"The fact that this kind of thing is all too typical in comedy doesn’t excuse it, any more than the fact that minstrel shows or screaming homophobic rants were once culturally normal excuses way back when. Indeed, as far as the flippant transphobia goes, if you make an effort to realize that trans people exist in real life and not just as the butt of jokes it gets really hard to watch even “progressive” comedians like Stephen Fry or Stephen Colbert make jokes about trans women as “traps” and not think about how that attitude gets trans women murdered every day.
But it does mean that Twitter inquisitions against individual comedians are something of a waste of time. It means that we’re now acting like the only relevant question is whether Trevor Noah, specifically, is anti-Semitic or sexist or transphobic as though he’s the only person in history to ever make such jokes, and if we root him out then our culture will revert to a pristine, innocent state of not being culpable for anything...
maybe we should be asking whether the tools we create to communicate act to enable or curb those worst impulses, and whether there’s anything we can do to make Internet culture more useful for discussion and self-reflection, as opposed to a culture that thinks it can eliminate bigotry by knocking down celebrity bigots one by one."
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/01/trevor-noah-and-the-toxicity-of-twitter-a-cocktail-party-conversation-that-s-being-refereed.html?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits
Arthur Chu is among my favorite humans. Everything he writes is just unexpectedly helpful for deconstructing human behavior in 2015.
(Also, ugh, I can't help it - as one of apparently very few people who knew who Trevor Noah was before last week and who has adored his comedy and his social commentary for a few years now, I remain excited about him. There are some celebrities I just forgive, because I respect their ability to grow and learn from mistakes. So, I am openly biased in this current conversation. I think everyone has the right to be disappointed, but my feelings haven't changed.)
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/01/trevor-noah-and-the-toxicity-of-twitter-a-cocktail-party-conversation-that-s-being-refereed.html?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits
(Also, ugh, I can't help it - as one of apparently very few people who knew who Trevor Noah was before last week and who has adored his comedy and his social commentary for a few years now, I remain excited about him. There are some celebrities I just forgive, because I respect their ability to grow and learn from mistakes. So, I am openly biased in this current conversation. I think everyone has the right to be disappointed, but my feelings haven't changed.)
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