Saw this today

[Nebe]

Sorry boss. That's racist and if you think it isn't you might be a little racist too.

Any time you make fun of someone's ethnicity at their expense, it's racism on some scale. There's hateful racism and then there is innocent harmless racism.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device

[detbuch]

Originally Posted by Nebe

Sorry boss. That's racist and if you think it isn't you might be a little racist too.

That's the problem with knee jerk reactions such as immediately attributing "racism". The first reaction in a racially polarized environment is to interpret a picture of a black man in the guise of a witch doctor as "racism." If, during the Iraq invasion, George Bush had been pictured in the guise of a marauding Viking, would that have been racism? Would that have implied that the white race was a plundering rapacious ethnicity? Some, no doubt, especially various non-whites, may have thought so, or would have liked to think so. Knee jerk reactions often say more about those who have them than what the object to which they react intends. Do you think, if you reflect more thoroughly about the matter as JohnR did, that the picture was MEANT to be racist rather than satirical? Is the video racist? Isn't the witch doctor depiction more a satirical comment on the regressive nature of Obamacare than a disparaging view of black people? And isn't it a bit racist to view a culture which ascribes to which doctors as inferior? So if you view the picture as a statement about ethnicity rather than medical satire, aren't you subscribing to another cultural ethnicity being inferior? Does that indicate that you might be a "little racist too"? Or, if you don't think that such a culture and its belief in witch doctors is inferior, then the picture, for you, would not be a racial insult.

Any time you make fun of someone's ethnicity at their expense, it's racism on some scale. There's hateful racism and then there is innocent harmless racism.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device

"Innocent harmless racism"--I like that. Can't we all just get along?

[JohnR]

Originally Posted by Nebe

Sorry boss. That's racist and if you think it isn't you might be a little racist too.

Any time you make fun of someone's ethnicity at their expense, it's racism on some scale. There's hateful racism and then there is innocent harmless racism.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device

I disagree. I do think it is in poor taste and I do see how it can misconstrued as racist. I think it is a very slippery slope to go down to think what is racist and what is not and where the line gets drawn. In that context, in the context of multiple doctor parodies in that video, it is satire.

I do think there are fifty other images I can find online in 5 minutes that are racist, but I do not think that image is racist - more so SPECIFICALLY in that context.