"Look At My African-American Over Here"
Right.
Anybody want to try to explain to me why this is allegedly a horrible thing to say?
Anybody want to try to explain to me why this is allegedly a horrible thing to say?
posted by Winston Smith at
9:45 PM
6 Comments:
You see, the term "try to explain" appears to make any discussion a foregone conclusion. Also, I can't really answer the question...I go back on forth on whether it's horrible, cluelessness, or simply enlightening about Trump. Maybe a bit of each. It doesn't seem to be a very positive or praising way of phrasing it (shrug).
You mean besides being condescending tokenism?
> You see, the term "try to explain" appears to make any discussion a foregone conclusion.
No it doesn't.
The tokenism angle is a new one...I've heard some other attempts to spin this into some horrible gaffe, but hadn't heard/thought of that one. But is that tokenism? I thought tokenism would have to be something more like specifically placing "token" blacks in the audience.
True or false?
I suppose it depends on the precise definition of tokenism:
"the practice of making only a perfunctory or symbolic effort to do a particular thing, especially by recruiting a small number of people from underrepresented groups in order to give the appearance of sexual or racial equality within a workforce."
By this one it wouldn't appear to be Tokenism (it appeared on a google search at the top of the page.
According to this one maybe:
"Tokenism is the policy and practice of making a perfunctory gesture towards the inclusion of members of minority groups"
He did gesture and comment on a member of a minority group that was present, presumably to fight off the label of being racist.
Yeah, but I don't think they mean 'gesture' in a literal sense.
Believe it or not it had not occurred to me that he was singling out the black guy in order to fight the racist label... I just did not think of that. I thought he was just being Trump. Trump see black guy. Trump comment on black guy. Trump have no real plan... Trump just comment on passing phenomena...
But of course it's an obvious possibility.
But I would say that the most important point is: I did not get the feeling from anything that I was seeing or hearing that it was the possible tokenism that people were mad about. It really did seem to me to be just more stream-of-consciousness, free-associative language policing... People were mad... They thought it was obvious that this was an awful thing to say... It was supposed to be obvious... And then the floundering for explanations came...
I'm all tunnel-vision-y now, so I can't be trusted on this stuff. But I really thought it was supposed to be about the words he used.
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