jar jar binks + racism = does not compute
- Thread starter shadowstriker86
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Can I just state this before any more of you mention the Ewoks or Jawas...Lord Krunk said:
People had their limbs chopped off, now if that is aimed at kids...the world is weird. Anyway, I liked the Ewoks and Jawas, they gave a nice alien feel to it. Jawas have always been a party-piece, and the Ewoks were there for the sheer cuddly-ness.
Ironically, you screwed up, because Aunt Jemima is racist. Like Uncle Ben, which you mention letter on, she's a product of a white-owned corporation associating its product with "folkly old blacksy goodness" or some such bizarre marketing claptrap. In fact, the name itself is the female version of "Uncle Tom," implying to white consumers that Aunt Jemima is a "safe" black person, because she has a history of just kowtowing to white people, and not doing anything to upset them. Her character history is even as a former slave. Here's image of her from her early days:Helnurath said:
The folks at Slate.com really trashed him for it in their audio review. But then again, Slate owns the Root (which is doing a series of wonderful stories on Spike Lee this week in honor of Do The Right Thing's 20th anniversary), so it's not exactly your typical newspaper.dwightsteel said:
Here, I'll put your faith back in gamers (or possibly take it away from the rest of humanity, so gamers don't look so bad in comparison)Cheeze_Pavilion said:
I don't think it's exclusive to the videogame industry. I think people are generally unwilling to discuss race in places where they cannot observe it. I'd go into more open detail, but the best way is to give you an example, so I'm just gonna refer you to the blog I have but very rarely use: It's kinda a long rant about private college codifying racist beliefs.
Frankly, the nature of the internet means I can't really tell, but just by the fact this is a site for gaming enthusiasts, which is a pretty expensive hobby and thus creates an artificial barrier to non-whites, who statistically will make far less per year than their white counterparts, I'm willing to bet that, like me, most of the folks on this site are pretty white bread. I mean, the staff of the Escapist is pretty white bread. But they've had some very interesting dialogues on race in video games before, so I'm gonna assume that for the most part, they're pretty socially conscious.
It's a cultural apathy towards racism. Racism is depressing. It's something you have to watch for. And people don't want to be called racist, which is something that can happen if they are aware of it. So they'd rather be unaware of racism, and just say that it doesn't happen. And you often do have to put extra effort into it. I mean, people see movies for the entertainment of it. They don't necessarily want to hear that their entertainment is racist, because that implies their entertained by racism that they weren't even aware of. Which happens all the time.
Personally, I'm glad that not only are we having this discussion, but a lot of people jumped up with me to go "Whoa! Hold on there, chief. I think you're missing a couple of things about Jar Jar." That makes me feel warm and gooey inside about gamers.
Except they do, and he's right. Stop it with the "You're reading too much into this" shit.Lexodus said:
Seriously, the imperial uniforms in Star Wars are exactly like the nazi ones. Also, the fact that the imperial soldiers are also known as Stormtroopers should be a slight giveaway...
What im doing now will most likely result in me pulling a Godwin, but here we go.
Its kinda funny when you consider Jar-Jar the biggest "mistaken racist" idea in Star Wars. To me that Character serves actually no purpose, he is stupid, has absolutely no sense and believe me when i say this, his sheer existance is a fuckup of the universe, natural order usually tends to weed out the "undesired" and all. So how he actually survived to the third Film, or for that matter the first 10 Minutes of Episode 1 were he was introduced is beyond me. As said, the Character is unneeded in itself, its not even funny, its just dumb. But to get to the Point here, i didnt think him as racist, after all, even when you stereotype blacks as lazy/dumb, theres equal measure to be had by the asian/white/latino/pengiuns so its not really all that "racial stereotype", if anything its a Stereotype against the American School System, or generally any School System which results in one stupid person, considering every other Gungan was at least 10 times smarter than Jar-Jar.
But as pointed out, heres the good bit, there have been analogues to the Third Reich in Star Wars before, even if subtle, consider the Empire. One single evil "Dictator" that got into power through strange means, Human High Culture (replace the word Human with Arian and see where that ends up), Imperial Dungeon Ships for the politically unwanted and "Slaveraces" which basicly were everyone except Humans, just to name a few. I doubt it was intended directly but if you begin to think about it, there are some parallels and its hardly that suprising, the Empire were supposed to be the really evil bad guys.
