel about them varies from one to another and in some cases I'm even ambivalent and neutral. Therefore, it's like, if one were of a different race and the same as the characters that were being portrayed, depicted and made a mockery of, how would he/she feel? Would he/she be offended when and if it's their own kind that's targeted or he/she not care? Also, while nowadays it'd be considered politically incorrect to do this type of thing in most cartoons, how and why is it that certain, very few exceptions like Family Guy and even live action movies like Soul Plane and Norbit can still get away with this sort of thing?
 
Family Guy and those movies are aimed at adults. That means the audience is expected to not be so sensitive if a couple race jokes are thrown around within the script. Besides, much of the racial humor in the latter's context is between those of the same race, which is considered acceptable by certain groups.

Much of the racial humor nowadays seems like playful jabbing more than anything, although I do admit many of them rely on some old stereotypes to base the humor on. Take Family Guy for example. I can recall various jokes about Asians being smart, socially awkward or deeply entrenched in tradition. As amusing as they can be sometimes, racial humor should be used sparingly so claims of racism aren't thrown around like daggers.

Plus, as a Mexican American, it seems most of the jokes about us seem to revolve around manual labor or large families. It doesn't seem nearly as potentially hurtful, but a lot of humor in our culture consists of self-deprecation and word play, so we naturally laugh it off.
 
I haven't seen all of the censored eleven, so I can't comment on them as a whole. I think I actually hate censorship and hiding/ covering up of that material more than anything. For me as an African American, there are certain things that I might see could be offensive. But so long as its out there, its out there. I also have Cherokee from both sides of my family, but I don't get offended by tribal stereotypes. I do think honestly everyone should get a fair amount of jabs at their ethnicity. In a strange way, it shows love.

I also have to say some of the censoring goes overboard. The mammy in Tom & Jerry, the satyr sequence in Fantasia, and some scenes in Jonny Quest are a little much. I mean c'mon. If these are so evil, why not ban Breakfast at Tiffany's for the asian cariacture, or most 50's & 60's westerns where whites portrayed indians and mexicans. The sad part is much of this is going on today, but the argument is a reversal of equality, which is just wrong.
 
As a Jew, I don't mind so much when Jews are portrayed as moneyhungry-cheepos, lawyers/accountants, large noses, nerds or reallysmart. I know it's all in good fun, and if it isn't, then those people who made it are morons, so allow the world to gaze upon their stupidity. The only thing that offends me are Holocaust jokes. I've lost many family members because of the Nazis and some of my grandparents actually went through Auschwitz. But I don't think anything should be banned though unless there's reason to believe it would incite racism/antisemitism. I think Disney's 3 Little Pigs should be released in it's original form, even if it is anti-semitic. Pretending it never happened is allot worse.
 
After I typed this I realized it sounded kind of bad, but it's the truth so there's no help for it.

Speaking as a white boy, it's easier for all but the most uptight of us to laugh when it is white people being made fun of. When it's other races we're never sure if we'll be thought racist for laughing, so unless we look around and can see a person of that race laughing we worry that we might be better off pretending to be sensitive and saying that it isn't funny even if it is. But when it's someone making fun of white guy stereotypes we can laugh without guilt. Heck, better than without guilt, because it gives us kind of a superior attitude to know that we can laugh at ourselves. This is why Richard Pryor is so popular with white people. He ironically makes us feel better about ourselves with his criticism.
 
Huh. I'm usually indifferent and I think that way too many people worry way too much. But oh well, c'est la vie.

I think it does help that for some time now, animated sitcoms/comedies haven't really left much of anyone alone.
 
Mostly, my feelings about this come down to whether the caricature is funny/entertaining enough to let me blow off the more racial aspects of what's on-screen. I think characters like Miss Chinglish in Black Lagoon, the restaurant owner in South Park, and Amy's parents in Futurama are all hilariously funny despite the fact that they're all gross stereotypes to a degree. I can even identify the exact moment when Amy's parents went from giving me a queasy, "We're going there, are we?" feeling to a "Oh, we're going THERE. Well, that's OK, then" feeling ("I know they Martians because they grammar so bad").

I will also say that I'll give cartoons more of a pass for this sort of thing because of the inherent abstraction in animation. I'm not looking at an Asian person, I'm looking at a drawing of an Asian person, and I think that extra step further away from reality is what makes it easier for me to swallow a lot of the more ridiculous/caricatured elements of their portrayals and the fact that they're all white people affecting thick Asian accents. It's the same rationale why The Simpsons is funny as a cartoon, but doing most of what they do in live-action would make you actively uncomfortable. A live-action actor in yellowface is also an abstraction of an Asian person, but it's not far enough from reality that I can't blow off the fact that I'm looking at a white guy in a lot of (often bad) makeup. It ruins the suspension of disbelief.

