[OT] Taking Offense

Well, here we go

I have heard a LOT on Blazer's Edge about being offended of late. Sophia's latest hotbed of controversy notwithstanding, there's been tons of mouth-covering and hand-wringing of late. Before that was the T-Rex, the Pritchslap and so on. It seems that, next to cheerin' BEdgers love them some gettin' offended.

I recently read the excellent Basketbawful post concerning just this issue. Honestly, it opened my eyes to not only what's going on within sports but what's going on within the blogosphere in general.

To summarize (at the risk of its ruination - again, I suggest you read it), I'd say that it introduces a new concept - new to me, anyway: Getting offended for the sake thereof.

No one's for it

It's not to say that I'm in any way in favor of genocide, slavery, sexism, Old School-ism or New School-ism, but, to quote my pals Gang Starr:

If we're not schooling the youth WITH wisdom
then the sins of the father will visit the children
And that's not keepin it real...
that's keepin it -- WRONG

After all, isn't the hoopla over a picture of a bunch of Spaniards slanting their eyes a little different from, say, a picture of a bunch of self-satisfied people at the site of a lynching? On a very direct level, I find the former "racist" and the latter "inhumane". In this BEdger's opinion the difference is a finite and terminal one: one image connotes a misapplication of differences, the other, hatred and its ugly, dreadful and deathly results. Or better yet, the record of such.

What good does it serve to be up-in-arms about this photograph? What good do 100 BEdgers accomplish by defining their morals through the gauntlet-like comment section of Sophia's post? Do we become better people? Maybe. Does the world become a better place? Doubtful. Possibly, we learned what this community as a whole feels towards the issue, but is that really helpful? Is that getting us anywhere - that a group of tenuously like-minded people are in agreement, far, far away from where the perceived conflict is 'raging'?

One could say that any and all racism is evil and that we should never tolerate any such act. Fine. I won't argue that - any time you limit your perception of someone by their physical characteristics is harmful and negligent. It's also to one's own detriment. I'm not arguing that and would take issue with anyone who does. However, there's a palpable difference between being offended by a picture spread across the internet and being offended by a cruel and often deadly cultural norm, no? Does anyone else find irony in our collective display of moralism concerning a picture when other, much more real issues are at stake? Why hasn't there been a Darfur fanpost? What about a Black inner-city one?

I, for one, am offended by photographs by what they relate. Pictures of concentration camp internees (while creepy in their own right) offend me because they're living proof of what people can do to others. The photos taken during the Vietnam conflict raise similar feelings within me. Same with the aforementioned photographs of lynchings. That said, I'm not afraid of depictions of differences within the human race's colors any more than I'm afraid of the differences themselves: none. The Nazis used caricatures of hooked noses and enlarged lips to slander the Jews and Blacks respectively, and because of their nefarious motivations, I'm offended. I heard a tall, white, friend of a friend dressed up in bandages and shoe polish to portray Sam Bowie on Halloween, and that doesn't really offend me. To wit, because of past (and lesser-so present) racial disharmony, may I never dress up as Brandon Roy on Halloween? Am I forever relegated to the Steve Blakes of this world, simply because of my skin color?

Wouldn't it be a better world if we could enjoy some silliness (racially ridiculous though it may be) without conjuring such closeted demons as slavery and oppression? I'm a youngster at 25 years of age and grew up doing the "Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these" rhyme in first and second grade, but would certainly say I'd never, child or adult, partake in any activity that included harming another member of the human race because of Asian features. Isn't it worth considering that this Puritanical, knee-jerk reaction to all things potentially racist is more of a symptom of the ills that preceded us?

Certainly, it's still a problem, and sure, it's best to stand ever-ready to vilify and disparage any wrongdoing, any steps outside the boundaries of ill-will towards fellow human, but is that what's really going on, here? I'm yet, in my experience with Slant-gate, to encounter one Chinese group denouncing this photograph. [Update: ptwnblazer informs me that the Chinese at the ensuing game were pissed. My bad.] Are we, perhaps, defending a culture for a slight that they themselves don't find hurtful? Are we, perhaps, finding offense in a context-less Spanish act that has not been received as such? Are we, perhaps, being offended because it simply triggers our learned sense of righteousness or because of our well-hewn sense of shame? Neither? Both?

Here's where I use The Lost World to make my point

In the sequel to Jurassic Park, there's a scene where the protagonists are chilling next to some nice, kind-looking dino-lizard. One remarks on how it doesn't know to be scared of them (being humans) and the other shocks it with a cattle-prod or something and says "now they know". One could assume that, for the rest of its days on Isla Sorna, said dino was wary of all humans and their machines. Perhaps it even told its main homies to watch out for the two-legged pink guys. And perhaps rightly so, but not every human is an electrocutioner just as not every joke is a genocide.

Isn't that sort of what's going on here? The slanty-eyed picture isn't hurting anyone, I don't think. Using Kevin Pritchard's name in a pun potentially connoting violent interaction isn't, either. The discussion seems more to do with what feelings these entities raise to the surface, and that argument could go on forever as we all have different feelings raised by any or all of these hot-button artifices. We could sit around all day arguing whether a Rorschach card is "moral", couldn't we?

If the eye-slanting made anyone of Asian descent feel bad, then that was an obvious misstep. If Nike's recent advertisement equating genitals forced in people's faces with negativity made people feel unwelcome, likewise. However, there's a chasm between an act of hatred and bad PR. In my opinion, these issues don't need to be hashed over - they're symptoms of a greater ill. These unlikely scions of "morality" aren't the source of our consternation; it's the source of the feelings that they bring up that should receive our scrutiny.