| Addendum | |
| Posted by: Singapore/Fling 03:53 am EDT 08/21/20 | |
| In reply to: re: Rainbow apologizes in the Advocate - Singapore/Fling 03:14 am EDT 08/21/20 | |
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| After posting, I read the full Advocate article. It's too late to edit my original post, but I do think his longer explanation of the comedy he was emulating and playing with at the time does have more nuance and intelligence than the first quote suggested... though also digs an even deeper hole for him. He is sadly falling into a place where he lets himself off the hook for the fact that most of these jokes were insensitive and inflammatory at the time, and he goes out of his way to deny the racism and transphobia that he was displaying. These jokes may not be skeletons in his closet, but they are also not "crappy jokes in his shoe box" - they are things he said on a public forum that denigrate specific racial and gender groups. His defense also gets rather tortured when he attempts to say that somehow it was okay for comedy in 2010 to be racist because the government was... less racist than it is now? He seems to be saying that someone has to be racist and say terrible things, so it's better for it to be comedians than politicians, and that he's started punching up because Trump is punching down in the exact same way that he was punching down ten years ago. So if the President wasn't a big old bigot, Rainbow could still be trying that out? Ugh. It is time for comedians of all stripes to retire the defense that it was okay to be denigrating because it was just a joke, as we have all seen clearly what that leads to (after all, the President is always "just joking", and people are always being "too P.C." when they get upset at the suggestion that Mexicans are criminals, which is a joke Rainbow made repeatedly). And his suggestion that we "consider the source" is truly bizarre, because the source is him. These tweets may have come to light because of pro-Trump political agents, but every word was written by Rainbow. Take a breath and accept responsibility. I'm hopeful that as he sits with this, he will take the opportunity to truly learn and grow. |
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