While I don't think that anybody's very well served by censoring these cartoons (nothing is so dangerous that it can't even be talked about), I also think that just putting them out there without any context doesn't really help anyone, either. I don't particularly like Charlie Chan movies, but I'm happier that they're on the market than not. I'd like them even more if they put added of the documentaries about portrayals of Asians in Hollywood as bonus features, or even packaged excerpts from Margaret Cho's I'm the One That I Want, which (in addition to being uproariously funny) documents the damage Asian stereotypes in Hollywood did to a real live person a lot more recently than anyone would like to acknowledge. I don't want them to censor Charlie in the Mister Magoo cartoons or anything in the original Charlie Chan and the Chan Clan cartoon, but I also think you can't just throw them out there without SOME kind of acknowledgement that, "This is a historical document and no, it's kinda not cool to do stuff like this any more."

Regarding stuff like Soul Plane or Norbit: I get to say things about Asian people that non-Asian people can't say. Black people get to say things about black people that non-black people can't say. This is no different than the fact that I can fling all kinds of nasty, horrible obscenities at my brother and he can do the same to me, but a stranger doing the same thing to him in my presence is going to get a punch in the nose.

The last thing I have to say is that what bugs me more about topics like the Censored 11 or Song of the South is an attitude I frequently see of, "I'm not offended by this, so nobody else should be either." You kind of don't get to decide that, and all it succeeds in doing is ticking me off more than I would have been otherwise. I understand all the arguments for why I should be flattered by Charlie Chan, but I don't find any of them convincing and just telling me to "get over it" is the most counter-productive counter-argument anywhere ever.
 
Ed makes a good point. Things like Soul Plane have kind of a FUBU (For Us, By Us) thing going for them that makes them feel more acceptable. At least they have the appearance of that, a lot of times at the end they're still corporate products designed to make rich white guys richer.

If you want to see a great movie that deals with issues of race in the media, check out "Hollywood Shuffle" with Robert Townsend. And that's definitely a movie coming from a black perspective because Townsend financed nearly half of it on his own credit cards.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093200/
 
When stereotypes become about behing humorous rather than harmful, that's when they lose their power to hurt. It's good to laugh at stereotypes, because when they're funny, it makes anyone who tries to use them seriously look stupid. It becomes about laughing at the ignorance of the person who used the stereotype rather than the stereotype itself. Like Archie Bunker in All in the Family.

The source is important, too. I mean, you've got comedian Russell Peters, an Indo-Canadian, whose comedy includes stereotypes for South Asians, East Asians, Hispanics, and some white jokes as well, and it's absolutely hilarious. Have a guy who's white, or even black, maybe, deliver the same jokes and it becomes extremely uncomfortable. I'm not even totally sure how Peters pulls it off so well including more than just his own race, though.
 
True about Family Guy being more adult-oriented, but then again, so were the majority of Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies featurettes from the classic era before making cartoons featuring characters from those more suitable for kids or even just spreading toward the general audience. So I guess since both of those would have a lot in common in that case, then that would be the same case.



I guess that sort of makes sense and I can somewhat see that, but it still seems kind of odd to me. And I already saw "Hollywood Shuffle" and own a DVD copy of it. I got the message out of that one.



I get what you're saying, but I still find it odd. I mean, I'm a full black and as a black person and the centuries old history of what my race went through after having been transported by ships from Africa to the U.S., I don't believe in nor condone the use of the n-bomb or any other racial slur. And this is another perfect example: The Michael Richards Incident. After getting heckled by some black audience members, the comic exploded into a barrage of racial epithets and tirades. And then apparently, of course that didn't sit well with them. Therefore, it's like black rappers can get away with using the n-bomb in their songs, but non-blacks can't. And that's just the problem right there. The overuse of that word. And Al Sharpton's (or was it Jesse Jackson's) attempt to bury the slur didn't seem to work. If there weren't so many blacks who used that word so much among and around their fellow blacks, things like this wouldn't happen or there'd be less things like this happening (although even more so if it was never coined by some racist whites in the first place). Also, that applies to the attempt of taking a word that was originally intended to have a negative effect and turn it into a positive. Oddly, blacks want to get upset and gripe about it if and when non-blacks go around spewing that loathsome name. I mean, surely we blacks have a right to do so, but only if we aren't using it ourselves despite being of the black race, otherwise I don't think we're in any position to do so. That just doesn't make any sense to me. All I'm just saying is if anyone was really going to do something about it then really be about it. Don't like being referred to as any epithet, then don't unintentionally encourage others outside that race to use it as well and send them mixed signals or the wrong message. That's what I think and I as well think that nobody, regardless of ethnicity, should ever use any racial slur.
 
