Are Romney’s welfare ads racist?

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 3 Comments

A little bit softer now…

God damn, Mitt Romney knows how to wear a suit. It’s because he’s rich; put him in jeans and he looks like he lost his luggage. Back before we knew about his Olympic horse and 13% tax rate, he tried to downplay the fact that he made enough money in 2010 to buy 100 houses. Now he’s going with it. The Republican candidate for president is one Thurston Howell micky-ficky, and you should vote for him because you have money, too. Even if you don’t, you would rather act like you did. That’s why the Romney campaign released this commercial:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F4LtTlktm0

Almost nothing in that ad is true, by the way. PolitiFact called it “a drastic distortion” of actual HHS policy—an accusation that prompted one Romney operative to declare that “we won’t let this campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” Thank god. I think we can all agree that fact-checkers have too much power in contemporary politics. To this home truth Thomas Edsall adds the claim that the Romney campaign is fundamentally racial.

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Let’s compare two instances of contemporary blackface

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 8 Comments

Scandalously, all these girls are actually Kulap Vilaysack in whiteface.

Now that Twitter and an HBO sitcom have finally convinced me that racism exists, I see it everywhere. It’s like when you first learned who Black Eyed Peas were: you thought that you were being followed by a child reciting nursery rhymes while someone tried to drop pinball machines on her, but actually that’s a song. Racism works the same way. It’s everywhere and bad, but some of it is also maybe kind of okay. It so happens that the last month in popular culture has given us two examples of blackface, one of which is the bad kind of racism while the other is okay—by which I mean okay, still probably bad. Video of Ashton Goddamn Kutcher after the jump.

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Can we talk about this hipster racism article?

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 13 Comments

Heil hipsters

There is something wrong with Matt Pearce’s brain. I know because I read his article in the Los Angeles Times about hipster racism, which is apparently now a real thing. By real thing, I mean imagined thing reported extensively as an epiphenomenon of our own awareness of it. If that sounds maybe kind of abstract, it’s because it totally is. Educated young people are still racist, but hipster racism is an abstract noun modified by a made-up adjective. It’s like when you try to read a clock in a dream: the closer you look at it, the blurrier it gets. Consider the lead paragraph of Pearce’s article:

The Trayvon Martin case, the”Kony 2012″ phenomenon, the L.A. riots anniversary…The conversation about race in America never went away. Now a new discussion about so-called hipster racism has brought the talk to the millennials, and it’s gotten a little awkward.

I’m so angry right now.

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Smug News: Racist Hunger Games fans

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 4 Comments

Amandla Stenberg as Rue in The Hunger Games

I have not seen The Hunger Games, because it has too many children in it. Granted, my understanding of the film is that those children are killing and possibly eating one another, which is nice, but narrative convention dictates that they will still be alive and talking for several minutes of screen time. That’s no good. But I can still enjoy the many, many internet articles produced in conjunction with the film, not the least of which is the news that racist Hunger Games fans were disappointed to find black actors playing several of the main characters. Never mind that those characters are described as having “dark skin” in the books; they’re characters in books, for Pete’s sake, and books are where you find white people the same way the library is where you find bums. Obviously, the fans foolish enough to tweet their disappointment at such faithful casting are stone-cold racists. The question of why their racism is a news story—and an incredibly popular one, at that—is less clear.

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Five-year survey yields bitter confirmation re: Tea Party

By Dan Brooks in Tea Party 5 Comments

His support for abortion makes him an extreme outlier within the Tea Party, but his Skynrd shirt puts him right back in the middle.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the Tea Party is its members’ claims about who they are. Tea Party groups continue to identify as grassroots, non-partisan coalitions of citizens from every walk of life, when we all know that they’re white racist Republicans or, sometimes, white racist libertarians. By “know,” here, I mean “assume in a way that makes us feel guilty about our own closemindedness.” There is no quantitative proof that Tea Partiers are more bigoted, GOP-affiliated and prone to sunburn than the average American, after all. For that you’d need some kind of comprehensive, long-term survey, and such a thing would be too good to—oh, you shouldn’t have, David Campbell and Robert Putnam of Notre Dame. And just in time for my birthday, too.

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