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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   31491 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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You should see how The Kids These Days react to Avenue Q.

Which I really enjoyed.

I hadn't heard anything about that, how are they reacting?

From r/Theatre a month ago:

The song “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist” is, when looked at through a current day lens, pretty fucking gross. It absolves the audience of whatever racist ideas they have because, hey, everybody does it, and it doesn’t mean you go around committing hate crimes! It’s very much a white liberal version of progressivism, and it takes for granted the idea that racism being bad is a forgone conclusion. Avenue Q means well, but its time has passed.

Racism obviously existed, but it was easier then to believe we were making progress against it. That belief made shows like Avenue Q, which frames racism being bad as a foregone conclusion, possible. It was palatable to the primarily white audiences that would go see it, in the same way that the era made TV shows like South Park and Chappelle’s Show cultural phenomenons. This idea that you can believe in progressive politics and also say wildly racist things as long as you make it clear that it’s “just a joke” was a hallmark of the 00’s, and we aren’t in that time anymore. The show is dated and it would need a very heavy rewrite to be relevant again.

The show depicts a specific malaise with politics and society from 20 years ago, and some of that still holds up. But it also is rooted in a (largely white, middle class) understanding of race and racism from the time, where racism is a personal failing (and a potentially minor one if joked about) and not a major systemic problem.

Basically a bunch of very serious “we used to laugh because we didn’t know how racist it was to seek a colorblind society, what privileged fools we were” with some hemming and hawing about Trump and DeSantis.

Here’s one I’ll respond to specifically:

I get that this pushing of the audience’s buttons about racism is the intent with Christmas Eve, but in a post-Trump world I can’t get behind it. It comes from a place of assumption that the audience will have a problem with that sort of racism, and I don’t think it’s realistic or responsible to trust general audiences like that right now.

This person is literally upset that there might be racists in the same audience as them, actively being racist by laughing at the Asian immigrant and getting away with it without anyone to lecture correct them about how wrong it is. This is a level of paranoia the CIA would have been giddy to inspire during their MK-ULTRA experiments, a level of internal division the Soviets would have loved to sow during the Cold War.

It reminds me of one of the most insightful moments in Cerebus The Aardvark. Bear, Cerebus’ drinking buddy, is discussing a pop culture fiction with Cerebus at the bar. Cerebus gets more and more upset, and finally Bear figures out why. “You’re not upset because I don’t like the thing you enjoy,” says Bear (I’m paraphrasing). “You’re upset that I do like it, but not in the same way as you.”

and it takes for granted the idea that racism being bad is a forgone conclusion.

I am really confused by this. Is the poster arguing that racism might not actually be bad? It reads so easily into "progressives are just as racist as everyone else" rhetoric.

My interpretation of the post was that that the poster believed that, 20 years ago, there was a naive belief that we could take for granted that everyone agreed that racism was a bad thing that we were making progress at defeating, which Avenue Q seems to be invoking by saying that Everyone is a little bit racist. That is, Avenue Q is saying that we're all on the same page - helplessly forced to be (at least a little bit) racist, but presuming that the audience sees that as a shameful thing to try to fix. And the comedy in the song comes from everyone agreeing that being racist is bad, but also everyone having to come to terms with they themselves being racist, even if a little bit.

The poster seems to want to contrast this to the true and correct view of now rather than 20 years ago, where we recognize that there really are significant amounts of powerful racist racists out there who really do think in stereotypically racist ways like "black people don't deserve human rights," not in the "little bit racist" way of, say, cracking a joke about Pollacks. There's a bit of leap here, but the poster seems to think it's "gross" that the musical is poking fun at "racism" by calling out these little bits of racism for humor, which sweeps under the rug the obviously much more significant factor of racism from truly racist racists (that the enlightened people of 2023 recognize which the ignoramuses of 2003 couldn't).

He's arguing the musical is taking it for granted that everyone believes racism is bad, but since we live in a cis-heteronormative white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, that view is mistaken.

That would explain it. It's just worded so weirdly, imo.

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