Politically Racist Creativity Killer
Well, the big topic of the hour is racism. The big protests in Australia and the general undercurrent feeling of all minorities abroad is that they aren’t feeling the love they used to get.
Kumar quite correctly explained in his blog The Monster Within that racism is a lot closer to home than we Indians tend to admit. In fact, this is just not about Indians. Everybody, and I mean everybody, is a little racist. To say that you are not racist implies that you have no unfounded bias (positive or negative) against or for anyone on the planet. This simply is not true (well maybe except in the case of babies before any biases can be formed at all).
I’d like to justify this with a little thought, and that is, any opinion that you do not form out of your own experience is somebody else’s opinion.
What I mean to say is that unless you have experienced something firsthand, your thoughts on a subject are somebody else’s. You might have seen it on the news, read about it in a magazine (all incredibly biased sources of information, I might add). Your views on the Iraq war? Guess what, they are most likely somebody else’s. I am not saying we are not capable of forming our own opinions. You might argue that after reading an article, you found that you did not agree with it, thus making it your own thought. But why did you disagree? You found another viewpoint more accurate and most likely, you didn’t come up with it on your own.
So racism. To be completely unbiased, means that you would have to travel the entire world, see each and every race and ethnicity for yourself and form your opinion. Any other kind of thought is simply a bias. Now this is obviously not very practical, and thus my conclusion that everybody is racist.
Am I justifying racism? Of course not, but people have taken things way out of hand and have forgotten what not being racist really means. The latest movie from Disney called The Princess and the Frog is about a princess who kisses a frog, but turns into a amphibian as well.
I’m a frog. Does it look like I care whether you’re black or white?
And that should have been the end of it. Disney would have created your average family cartoon movie that would make the children happy and blah blah. But the princess is black. So that means that a lot of people are going to start a HUGE race row. Suddenly Disney has to check its bases a million times over to make sure that they are politically correct at every frame in the movie. A cognitive psychologist Michael Baran said, “Because of Disney’s history of stereotyping, people are really excited to see how Disney will handle her language, her culture, her physical attributes”. So people are gearing up for the kill.
This is where the contradiction lies. If you are truly not racist, then it shouldn’t matter whether the princess is black or white. A person who is not racist, is not biased either way, and would just watch the movie for the sake of the movie. So these supposedly anti-racist people that are waiting to pounce upon the movie are the most racist of all. They are trying to expose the differences at a time when we are supposed to be overlooking them.
Sebastian was Jamaican?I didn’t even know what Jamaican was back then…
As a result of this pressure, I’m sure Disney will cave and produce a thoroughly boring movie. The sad part is that this movie is intended for kids. Most kids don’t really care about race and that’s how it should stay. When I saw The Jungle Book as a kid I didn’t even realize that the apes were voiced by African Americans. I just thought it was funny, not noticing any differences, which is the key to not being racist. These so-called politically correct people are trying to deepen the divide and we shouldn’t let them do it.
