Flying FuManchu said:
You, sir don't understand the power of words and how hurtful they are to an ethnic minority, especially if they have been used in a way to degrade and humiliate said ethnic minority. Ask any Asian person, and I bet you the majority of them will say that if they've ever been verbally attacked by another person from another race, people tend to not just yell out "motherfucker or son-of-a-bitch" but they also tend to slip in a few ching, chong, changs. If Rosie wanted to really do that joke should could have had the common courtesy to learn the language so as to not offend people.
I'm extremely skinny - I stand 5'10" and weight 125 lb - and have been all my life. I took so much shit for it in grade school that I nearly killed myself a couple times. I've heard every name in the book and heard "why don't you just eat more?" so often I want to punch people when they say it to me now. It's genetic, it's who I am; I eat way more (we're talking thousands of calories more) than most people my age and still never gain a pound. I tried working out this summer for about four months before school took away my time. I know it's a short amount of time, but again I saw literally zero gains, and I was doing everything right.
I've accepted this fact that it's who I am. I know there's nothing wrong with me, I still function perfectly normally. I still have a brain that works just as well as anyone's, and over the years I've learned how to use words to make up for what I lack in muscle power. As a result, I've been able to talk my way out of nearly every fight I've ever been challenged to. Some might say that makes me a coward - I say I learned to use my strengths and forget my weaknesses.
The point is this: if someone on TV makes a joke about Nicole Richie or whatever and then turns it into a rip on skinny people, I could care less. I'm cool with who I am; that's not to say that I won't keep trying to improve myself and get into better shape, which I plan on doing (once these damn exams are over!) by going back to the gym. But if it's a part of me and I can't change it without extreme amounts of work, then so be it. I'm not going to let someone who makes a "manorexia" joke offend me. They just refuse to see past my body type, and frankly I'm better off without people like that around.
I know being skinny isn't quite the same as racism (you can't hit the gym and become a black person, for example), but you have to keep in mind that race is an entirely human construct built only since the 1500s or so to justify the Atlantic slave trade. And since it's created entirely by humans, humans can choose how much importance is placed on it. Taking great offense at something like this places more importance on the division of race, rather than the fact that "Homo sapiens sapiens" is the only division that matters to nature, and serves the purpose of racism more than it does to solve the problem.
This is why I don't support people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson while at the same time supporting their ideologies. Claiming an issue is a "race" issue, no matter how good your intentions are, only reinforces the arbitrary divisional system that exists.
I'm not saying these types of "jokes" should be excused or become commonplace in the name of equality, I'm saying that taking enormous amounts of righteous offense at a "joke" about race doesn't help the situation any more than the "joke" itself does.
One further observation before I go: Does it strike anyone as odd that if Dave Chappelle went on television and did the exact same thing, it would be absolutely gut-bustingly funny? I realize Chappelle's Show is (was) satire, but there are no white comedians on television doing racial comedy (Sarah Silverman being the only exception I can think of, and even still her provocative stuff is kept to paying audiences at stand-up shows who know what they're going to see beforehand), and I venture even further to say that if such a show existed (ie if Dave Chappelle was a white guy) it wouldn't be on the air past the pilot episode. Again, I don't want to sound like I'm advocating Rosie's "joke"...I'm just extraordinarily wired right now and procrastinating like hell, and a lot of interesting (at least to me) thoughts and observations are coming out of me right now.
I really think I ought to switch to decaf.
What is it with the racism coming from Hollywood celebs?
