A few months back Zooey Deschanel tweeted: ‘home from
tour and first things first: New Girl episodes I missed #thuglife’. A
piece by Lindy West attacking Deschanel for being a ‘hipster
racist’ then went viral.
Hipster racism, says West, is “...racism. It’s, you know,
introducing your black friend as ‘my black friend’—as a joke!”
Apparently, ironic comments about race are racist. I
disagree.
If society wants to break racism it needs to do so by
ensuring that race is no longer a serious matter. If nobody associates race
with anything substantial then race disappears as a ‘legitimate’ source of
discrimination. The same goes for gender.
The best way to destroy the seriousness of something is
to take the piss out of it. Introducing your black friend as ‘my black friend’
is brilliant. You are recognising that he or she is indeed black, but that this
is of no significance.
Some people are black, some are white. Some people are
gay, some are transgender. These things must be acknowledged – people often
insist upon it. The key is for these qualities to be of absolutely no normative
consequence.
I was educated at a school populated almost exclusively
by migrant children. We were ceaselessly ‘racist’ to each other. For example, ‘oi
Fabian, how’s your salami?’ or ‘Rouslan’s Russian, he was born drunk’.
Some people might recoil in horror, but I remember school
as a profoundly inclusive institution. We acknowledged our various cultural
identities but extinguished them as normative issues using satire. Through this
process we created and assimilated a shared identity out of the things that
really defined us.
Pretending that distinctions don’t exist simply drives
the acknowledgement of difference underground and creates an elephant in the
room. More importantly, it annihilates difference, when we should be
celebrating it.
West’s piece essentially argues that ironic ‘hipster’
racism is just racism repackaged. But this is a rabbit hole: go far enough back
in the meta-levels and just about anything can be racist. An obvious example is
that in culturally outlawing all acknowledgement of race you are, arguably,
making race an issue and therefore being racist.
The important thing is intent. If you intend to be racist
then that’s what you are, but if you intend to emphasise the ridiculousness of discrimination
then you’re something else entirely.
This can get complicated in the case of, for example, men
who ‘care’ about women and therefore keep them out of the boardroom because it
is a disgusting place. In such areas nuanced discussion of discrimination and
intent is welcome, but Deschanel’s tweet should be left alone as a step in the
right direction.
Taking the piss has limits. Many aspects of the fight
against discrimination are not about negating seriousness. For example, taking
the piss out of sexual harassment serves no purpose. Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred
Lines’ might therefore be ironic, but it is also definitely sexist.
But where our aim is to annihilate the seriousness of
something we are best off satirising it. As Maya Angelou said: ‘I am serious,
so I laugh a lot’.
The
author blogs at markfabian.blogspot.com
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