Weekend Video Time – Racism

When I go back and watch TV shows that I used to watch when I was just a little boy my mind immediately gets blown. It’s amazing what children’s TV shows and movies could get away with just 15-20 years ago. For instance, I just watched an episode of the cartoon David the Gnome and was shocked to find the main character smoking a weird pipe and talks about things most adults couldn’t understand today. Then, you have stuff like this:

According to Warming Glow, this is a clip from an old PBS show in the 80’s called “Many Voices, Many Visions”. Before I read what this video actually was I just assumed that the “little black boy” was really a boy with naturally curly hair, but it’s actually a girl. I should have realized that it was a girl when the very first insult was “you’re a boy”, but I thought that kid was just stupid and making an observation. If this kid didn’t want to look like a boy, it wouldn’t wear goddamn loose jeans and a baggy polo. It’d also help to blow up some balloons and put them in her shirt where boobs will eventually go.

Sure, some people would call the part where the mom says “it’s not like you’re really black”, completely racist, but I think it’s just good parenting. I can’t tell you how many times I was depressed when I was younger and the only thing that would cheer me up is when my mom came in my room with a popsicle and said “Just think, no matter how bad your life gets, at least you’re not black, so cheer up.” It got me through some really hard times.

This clip is just filled with unbelievability, to me. When I was younger I had extremely curly hair that everyone thought was permed and nobody compared me to a black person. Plus, I actually had black people in my school to be compared too, unlike this show which probably didn’t feature anything but whites. How are kids going to throw out insults about something they don’t even know exists? It’s the sloppy writing that offends me more than anything.

I bet the creators of this show are absolutely shocked these days that white people actually try to look and act black on purpose, instead of doing it accidentally and then getting ridiculed for it. That is, if they’re still alive after they got arrested for hate crimes and survived multiple shanking attempts in the prison yard.

Technorati Tags: future lesbian, perm, racism

Weekend Video Time – Something Different

Sure, I guess I could be considered a scumbag for making this, of all videos on the internet, my next target for ridicule. That’s why I’m going to do something a little different. Instead of making fun of everything about the messed up girl in this video I’m going to talk about some of the comments I’ve read on it’s YouTube page.

Anyways, get ready to feel completely uncomfortable:

Sure, it would be super easy to pick this girl apart and that’s exactly why I’m not going to do it. I’d also feel like making fun of this video would push me over the asshole edge, quickly going from funny and likable to a monster built completely out of assholes. So first, I would like to start out with a compliment. This girl has bigger balls than I would ever dream of having. It took me three internet years to work up enough courage to post pictures of my face on MySpace, and I’m a moderately attractive young stallion. I would never even think about posting a YouTube video of myself, and if I did I sure as hell wouldn’t be singing in it.

While grimacing at watching this video, I started to read some of the comments posted underneath it. I’ve never been one for reading comments on anything because it’s usually filled with ramblings of complete douches arguing with each other. The comments on this video, however, are more cringe-inspiring than the video itself. Sure, you have the usual asshole comments making fun of her, and those are sort of bad, but they’re generic and unoriginal enough to easily brush off. Then you have the comments attempting to be nice, saying “You have such a good singing voice! You go girl!”

I think these so called “nice” comments are actually crueler than the ones calling her a melted candle face. Obviously this girl doesn’t have anywhere close to a good or even moderately listenable singing voice. Building her up with all this fake self confidence will just open her up to twenty times more ridicule down the road. Also, just because someone has a disability it doesn’t automatically make them fucking amazing at everything. If it was an attractive, or even very average looking girl singing like this nobody would be fake nice to her, but since this girl is disfigured all of a sudden she’s the best singer in the world.

In a perfect world nobody would be leaving negative and hateful comments on this video, and nobody would be posting fake nice comments either. Everyone would just take this video for what it is, do a mixture of cringing and chuckling to themselves and then ignore it, just like we should do with disabled people themselves. And yes, I realize the hypocritical nature of talking about this video on my blog.