These two, from the late 1960's. I remember them.
I could finish this song:
But are they? Are they racist? They use stereotypes -- the bandito started with a stubble, a gold tooth and pistoleros. Chicano pressure made the corporation tone it down, and finally threatened an 650 million dollar lawsuit. A loser of coure, but bad PR, so the corp dumped the bandito. Tex Avery, the road runner guy, designed the character, and Mel Blanc voiced it -- you know, Bugs Bunny et al.
So is it racist? I see it as a character, like Santa, or Harlequin. But it is indeed a negative, a bandito. But it's not raciest. It's a negative stereotype. Stereotypes exist because of a fundamental reality. There are swishy gays, and authoritatively droning white males -- like me. Although if you call me "white" you're a racist, and also I'm not "male", that's hurtful and dehumanizing to me. Human males are called "men", occasionally seen in their natural habitat.
This would have been from the Jack Benny program I think, probably mid-50s. Before my time. Again, stereotype. And, no, not a very good commercial. No need to be offended, but we might not be overly-sensitive if we note an undercurrent here.
Dialect humor was screamingly funny in the Golden Age of Radio -- surviving, like the minstrel show, into the '50s and '60s.
Depicting race is not the same as racism. Neither is exploiting the conventions of stereotype. And there is a difference between race and culture, which fact is one of the great beauties of America. But if these sorts of images are IT, for Chinese -- than the one-sidedness, the bias -- it's a problem.
Just as for terrorism, so one man's racism is another man's superiority because of his race. Even if we define our terms, there will remain a field of meaning -- as in the probabilities of quantum mechanics. It's not a particle, not definite, not a thing, until the wave function collapses. That's racism -- it's NOT, until it really IS.
So the name-callers: first, for shame, for being a name caller ... but shaming the shameless is like squaring the circle, or circling the drain, or draining the monster -- it's just being frightened, or lured by the sound of the words, like the pied piper, and rats, and children, who have a very minimal capacity for critical thinking. The racist name-callers -- by which is meant, calling other people racist -- they function on the level of the lower anthropoid primates. Monkeys, screeching and flinging feces, because that's who they are. With no developed capacity to elevate their character via true self-examination, etc.
Like, I've never seen tic tok, but the current thing about Osama's decades-old Letter to America, and these fetuses who've just discovered it…? I saw one unattractive youngster who seems to identify as a person with ovaries and a cis vagina, I heard her saying that, "after I had deconstructed christianity, I had a lot of thinking to do" - and Osama challenges her in the same way. Because, as an unthinking bigot, she had never before examined her assumptions, biases and bigotries. That's what being young and callow is -- questioning everyone else's authority and assuming your own existential virtue. Hey, dude -- you don't have to question your axioms, your assumed truths -- but you do have to be aware of what they are.
Regarding racism, I, personally, am superior to almost everyone, not because of genetics, or even culture, but because of my superb character -- the good attributes that I have adopted and disciplined enough so that they have become who I am. That's the REAL truth about identity. It's not about feelings. It's about behavior.
In terms of your psyche-soul, only god, judges, and the people who love you, have any business caring about your psyche-soul. Liberals, mind-readers and the sentiment -- but I repeat myself -- they THINK they know about your soul, but only the way an addict knows about self-control.
And then there was this. Astonishing.
Clearly anti-woman, if "she" identifies as a woman.
The wonderment isn't how we have survived as a species. It's why we'd want to.
J
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