Ok, try Eddie Murphy, Delirious.
Racism and stupidity are not mutually exclusive. They are often found together (as appears to be the case here).
@yourmomma ^1983 - also 35 years ago. However, I owned that recording. We used to do the ice cream truck skit all the time - I might still run to an ice cream truck saying “ICE CREAM” that way. My ice cream truck stopped in the projects and IMO Eddie was pretty spot on with how all of us acted when it finally came. And his sharper observations of how kids make fun of each other - “your mom is on the welfare” and all that? All true (of the way kids sometimes are mean to each other - not necessarily the welfare though we had plenty of kids at our truck who couldn’t afford ice cream for that reason).
But Eddie Murphy is a professional comedian and he is black and speaking from his experience. I’ll take great issue now with some of the things he joked about but back then it was mostly the misogynist/gay jokes that hit me wrong. Most of what was controversial about that record/show at the time was the cursing.
Had the SU kids been doing jokes about their OWN ethnic group, their OWN neighborhood, it would be quite different, I believe.
Regardless, IMO Eddie’s 1983 comedy routine has nothing to do with the SU kids today.
Whataboutism is the opposite of critical thinking.
I would hope that, as a society, we’ve made progress since Blazing Saddles. It can be looked at as an artifact from the past. But even if we don’t study it, the past 45 years have happened and added many cultural and social layers to our understanding, creating new filters. We can’t watch it the way people born in the 20s, 30s, 40’s, 50s did. Already there was a difference in the way people born in the 60s then 70s appreciated it.
(Read ’ the great cat massacre’ if you’re interested in the topic of evolution of humor.)
“When you know better, do better”
Referencing comedians and movies from 20,30 or more years ago as an excuse for why racist, homophobic, offensive activites by college fraternities should be shrugged away in 2018 is at best a distraction and at worst, an insidious way to spread racism.
In 1983, the books Truly Tasteless Jokes and Totally Racist Jokes were runaway bestsellers. Can’t say I long for those days.
I’d file the student demonstrations over a college cafeteria’s bahn mi being culturally appropriated under “constant outrage.” This is a very different situation. IMO the school acted appropriately by expelling the fraternity, removing the students involved, and opting NOT to release their names or any more videos on the internet. Do posters here really think that was too much?
To say pointing to Blazing Saddles as and archaic example of what we should have grown from and changed our collective attitudes, gets away from the understanding of satire and its place in our world. In 2006 (decidedly not 30+ years ago) the Library of Congress deemed the movie “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” and selected it for preservation in the national archive. The movie used satire to hold up a mirror to the racism and through humor was educational rather than being a racist film.
I am not saying that I buy that these videos were satire, although that is what the students have claimed, but rather I think statements, movies, comedy, etc. can just be written off or pointed to as racism by those outside of the intended audience.
Your comment about fraternity members being more successful than non-fraternity members is correct. However, you fail to also recognize that fraternity members are so much more financially well-off than the general population of a university before they even join the fraternity. When I say fraternity, I mean fraternities belonging to IFC (not professional fraternities, multicultural, etc.). The greater success fraternity members face is due to their already privileged socioeconomic status with the added social capital from their membership and alumni base.
I am not anti-frat (currently a college student, and much of my friend circle is involved in Greek Life at Michigan). However, there are several destructive cultural norms in traditional (IFC/Panhel) Greek Life that need to be recognized and addressed.
Here are some hard truths:
- IFC fraternities are disproportionately made up of rich white men. Membership in a fraternity has been shown to hurt your GPA, but increase post-graduation earnings.
Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-10-06/the-fraternity-paradox-lower-gpa-higher-incomes
- Men who join fraternities, despite having similar rates of sexually coercive behavior before joining a fraternity as non-fraternity men, end up being more than 3x as likely to engage in sexual assault after joining a fraternity. This means that fraternities themselves are breeding grounds in developing a culture in which sexual assault is normalized to the point that it makes the men 3x more likely to sexually assault someone. This is evidenced in a study of national scale.
- Women in sororities are 74% more likely to experience rape than non sorority college women, and those who live in the sorority house are over three times as likely to experience rape.
source: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1077801209334472
Clearly, there are major problems with Greek Life (despite all the value they contribute in the ways of philanthropy and increased alumni engagement with a University which helps with development). Alumni of fraternities need to aid in the reformation of Greek Life, and not encourage Universities and governing bodies to ignore the appalling problems which exist.
At many (though not all) campuses, the fraternities and sororities are mostly racially segregated (the sororities often more so than the fraternities). Note that even the typical umbrella organizations (IFC, PHC, NPHC, MCGC) are not unified, but separate by predominant race/ethnicity of the fraternities and sororities under them.
Do fraternities and sororities merely reflect the common level of racial self-segregation behavior in society, or do they tend to disproportionately attract those who tend to self-segregate by race more than others?
In post #91 I said 'I refuse to write it off as harmless high jinks. I also refuse to characterize the participants as irredeemable delinquents."
Yes, some of the participants may very well be hate-mongering zealots, but I suspect some (no idea how many) were going along with the crowd. Those people lacked the moral courage to stand up to their peers. (They needed a Neville Longbottom!)
Yes, the participants deserve to be punished. My wish is that cooler heads prevail. Instead of a visceral reaction to the deeply disturbing actions, I hope the university does it’s due diligence and bases it’s punishment on facts. Examine all available videos and interrogate individuals with parental involvement…expeditiously. Do this…not because there is a goal of leniency…but with a goal of rational consequences and efforts to prevent this from happening again. Make the goal ‘swift, fair justice’. Make it a priority.
Remember, hate begets hate. We need to do the hard work and educate those who can be reached through intervention.
I, for one, am getting tired of all the anger that seems so prevalent right now.
I’d imagine that the parents of those in the video felt the same way about their kids. I was a cop in the military, and if we picked kids up for some kind of juvenile delinquency, odds were that when we talked to the parents, they would swear that their kids weren’t raised that way.
If they were proud of it, they’d be defending what they did and marching in the streets like those in Charlottesville. It was probably one or two stupid frat bros who posted the video on their own, rather than the fraternity posting it as some kind of statement. From what I’ve seen, those taking part were embarrassed when the videos became public and they realized what they had done.
Yes, parents of perfect kids might very well be surprised by what their kids were up to in college.
in other words, “they’re only sorry because they got caught.”
No, they were embarrassed because they realized what they had done was stupid. Sometimes you need someone else to point that out to you.
I think they’re embarrassed because they got caught - it’s not like any came forward prior to this that I’m aware of.
But none of us can know what their feelings are about having their actions go public. Including their loyal defender here on CC.
So they initially didn’t know what they were doing was stupid?
My take is that they figured what they were doing was so stupid and over-the-top that nobody would take it seriously. That in itself was stupid. It wasn’t evil.
Have people here really done nothing stupid in their lives without realizing it at the time? I’m impressed that there are so many people here on CC with impeccable moral values and who have never done anything they’re ashamed of.
Righteous indignation is a popular activity these days.
My take is that they knew what they were doing was stupid and decided to do it anyway.
Does it really matter why they did it? Like the rest of us, they need to deal with the consequences of their actions resulting from their poor decisions. If SU makes an example out of them and doles out a punishment that may appear a little too harsh, so be it. Maybe the next group of stupid kids will think twice.
@simba9 , if what you are suggesting is 100% true, what would be different about the outcomes & punishments?
For the record, you are just as entitled to your righteous indignation as others are to theirs. No argument there.