I can't make out what he's saying, but I'm sure it is hilarious. This guy has brilliant, postmodern magician written all over him. I'm sure it won't be long before the Academy comes calling . .
Seriously though, I am having trouble deciding where to put this guy on the racist-o-meter. On the one hand, he probably doesn't understand the American cultural implications of wearing blackface. On the other hand, he is wearing blackface while talking about Barack Obama. You can't do that. Obama is the secular Jesus*. This has to count for something.
The only way to clearly determine this is by consulting precedent. If Robert Downey Jr. was in a comedy playing a white actor in blackface playing Barack Obama in a movie within the original movie, and also in this movie there was a separate black actor playing a black actor who was comically passed up for the Barack Obama part by blackface Robert Downey Jr., would that be racist? If Tom Cruise made a hilarious cameo in the movie, would that make it more or less racist? Would you see this movie? Does your answer to the previous question make you a racist?**
I'm sorry, I got off track there. Since Tropic Thunder proved that it is impossible for Robert Downey Jr. to be racist, then Turkish Blackface Obama has to be more racist than him. But is he more racist than Japanese Louis Armstrong? It's hard to say. Both of them are crazy foreigners who clearly do not understand the context of blackface in America, but here's the difference: Japanese Louis Armstrong is comically impersonating an actual black person, whereas Turkish Blackface Obama isn't necessarily trying to look like Obama, he is trying to prove a point about Turkish-American relations.*** To me, this makes Turkish Blackface Obama slightly less racist than Japanese Louis Armstrong, while simultaneously being less funny.
This is a surprising turn as the generally accepted Chappelle-Downey Theorem of Racism states that the funnier you're being, the less racist you are. I would like to add what I will heretofore refer to as the Turkish Postulate to this theory that states that the reverse is true of foreign people wearing blackface. If the foreigner is trying to be funny, then he is communicating at least an extremely small understanding of American blackface context and is therefore more racist than a foreigner who is not trying to be funny. This of course assumes that neither is intentionally trying to be overtly racist.
Just to recap, here are the current levels of racism that we have discovered as it relates to the use of blackface. In order of least racist to most racist:
And here's the new Racist-o-Meter:
* * *
* If liberal agnostics had a hell, this Turkish guy would be going there upon death.
** The answers to these questions: yes, more, yes, probably
*** According to an NPR interview, in Turkey, there is an old saying that one who asks for a favor has one side of his face darkened and one who does not return the favor has his whole face darkened. This saying does not have any racial implications in Turkey. The newsanchor claims that the US is constantly asking Turkey for favors without doing anything in return.
2 comments:
I'm wondering if there's some type of correlation we can establish between the degree of racial progress in the United States and the acceptability of blackface?
For example: blackface is acceptable when black people were basically second-class citizens. Today, our president is black, our Lambo's blue, and I'll be G-ddammned if blackface isn't considered acceptable.
That was an excellent comment on many levels.
I think it's like a bell curve where the x axis is the standing of black people in this country as well as time and the y axis is the degree to which a random sampling of people would be offended by the use of black face.
The far left of the graph starts when black people were actually enslaved in this country. Back then, I'm sure no one would be offended by blackface. As black people started getting more and more rights, people became more and more offended.
I think we reached the tipping point when Barack Obama became a viable candidate for the Presidency. That's when we started going down the other side of the bell curve. Hollywood knew this before us and this allowed them to film Tropic Thunder at the perfect time for it to be released after we turned the corner on blackface.
Actually, I think Chappelle's Show was the tipping point. Fuck it, I'm writing a post about this . . .
Post a Comment