| Repeating here: Question about Rainbow Rainbow tweets quoted in THE ADVOCATE article | |
| Posted by: Michael_Portantiere 12:14 pm EDT 08/21/20 | |
| In reply to: re: Rainbow apologizes in the Advocate - ryhog 10:49 am EDT 08/21/20 | |
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| Hi again, all. I posted this above but doing so again, in response to ryhog's recent post, hoping to get more notice: Having read the full article in THE ADVOCATE, with three of the Rainbow Rainbow tweets in question, I have some questions about two of them. The tweet I don't have any questions about is this one: “Why is it OK to call it a ‘white noise’ machine, yet offensive to say that I bought it to drown out all the ‘black noise’ in my building?” I have no trouble understanding why many people would find that offensive, regardless of the fact that I'm sure it was meant as "just a joke." But in the case of the other two tweets quoted in the article, I honestly don't understand what the specific problem is. Here's the first one: “My parents said that had I been a girl, my name would’ve been Randi with an ‘i.’ And had I been black, it would’ve been ‘MISS JENKINS!!!’ Looking at the first sentence above, are people upset because they find it offensive for someone to reference the fact that some first names which have been popular among both men and women have often been spelled differently depending on the person's gender? If so, would the changing of "Bobby" to "Bobbie" in the new version of Sondheim's COMPANY also be considered offensive for the same reason? As for the second part of the tweet, at first I didn't understand it at all, but then I asked a friend who explained that it must be a reference to the character Marla Gibbs played in 227 -- a show with which I'm unfamiliar. So, do people object to this quote because they find it offensive that Rainbow was trying to make a joke in reference to a black character played by a black actress on an old sitcom, even though -- as far as I can tell -- he said nothing negative (or positive) about the character or the actress? The other controversy I don't understand is the one over the following tweet: “Black & White cookies R a delicious metaphor for racial harmony :) But they taste better if U keep both halves segregated. I mean separated!” In this case, I think it's safe to assume that RR is not in favor of segregation. So, are people upset about this tweet for the fact that the very serious matter of black/white segregation would be used as fodder for attempted humor? That's the only guess I can come up with, but if there's something else I'm missing, please let me know. I'm being 100 percent sincere when I say that I'm asking these questions not rhetorically and not because I have already arrived at an opinion and am looking for an argument, but because I'm honestly not sure I fully understand exactly what people find offensive in those two quotes, and I would be very interested to read various people's thoughts about that. |
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| Previous: | re: Rainbow apologizes in the Advocate - ryhog 10:49 am EDT 08/21/20 |
| Next: | re: Repeating here: Question about Rainbow Rainbow tweets quoted in THE ADVOCATE article - ryhog 01:06 pm EDT 08/21/20 |
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