Who Says You Can't Say That?

January (really starting on New Year's Eve) I rewatched the first three seasons of Arrested Development on Hulu.  Along with that I watched the latest season of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, one episode of which commented on Hulu removing some episodes of the series like the "Lethal Weapon 5 &6" episodes because one character plays the Danny Glover character in blackface.  And before that sometimes I read older books by authors like Donald Westlake or Lawrence Block.  And sometimes I think, "Geez, you really couldn't get away with that now."

For me, I don't think any of the stuff I mentioned is actually racist or should really hurt anyone's feelings.  Mostly because of the context.  None of the things I mentioned was ever really putting racism in a positive light.  In Arrested Development or It's Always Sunny it's really more about showing how arrogant and/or dumb the white people are.  When Lucille Bluth adopts a Korean boy and thinks his name is the Korean word for "Hello" or when her and her husband order Guatemalan painters around or mistreat their Mexican maid we're not supposed to sympathize with the white people.  Just like in It's Always Sunny, the other characters call out Mac for acting in blackface so even in the show it's clear that this is not something positive.  That's really why I think Hulu overreacted taking down those episodes.  And it's why I think I can continue to laugh at the antics of the Bluth family.

Probably the most offensive thing in Arrested Development was the third season plot where Michael goes out with a British girl (Charlize Theron) not realizing she's mentally handicapped.  She wears a bracelet that says MRF which he thinks means Mr. F when really it means Mentally Retarded Female.  But still a lot of it was how oblivious Michael and his family were not to realize her mental handicap early on.  So we're not supposed to be laughing at her but at him, which is why it isn't really offensive.

I've said before that during the pandemic, Mike Tyson Mysteries has been one of my favorite shows.  But Mike Tyson in real life is an ex-con who has a lot of personal problems.  Recently he got into a fight with an annoying passenger on an airplane.  Am I going to stop watching the show?  Hell no.  It's a stupid silly fun show and I mostly watch it for Pigeon, voiced by the late Norm MacDonald.  The show does even reference Tyson's real life bad behavior, like at one point where Pigeon says, "I think sometimes we forget this is Mike Tyson.  He could literally kill all of us!"  So, yeah, the show's writers are aware of it and I'm aware of it and none of us give a fuck because it's a fucking cartoon!

Last October someone wrote a review of Private Dick (Gender Swap Detective #1) decrying the use of the word "colored" for black people saying:

The time setting of this story maybe they would have used these words. But don't do it now, in a fantastical story where the point isn't about racism.

I don't really think it matters how "fantastical" the story is; the point wasn't being racist.  Dixie, the main character, isn't any more racist than Philip Marlowe was; it's just that being from the 1930s that's how she thinks.  It would be jarring (at least to me) if she were to call black people "African-Americans."  Even "black" wasn't a term people like Dixie used then.  In Raymond Chandler's books, Marlowe actually uses "Negro," which I don't think is really any better; to me "Negro" is just another way of saying that other n-word, so I've never really liked using it.

Ironically I was already addressing this issue in Guardians of the Swapverse for Kindle Vella.  In that story Dixie is brought to the present day, which of course is very jarring for her.  At one point she calls someone "Oriental" and gets told that people don't use that word anymore because it's racist.

When I read Donald Westlake's Spy in the Ointment from 1966, I commented on Goodreads:

Cancel culture shouldn't read this because there are some anachronisms concerning race and geopolitics. You have to read it considering the context of the period in which it was written.

I don't really remember everything in that book, but there was nothing too egregious in my mind.  One I read from the 70s called Dancing Aztecs was a little more problematic in the black characters from Harlem using dialect to sound like Jar Jar Binks and the dumb, sleepy guy from South America could be considered stereotypical.  Most of the white characters use the n-word too.  But like the TV shows I watched, the white people weren't really very bright either, so it wasn't really looking down on non-white people.

It's just that these days some people are so overly sensitive.  Like people getting upset that Gal Gadot (who's from Israel) is playing Cleopatra.  Or that Javier Bardem (who's Spanish) played Desi Arnaz (who's from Cuba) in a movie on Amazon.  To me that's like complaining an American is playing a Canadian--or vice-versa.  Or it'd be like complaining about Patrick Stewart (who's British) playing Jean-Luc Picard, who's French.  Or Bill Shatner (who's Canadian) playing Captain Kirk (who's from Iowa).  In none of those cases is anyone going around in "blackface" or "brownface" or anything other than normal makeup and in no way is anyone playing that to make fun of a particular culture.

But, again, I'm a middle-aged white guy, so no one really cares what I think about this, do they?