| By Annika - Oct 3rd, 2007 at 12:01 pm EDT |
| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
Didn't college students learn anything from the post-Borat lawsuits? Never make a drunken, racist video. Come on, people. Is that such a hard rule to follow?
The Smoking Gun posted a video this week of several white Univeristy of Louisiana students covered in mud--a la blackface--reenacting the Jena 6 attack. Freshman nursing student Kristy Smith posted the video and several pictures of her mud-clad friends on Facebook. She's since removed them, but not before the video got picked up by Smoking Gun and posted to Youtube:
Smith apologized for the video via Facebook, giving well-written explanations like "We were just playin n the mud...I promise i'm not racist. i have just as many black friends as i do white. And i love them to death." Apparently they were drinking and the situation "got a lil out of hand."
Right. Either that or the video reveals that racism is clearly "a lil out of hand" despite our best efforts to sweep it under the rug.
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As anyone who has friends outside of rabid activists can tell you, in private people of all races sometimes enjoy incredibly crude, racialized humor *with each other*. I have friends who are African-American where I could imagine, if we all got decently drunk, one of them saying "hey guys, get the video camera and let's re-enact the Jena 6".
I couldn't imagine doing so with a group of white people. And I couldn't imagine posting the video on YouTube, where you're blatantly putting it in front of the public.
I'm Jewish. In private, I tell some really great Holocaust jokes. In private, some of my non-Jewish friends will tell really great Holocaust jokes. But they'd be reticent to do so if I (or one of my other Jewfriends) weren't around, if it were only non-Jews, and they sure as hell wouldn't put the video on YouTube. I wouldn't want some kid whose grandparents died in the Holocaust to stumble across it. Same reason I don't make autistic jokes unless I know it isn't a personal sore spot for any of the people who can hear me. That's called courtesy.
This falls in line with the debates surrounding people like Sarah Silverman: What counts as racist humor, what counts as merely racial humor, what counts as ultimately-non-racist meta-racist humor. It's blurry.
Try as we may to sweep racism under the rug, it continues to have a profound affect on our social, economic, and political worlds. Laughing about racial injustices might make us a feel a little better, but it does nothing to deal with the situation or to change the grossly un-just treatment of minorities in the U.S.
It's a shame, though. The one about why we're so good at math tests is especially clever.
""Try as we may to sweep racism under the rug, it continues to have a profound affect on our social, economic, and political worlds. Laughing about racial injustices might make us a feel a little better, but it does nothing to deal with the situation or to change the grossly un-just treatment of minorities in the U.S.""
If anything, I'd say laughing at racism has the opposite effect - it opens up the dialogue on these issues. Sarah Silverman's done more to facilitate realistic, important dialogue on racism in this country than you might think.