I know quite a few black fans of Seth MacFarlane, myself included, who, when one of his shows makes a somewhat un-PC crack about black people, we gasp and laugh at the same time. I get that what he's doing is not malicious, because I've seen the dude interviewed and I get what his humor is, to an extent. If it's just flat out insults without being ironic, then we got a problem. But some people can't seem to get subtlety in humor at times.




Basically what that comes down to is, life ain't fair, man. Girls can call each other the b-word and you as a guy better not or you're in for it. Gay guys can call each other the f-word, and same thing applies. I don't have a problem with not being able to do so, but it seems like the n-word has become so coveted it's like, non-black people claim they don't want to use it, yet that's all they can talk about.

Mod Edit: Please don't double post. Use the edit button instead. Thank you.
 
I reallt don't know if it counts but I'm Uruguayan and The Simpsons once called my country "You Are Gay" instead of Uruguay. I really don't care, I even laughed because I never realized of that coincidence until then.
 
Whatever, again I'm not saying it's unjust that any of these shouldn't be said by someone outside any certain race (or even gender or orientation for that matter). But to have the reaction to something, as bad and negative as it may be in most cases, that one doesn't like when they did it and feel that they're allowed to say it about themselves despite being wrong when and if others who are different do it is still jacked up and dumb. Because what do they expect if there are some who seemingly promote or glorify them then? Therefore, never mind that that's-just-the-way-it-is mess, I'm not settling on that.



Yeah, I seen the episode with that joke. But that's about orientation in that case.

Mod Edit: Do not double post again. Use the edit button instead. Thank you.
 
Something I noticed in college, several years ago, was that there seems to be an alarming new trend. Back when our parents were growing up, certain ethnicities would be in certain groups, this would even be so up until about ten or fifteen years ago. With the changes of our country, I've noticed that more and more groups are becoming multi-cultural. Jocks and nerds are one thing, but other groups like goths, punks, sk8rs, hipsters, posers, and gangsters are becoming more mixed. Within these groups words like the n word are thrown around affectionately and without remorse.

The other thing to throw in the mix is more biracial people who seem to be forced to choose a side. Isn't it true you either act, urban, suburban, or foreign? So this also makes it more difficult to weed out those who are truly racist when they can hide their feelings in the midst of these groupings. Older people (forty & over) are easier to spot, they can't relate sometimes and you can hear and see them trying to be careful. I think healthy discussions about race is important, but the old evil has a way of creeping into the minds of the young.
 
Another thing I forgot and wanted to point out, and mention, is all of those who complain about the censorship of the racist cartoons, would they still do the same thing if they were of the race that's being made fun of or would they feel any different about them?
 
This is a very interesting topic and has really got me thinking about racial tendencies within cartoons. Though not obvious at a first glance, Disney actually has a lot of elements within films that could be considered politically incorrect. Take for example Sebastian of A Little Mermaid, who teaches Ariel that life is better under the sea where you don't have to get a job:

Up on the shore they work all day
Out in the sun they slave away
While we devotin'
Full time to floatin'
Under the sea!

Alternatively we have Aladdin, where a young innocent white western boy has to face up to Jafar, a very ethnic looking villain.

Of course these films date from a time when people where stereotyped according to race. Hopefully these days we can expect different.



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Middle Eastern people are white. On the US Census and several job applications that I have filled out defined white as having ancestors from Europe or the middle East. Middle Eastern people tend to be tanner than Europeans so they won't be sunburnt.
 
I have no problem with historical media portraying women as basically slaves because they're historical. I'm against censorship almost as much as you can get so I believe these older things should be released as is. If they have to, throw a PSA in before hand, but don't edit them.

I respect African Americans and their heritage, and I have to say I don't think Jynx and Mr. Popo aren't out to put you down. Jynx looks a lot like one of the (rather silly) fashion trends in Japan and Mr. Popo is either the nicest (or most horrifically powerful :anime:) being you will ever encounter. Neither of them do anything to demean people, and the people of Japan don't completely understand the sensitivity of the look so they're not necessarily being malicious. A friend with a Japanese husband had to explain the unspeakable word to him because he only ever heard it in rap songs.
 
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