Quote:
Originally Posted by Coach
Point is there is no hard and fast rules for these things. Context matters. Even blackface. People try to tell me Tropic Thunder couldn't be made now and I disagree. The joke is on the racism, it's not a racist joke. It just takes tact, discipline and intelligence to do it right.
|
This is true. And I think part of the problem is that people from across the ideological spectrum have decided that rules are important for very different reasons. “The rules” are basically used as a pawn to make an argument.
Someone might take two situations which seem to be treated differently without understanding or acknowledging the context and say, “Why is this OK but not that? if that’s OK then I should be able to do this. Isn’t that the rule?”
Someone else might say “This person did or said this thing, and the rule is that the thing is not OK, so this person is not OK. Isn’t that the rule?”
In both cases, context makes a pretty huge difference. People want to make up definitions for words and play in the very nitpicky-realm of what specifically is or isn’t ok, or play dumb to bait people into saying something that will validate them, but all it does is move people away from a simpler truth.
Someone could look at Tropic Thunder and say “not OK, because blackface” while someone else says “they did it, so blackface must be OK” and someone else says “it’s not technically blackface because it doesn’t follow the specific rules to determine the impact of the usage of blackface” or whatever. And the simplest explanation is that it’s ok because of the context.
Going back to the Rogan thing, it’s a simple fact: he used an anti-semitic stereotype. Does that make him anti-semitic? No. He might be, or not be. But, given the context, we still know it wasn’t an OK thing to use. Instead of just acknowledging it, the conversation has devolved into “is Rogan a NAZI?” “is it racist if I don’t like CHICKEN FEET?” “actually, white privilege is RACIST” “sorry, that doesn’t TECHNICALLY fit the dictionary definition of RACISM.”
End of the day, it’s a lot of people obsessing over the rules because following the rules (or showing you don’t follow the rules) is more important than bothering to understand a concept to a level where context answers all of these questions for you.