Which of these charming gents is Virginia governor Ralph Northam?

boing
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And Blazing Saddles is Poe’s Law in cinematic form.

It was a movie that explicitly mocked how casually racist most Western films were, and yet, it is always brought up to help apologize for actual casual racism.

In Blazing Saddles, the target of the humor is racists, and how people should be against bigots.
When someone slaps shoe polish on their face, they’re doing it to mock the idea of black people, or to mock the idea that anyone should be concerned about racism.

Likewise The Producers makes fun of the fact that post-WWII people would still consume Nazi shit, not that Nazis are cute and cuddly. People then use it to justify consuming Nazi shit.

Every time someone conflates them against their clear mocking intent, Mel Brooks starts spinning in his bed.

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I think you are right, but could Brooks get Blazing Saddles, an anti racist movie, greenlighted today?

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I think he’s too old to get movie insurance clearance.

Anti-racist movies can be made.

Things that parody bigots are made.

On the other side, there are plenty of people who produce things that look like unironic Springtime for Hitler s or other pro-racist outrageous comedy, as there always has been.

Just as there are still adults in the 21st Century who try blackface to “own the libs”, or to “save democracy and freeze peach for smartass white people”. Which is why the “1983 was so long ago and things are different now” argument feels so pointless.

I’d add that Blazing Saddles was one parody movie of a thousand other movies that were racist as f. Examples of explicitly anti-racist movies were an exception then, as they are now. The bulk of movies take a, shall we say, “centrist” take on being against racism, meaning, “don’t rock the boat, and don’t even mention we’re in a boat.”

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protip: this shady dude in your nightmares… he’s already doing it with any photo of a woman in a bikini. The only people this would affect are people who within the last 20 years have dressed up as klansmen or in blackface. Any images fished online can be used for public scrutiny. It’s the world I grew up in. Example: Among many good reasons I will never run for office because once I was 15 and an underwear model. That’s life already. I don’t really know why it hits you all of the sudden when a public figure is criticized for a public image of him doing something he really honestly should not have done. The only take away is that you think it’s ok and deep down he shouldn’t be criticized for his racist past or have his racist past affect his job. I disagree. We’re never going to agree on that point, just so you know. Frankly, you’re going to have a hard sell with “but now I can imagine a scenario where a white guy might face the same kinds of blackmail and unfair scrutiny that literally every and anyone can face…” Yes, criminals prey on assholes and the innocent. I’ll worry about the innocent you keep worrying about the assholes if that’s what’s most important to you. You do you, man… you do you.

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When you compare 1830s Southerners to 1860s English, you’re comparing apples and oranges. England had already had the massive emancipation movement two generations earlier, and were literally in the throes of the class you’re specifically talking about waking up to the ills of worker exploitation, while simultaneously suffering the effects of rapid industrialization.

Saying some dirt farmer in Georgia should know as well as well as the guy who’d been reading Karl Marx’s pamphlets isn’t exactly fair, and you’re just cherry picking.

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The stupidest, most illiterate fast food manager knows in their little hearts that they are getting over on their teenage workers.

Saying that anybody in the 19th century truly believed, at heart, that human slavery had no ethical problems is an insult to basic sense.

Whatever they say in public, the most committed farmer understands that slaughter-time is a bit one-sided, benefits-wise.

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I’ve said it to others and I’ll say it here: change isn’t enough if you don’t own your shit. Saying “well I’ve changed” doesn’t mean shit to me. Proving you changed means you acknowledged your wrong and tried to right it at the time you changed, not later. When he first ran for ANY office, he should have brought this up. “When I was a kid, I did things that I now know are racist stereotypes. Things that are deeply hurtful and damaging to a community of people systematically oppressed by such images and words. People who have lived in terror for 150 years. I’m running for office because I have changed and want to show that. I’m running with a goal of ending racism.” That’s truth and admirable.

He should have owned this photo publicly the first office he ran for. Not waited for it to leak out and then gave us conflicting answers about what it means. As if saying “well thankfully that’s not me in the photo, when I did blackface it was at another event” somehow made it okay.

