Real simple words here with an admission of bias and exhaustion. Cause I'm tired, ill and amazed at yet another instance of utter stupidity.
Matt Brady,
White privilege is not just an omission, it's not 'well back in those days all aliens came from one culture per planet'. And being called racist and anti-black is not worse than being racist. Being a product of it's time is not an excuse for something when said time includes extremely racist attitudes and exclusionary views.
Finally, African American can mean, a person of African Descent who is an American, or a person who became an American citizen who was previously a citizen of one of the MANY countries on the CONTINENT of Africa. In which case they might say Nigerian-American, Ghanan-American, etc...
So calling a character an African-American analogue Kryptonian is just so much bullshit. Falcon is an African American analogue of Captain America (the way I understand things) and I would think so are Patriot and his grandfather Isaiah Bradley.
A dark skinned Kryptonian could* be an African or African Descended analogue. 'African-American' is not a race. It's a descriptive title for the descendants of slaves in the US.
Or is this also a case of nationalism and there's a Canadian version of Matt Brady somewhere stupidly calling said character an African-Canadian analogue?
______________
* They could also be a South Asian Analogue or an Indigenous Australian Analogue or one of many other sets of brown folk.
Less newsarama stupid and more general stupidity. I've had a number of whites and east asians say pretty much the same thing to me while trying to explain either how good black have it (this from the asians) or how blacks don't really have it all that bad.
ReplyDeleteWhile I disagree with your first paragraph (I thought Waid phrased it pretty well, and I do have a tendency not to blame folks for not being culturally ahead of their time), I nodded my head vigorously at the rest of your post. I know it amuses Dougie Braithwaite to no end whenever he's called "African-American," as he's neither. (I don't even think he's African-Brit, I'm pretty sure his ancestry is Caribbean.) The "ethnicity-American" hyphenate thing is something fairly peculiar to this culture, and it may come from the obsessive need to stick the "American" label on everyone, as if it's not obvious that they're Americans now from the fact that they LIVE HERE.
ReplyDeleteElayne,
ReplyDeleteGalileo is a good example, to me, of someone ahead of their time; filled with intellectual curiosity and challenging the status quo. And that's the only one I can think of off the top of my head. As for the rest, when something is wrong and evil - when the attitudes of the day involved treating other human beings as lesser then I don't give a pass.
And that's not just about chattel slavery and its various incarnations in the US (Jim Crow laws, the current three strikes and prison system etc...), that also emcompasses how the British Empire treated indegenous peoples damn near everywhere; big example? India.
I'd say you and I can agree to disagree on that point, especially because I think you have the privilege to see things the way you want to along with the desire not to see your immediate ancestors as part of the problem - but you also seem to be saying in disagreeing in my first paragraph that being called racist is worst than being racist. In which case, don't bother commenting back - you won't get through.
Onion Slime,
ReplyDeleteThis post was not the place to bring up instances of other people playing 'Who Wins The Oppression Olympics' What exactly were you trying to say that's directly relevant?