What bugs me most about the whole Prequel Trilogy is that it completely fucked up the Original Trilogy, after all, how can you now take Darth Vader seriously knowing that before he was a "Emo" that cried at least for 5 Minutes in every single Movie. That in itself is bollocks.
Its kinda funny when you consider Jar-Jar the biggest "mistaken racist" idea in Star Wars. To me that Character serves actually no purpose, he is stupid, has absolutely no sense and believe me when i say this, his sheer existance is a fuckup of the universe, natural order usually tends to weed out the "undesired" and all. So how he actually survived to the third Film, or for that matter the first 10 Minutes of Episode 1 were he was introduced is beyond me. As said, the Character is unneeded in itself, its not even funny, its just dumb. But to get to the Point here, i didnt think him as racist, after all, even when you stereotype blacks as lazy/dumb, theres equal measure to be had by the asian/white/latino/pengiuns so its not really all that "racial stereotype", if anything its a Stereotype against the American School System, or generally any School System which results in one stupid person, considering every other Gungan was at least 10 times smarter than Jar-Jar.
But as pointed out, heres the good bit, there have been analogues to the Third Reich in Star Wars before, even if subtle, consider the Empire. One single evil "Dictator" that got into power through strange means, Human High Culture (replace the word Human with Arian and see where that ends up), Imperial Dungeon Ships for the politically unwanted and "Slaveraces" which basicly were everyone except Humans, just to name a few. I doubt it was intended directly but if you begin to think about it, there are some parallels and its hardly that suprising, the Empire were supposed to be the really evil bad guys.
What bugs me most about the whole Prequel Trilogy is that it completely fucked up the Original Trilogy, after all, how can you now take Darth Vader seriously knowing that before he was a "Emo" that cried at least for 5 Minutes in every single Movie. That in itself is bollocks.
...Pull the other one, it has got bells on.Abedeus said:
(You're kidding me.)
If such a parallel were to be drawn (and I find that tenuous to point of mere coincidence), then why call it racism? Why not caricature? The assumption there is that someone deliberately set out to deride a nation, which strikes me as unlikely at the very least.
Sure, suggest away, but double-check how much cultural sensitivity you're bringing to the table by comparing clumsy amphibious aliens from a movie to fellow human beings. I mean, I wouldn't, and WTH?
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wow did not expect all this from my question lol but i did get an answer. my first assumption when i first saw it was the it was just some retarded elephant mutant thing with a speech impediment, and wanted him to die the millisecond i heard him speak cause he was so stupid. but my wish was granted when Force Unleashed came out and he was frozen in carbonite.
Here's an idea, you could go through this thread and find all the point made by people (me included) in which we contend that Jar Jar is in fact a racist caricature, before you basically pose the question that is asked in the first post. You could also see that the general consensus is not that Jar Jar is an intentional racist caricature, but an accidental one. It's something that if you take a step back and go: "hrm...let's examine this a little critically, here" one could easily go "Yah, hrm...maybe it's really easy to misconstrue this as racist because it's borderline racist..."mooncalf said:
The fact is, these "clumsy amphibious aliens" are, as you say, "from a movie," so comparing them to fellow human beings is a pretty fair evaluation. You have to realize that like all aspects of a movie, they were created, and subsequently refined by the director and writers (or in this case, writer/director). That means Jar Jar's likeness, his speech patterns, his mode of dress, all were consciously decided upon by George Lucas. And since I don't see a lot of tall amphibious aliens walking around the street, I'm gonna go ahead and suggest that maybe George Lucas used real life inspirations for a number of elements of his story (namely because he himself has said that he's used real life inspirations for various elements of his stories). So, if we accept that the Gungans are based on "something" in real life, it's pretty easy to say, "well, the closest thing that exists in real life to this are those racist caricatures of blacks, so what's Lucas doing a caricature of?" I'm not saying it's specifically Caribbean, but mainly because I don't know a ton of Caribbean blacks, certainly not well enough to know what they report as their being stereotyped as.
Frankly, if you've got an alternative for the real life basis of Jar Jar, I'd honestly like to hear it. But keep this in mind, in case you want to argue "hey, he's an alien! He's not human, there's no earthly basis for it!" and try to beg off the question: no writer can create something completely out of his own imagination. It doesn't happen. There's nothing in any form of written work that doesn't borrow from something that previously occurred. Not even the ridiculously outlandish creations, the most distinctly inhuman ones, lack a grounding in the real world, somehow, somewhere.