Yet I’m a 57-year-old white male with no college education, and forced into early retirement without any pension or health care. I mean I’m more or less the perfect Trump demographic. So fuck me and old white men like me. Racist? Ageist? Classist?
I haven’t seen that movie, so i can’t speak of it, but I’m gonna have to guess that the answer is, “no”. I’m guessing that the white people who want to scrape people out of their skin aren’t the protagonists of the movie?
Satire and parody is more than simply doing the thing you are satirizing.
Simply repeating a bad action towards those committing that act against you does not constitute satire.
In this case, for it to rise to the level of parody or satire, you would have a piece where you presented the actions of racists in an over the top manner. Not simply performing those actions yourself.
In blazing saddles, you don’t have the good guys engaging in racism to “show the bad guys how it feels”. The good guys are not racists. The racists are instead presented in an overtly foolish manner, to highlight the idiocy of their racist beliefs.
This is an important distinction, in that its satirization does not have good guys simply being racist, and then saying that it’s ok because they are the good guys. The bad acts are committed by the bad or foolish characters, to link those acts with those personal qualities (or lack thereof).
THIS! I don’t understand why the Blazing Saddles comparison keeps getting made. Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder aren’t anti-white racists. They’re anti-racist. The tricks they play on the villains work because they exploit the bad guys’ ignorance and racism. They don’t just yell racist things back at Slim Pickens and Harvey Korman.
In fact, Mel Brooks’ astutely characterizes the townsfolk as having racist sentiments, but they’re not evil or white supremacists. They are taken aback and frightened of Little’s arrival as sheriff, but he eventually wins them over with his good work.
Because the message of the film is this:
- that white people are largely stupid and venal
- that they will retreat into racism at the slightest opportunity
- that they will only accept people of color when they are driven to it by exigency
- that even then their acceptance will be grudging and, to them, shameful
- that if a black man wants to succeed, he has to ignore their racism and make himself useful to them
Scott went to all the trouble of making that list, and by gum he’s going to keep bludgeoning this thread with it until he gets satisfaction.
I don’t know about you, but I read a statement of the form I don’t understand why X as a request for someone to explain X. It’s a conversation. If you’ve got something to add, then join in. If you don’t, then have a nice day.
Oh! I get it now. You watched a different movie.
Yeah… That’s amazing.
I’m 58, also white, retired, and have no health care or pension. What possible difference does our skin color have on anything? Plenty of folks at our age don’t consider themselves old, I do but I’m partly being self-deprecating. I don’t even understand the point of fuck old white men statement.
Sorry, I’m asking: If I as an older white man blame older white men for electing Trump, am I engaging in racism or ageism? I don’t think I can be, because I can’t possibly be distinguishing between myself and then on the basis of age or race.
“saying that white people are awful is the same as saying old white men elected Trump, because just like it’s a statistical fact that most old white men voted for Trump, it’s a statistical fact that most white people are awful.”
No problem, these things are difficult to express online. I hope I wouldnt keep moving the goal posts. I guess what i am looking for is like for like. You know? A comparison in social media where one person is posting racist abuse of another ethnic group with no follow up and just letting it stand and everyone “gets” its not actually racist. Or just something from within the same form of communication. I appreciate you posting Matt Y’s post but hopefully the extra clarification above explains why thats not helpful to me.
I dunno, I mean I am happy to discuss why I think Blazing Saddles is a great movie critique of white racism by a white guy, but again I just dont think its useful for Jeong. She didnt make a movie critiquing Korean racism. She posted racist abuse of white people on twitter.
Fwiw I personally have used the #CancelWhitePeople meme. (As well as #CancelKanye etc.) Especially after the 2016 election and seeing all the Trump enthusiasts I was super annoyed with us white people! The cancel meme was (is?) widespread.
I certainly read her usage in the same silly way.
I’m really confused that so many oeopke don’t seem to see the distinction berween what Jeong wrote and the sort of racist crap you see, for example, in every comment section on the Fox News site. Or do you see the distinction but don’t think it matters? Does it not feel different in your head at all?
As a subtweet to racism she got from white people.
But anyway, I think we’ve run this thing into the ground, no one is saying anything new and no one is changing their positions, so we’re just talking in circles at this point.
I can understand that you guys want to get out of the Blazing Saddles comparison because Blazing Saddles is obviously a work of fiction and obviously a work of humor. It’s broad over-the-top parody (which I also think is true of Jeong’s Tweets).
But I wish more of you had seen Get Out, because it’s not a parody. It’s satire. It’s played straight*. It suggests that white people still want to own black people as slaves. It suggests they want to co-opt their culture and identities and very bodies. It suggests that they organize covertly to deny black people any agency. It exaggerates something to effect a social commentary. That’s the definition of satire. But the reason Jordan Peele isn’t being accused of racism isn’t because the movie is different from Jeong’s Tweets. The reason Jordan Peele isn’t being accused of racism is because no right-wing outrage machine was built around it, probably because it’s a ninety-minute movie instead of an easily linked Tweet.
(Timex, you point out correctly that white people aren’t the protagonists in Get Out, so therefore it doesn’t compare to Jeong’s Tweets. But white people aren’t the protagonists in Jeong’s Tweets, either. They’ve as villified as they are in Get Out, but it’s shorter form.)
-Tom
* Mostly. Pretend the TSA character isn’t in the movie.
I haven’t seen Blazing Saddles in ages – I really don’t care for Mel Brooks – but are Scott’s bullet points not correct about how the movie caricatures it’s non-Gene Wilder white characters? That seems accurate based on what I remember.
-Tom
@ShivaX Probably right. I don’t think there is a common language here. Just one of those situations where people of goodwill can see something very differently.
@tomchick gotcha. Yeah again for me its much more similar to Michael RIchards if we want to give her the benefit of the dout it was performance art she was doing. Which i dont :) But yeah. Dead horse I guess.
A Nazi didn’t kill Heather Heyer. A car did.
On reflection I was totally wrong. The point of Blazing Saddles was the fart jokes. Can’t believe I missed that.