Final note: it cannot be stated as “most of you”. It was him. Own it, don’t pass the buck. I, too, tried to dance like Michael Jackson on stage. It never occurred to me to do it in blackface, because even at 16 in 1982 I knew that was fucking WRONG.

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For those who accidentally (or purposefully) have been bringing up false equivalencies, here is a good explainer on why white people don’t get a pass:

https://www.tolerance.org/magazine/fall-2018/what-is-white-privilege-really

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It’s stupid that you should be barred, even internalize it so you bar yourself, from a political career, just because you were an underwear model. This does seem to contradict your statement that only people who dressed up as clansmen or in blackface have to worry. Lots of stuff can insult people (although women dancing or in bikini obviously doesn’t work as mud slinging). Even worse, you have no idea what people will find sufficiently insulting to ruin a political career in 20 or 30 years.

What should we do if next time it’s black politician caught with an old video of him singing gangsta rap with their often nasty lyrics? “Oh, he sings about killing white people, we can’t have him as governor”. IMHO the proper response is “It’s just a song, who cares about the lyrics”, but you can trust that the same people who dug up these photos are going to make just as big an issue of it.

[quote] I don’t really know why it hits you all of the sudden when a public figure is criticized for a public image of him doing something he really honestly should not have done.
[/quote]
I don’t know how you got the idea this is a new revelation to me, nor is the issue if Northon should have posed for that photo, he clearly shouldn’t have, but if he 30 years later can be forgiven for it. There is a difference between criticizing someone and demanding his resignation. I admit, though, that the confused way Northon has handled the scandal hasn’t exactly convinced me about his competence for the job.

If you want a crazy story of how little it may take to force someone to resign, look up David Howard and the “niggardly” scandal.

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The fact that you can find an equivalence between rap and blackface tells me everything I want to know.

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History is the diff.

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It’s not just a matter of education - it’s a matter of empathy and seeing what’s right in front of your face - a fellow human being.

The solid south was a lost cause lie.

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Worth reiterating:

White privilege is - perhaps most notably in this era of uncivil discourse - a concept that has fallen victim to its' own connotations. The two-word term packs a 'double whammy' that inspires push-back:
  1. The word white creates discomfort among those who are not used to being defined or described by their race.
  1. The word privilege , especially for poor and rural white people, sounds like a word that doesn’t belong to them—like a word that suggests they have never struggled.

This defensiveness derails the conversation, which means, unfortunately, that defining white privilege must often begin with defining what it’s *not* . Otherwise, only the choir listens; the people you actually want to reach check out. White privilege is *not* the suggestion that white people have never struggled. Many white people do not enjoy the privileges that come with relative affluence, such as food security. Many do not experience the privileges that come with access, such as nearby hospitals.

And white privilege is *not* the assumption that everything a white person has accomplished is unearned; most white people who have reached a high level of success worked extremely hard to get there. Instead, white privilege should be viewed as a built-in advantage, separate from one’s level of income or effort.

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As I said, I find it irrelevant if you are filmed singing gangsta rap, but I think it is naive if you think a scandal couldn’t be made out if it. The person I replied to thought that having been in underwear commercials was too controversial for politics!

Does the comment I left here fit with your image of me BTW:

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Wait a minute, are you literally saying “all it takes is empathy” while just painting the historical poor with a broad brush, and not taking into account the way they were raised or educated.

And, you’re right, the south wasn’t a monolithic block. Which is why comparing 1860s small farmers in Georgia (who were raised culturally in one way) to 1860s Tennessee highland farmers (who were raised culturally in another) is ridiculous. It’s like comparing Georgian farmers to small-hold German settlers in Texas, or German merchants in St Louis, or Mulatto/Quadroon slave holders in Louisiana and New Orleans.

These people were literally raised within a society that taught them from birth that this was the way of the world. It took generations of people coming from the rest of the world to break down the mental barriers for some people in the NORTH.

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That’s a complete misinterpretation of her comment, to the point that the miscommunication seems to be intentional.

