In most causes I'm a liberal, but I'm also a middle-aged white guy in the Midwest, so I have my limits. Some things in the last couple of weeks are straining even my liberal sensibilities.
After all the Black Lives Matter protests in the last few weeks, a bunch of white people voicing non-white animated characters decided they had to step down. Like Mike Henry on Family Guy, who voiced Cleveland Brown for 20 years and all through a spin-off show, suddenly decides that a white guy shouldn't be voicing a black character anymore.
Most of these I find pretty ridiculous. It's a fucking cartoon! What the fuck difference does it make? I get in real life you don't want white people coloring their faces to play other ethnicities; that's pretty cringe-worthy in the 21st Century. But we're talking about cartoons! Unless I go to IMDB or a panel at a convention or something, I'm not going to know what any of the voice actors look like, let alone what color they are unless it's someone famous. When I was watching cartoons in the 80s do you think I gave a shit what Peter Cullen or Frank Welker looked like? They were Optimus Prime and Megatron--and a bunch of other voices too--that's all I gave a shit about.
The whole logic behind it is kind of silly. Black people have to voice black people! OK, so gay people have to voice gay characters now? Jewish people have to voice Jewish characters now? A rabbit has to voice Bugs Bunny? A robot has to voice Optimus Prime? Where are liberals going to draw the line on this? What about on shows like Bob's Burgers where men voice female characters? Is that sexist? What about on The Simpsons where women voice the young male characters like Bart and Milhouse? Is that sexist? Ageist? Shouldn't they hire actual boys to do the voices?
The obvious thing with the latter is that a boy's voice would change in a couple of years, whereas if you hire a woman to do the boy's voice, you can have that same woman still doing it 30 years later. Plus you don't have to worry about child labor laws. That's just practical.
And that's the thing: most shows don't do these things because they're racist or sexist; they do them because they're practical--and cheap. Especially in the old days they didn't have the money to pay someone to do each character, so if you could get a Frank Welker to do a dozen voices in Transformers or just about any other 80s cartoon or James Doohan to do a bunch of voices on the Star Trek cartoon series, that's just what you do to save money. When shows like The Simpsons and Family Guy started out, guys like Hank Azaria and Mike Henry did characters of different colors probably just because they were cheap and available. I'm sure if they had the budget at the beginning they could have hired an Indian to voice Apu and a black guy to voice Carl Carlson and so on but they probably didn't think the show would be on 30 years later or that Apu and Carl would be recurring characters over 30 years, so fuck it, Hank Azaria is here already.
Speaking of, by today's standard the Apu voice is racist not just because it's a white guy doing it, but because it's a white guy doing a cliche accent. Whereas there's nothing really wrong with Carl's voice because it's not really accented. If he were doing it with some stereotypical jivey accent, that would be racist. Mike Henry on Family Guy is closer to that, but not really. Who am I to judge? Well, this is my blog; go write your own fucking blog if you want to say something different.
Along these lines we also have more tearing down statues and vandalizing statues and renaming buildings and such. After a while it gets out of hand. I can understand tearing down Confederate general statues; they were traitors and losers. But then of course people want to go farther than that. We have to tear down the Columbus statues because he tortured Native Americans! We have to tear down Jefferson and Washington statues because they owned slaves! FDR created internment camps for Asian-Americans!
Look, there is no one perfect. No historical figure is ever going to be purely good or evil. You have to weigh the good against the bad. Washington and Jefferson owned slaves (and the latter fucked them too) but without their efforts we wouldn't have a country where you could complain about cartoon voice actors and statues. FDR approved internment camps, but if he had lost to some "America First" asshole in 1940, we might be living in a Man in the High Castle or Plot Against America universe right now. The Columbus one I'd go with because he didn't really "discover America;" he landed in fucking Cuba, not America!
I'm just saying, try to have some perspective. Because while Hollywood thinks they're being brave or helping some cause by stepping down from voice acting roles, Princeton might think they're being progressive for taking Woodrow Wilson's name off buildings, and the Coasts might think they're helping social justice by removing statues of just about anyone, where I live, that's the shit where we just roll our eyes. And you know what happens? People like Donald fucking Trump use that shit as fuel to say, "those stupid liberals want to take away your heritage!" Social Justice Warriors! Make the Libs Cry! Blah blah blah.
If liberals want to win this year, we can't get distracted by issues the majority of people don't really give a shit about. Most people don't give a shit who voices who in cartoons. They don't give a shit about most of the statues. Focus on what matters. Black Lives Matter. Cops shouldn't murder unarmed people. Keep the focus on that and not a bunch of virtue signaling nonsense that no one between LA and New York will give a shit about. Otherwise you're going to end up with another 4 fucking years of Trump bullshit.
1 comment:
You summed things up really well. The founders of our country lived in a different time. They grew up with slavery, and they thought it was normal. Yes they were barbaric and primitive, but do we erase history? There is no reason to keep confederate statues, but why be so sensitive over every statue?
Post a Comment