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No, I’m saying that it’s not just about education - I’m saying that racism is not just about education, which was what you argued. Plenty of poor whites participated in building up white supremacy, but others did not, and not just because they got a formal education. Some people are able to break out of their social programming, in part due to empathy, others not so much.

And as the article I linked to noted, there were plenty of poor southern whites who opposed the confederacy. And plenty of whites participated in abolitionist movement, including some uneducated whites from the south.

No, they are more alike, actually. The culture in Tennessee and GA were more similar, given that they are literally right next door to each other. The pockets of unionism came from Eastern TN and North GA.

And immigration also saw decades of anti-immigration sentiment, culminating in laws restricting immigration from certain parts of Europe… in part because it was competition for jobs and fears of communism and anarchism. Catholics and Jews were often targeted for kinds of exclusion (not raising to the level of Jim Crow segregation), really into the post-world war 2 era. Anti-semitism ran particularly high until many American soliders saw the real world consequences of that. Jews were often kept out of many areas of public life until after the war.

Indeed. I wonder…

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East Tennessee is culturally not like deep south Georgia. They also had people like Elihu Embry working on abolition for 35 years. Elihu was the son of a Quaker minister. That entire area has a vastly different culture than deep south Georgia, (which is what I was referring to in my original comment) something which was even more pronounced back then.

My point was that I’m not going to hold certain groups of historical people to the same standard because they had racism being the right way pounded into them every single day. You continue to apply your own standards to some backwoods farmer who was little more than a subsistence farm, while trying to make me sound like I’m arguing it’s okay for poor people to be racist in this day and age. That is categorically not what I said, nor what I even implied.

And, yes, I know all about the anti papist movements, that the KKK hung blacks and Catholics. I also know that people continued to try and run my ancestors off their land because, as Germans and Poles in Texas, they categorically refused to fight in the war, while maintaining their Catholic faith.

But you’re making it sound like Jews magically entered the public sphere right after the war. And that’s NOT the case. Soldiers didn’t suddenly come back with a bunch of empathy because of the horrors they saw. Jews were still relegated to traditionally low esteemed jobs like entertainment, contract law, tax law, and so on. It took until the 70s, at least, for things to change, and that was only when the extent of the holocaust became actually known in the States because the survivors’ children interviewed and researched it all and published books on the subject.

Hell, Catholics faced much of the same shit well into that same time period. There were “Catholics need not apply” signs in quite a few places even after JFK was elected (who is still the only Catholic president).

Nobody grows up to be a racist on their own. We know this now, we talk about this now, about how children emulate their parents. And about how the best way possible to combat this is to send kids to places where they can encounter other people and cultures.

But, for some reason, all those farmers in south Georgia should have just magically broken all their social programming and decided to free the slaves! Because they did what? Researched it on Wikipedia, or found a bunch of people talking about it on BoingBoing? Because they were making trips to New York on the regular? Or maybe they could have checked out some books from the nonexistent public libraries that were on every street corner?

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And I was talking about north GA… which is where I grew up…

Yet plenty of people overcame that programming to see a different way forward.

You continue to imagine that a lack of education means that people can’t think. Growing up here in N. GA, I can tell you that this is not at all the case.

And what does that have to do with Georgia or TN. As you yourself note, TX is not either of those places.

As the child of a catholic family, the discrimination faced by catholics in the south was not the same level as faced by African Americans. It just wasn’t.

Yes, that started changing when men who served in the war rose up in the ranks to positions of real power. It was also around the time that Holocaust became a much more discussed topic in American life.

Some of them would have sided with slaves, because they MET some of them and maybe got to know them, and came to understand that there before the grace of god. Not all, but some.

But please, continue to misconstrue what I write here. I’m sure it gives you a warm fuzzy to know that you’re oh so much more clever than I am… Have a good day!

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In fact, the Democrat’s stunning about-face — at a bizarre news conference at which he admitted putting on blackface decades ago and had to be stopped from doing the moonwalk for reporters by his wife — might have made things worse.

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