Aliiias

Being super into the fact that someone is not 100% white is not necessarily racist, but it is almost always patronizing.

Ah, alright. Then I think it's mostly a semantics issue, because I'm with you about the stupid jokes. I don't think I mind these kinds of jokes in some specific contexts, as long as the joke is done well and it's not at the expense of the targeted demographic. I suppose some terrible people can still read the joke the wrong way and see it as a justification to treat others in a certain way, but society has a long way to go until that's not a problem anymore.

I don't know if I agree with stereotypes being used mostly as humor. I kinda feel like a lot of stereotypes are used by groups in power to "justify" their terrible attitudes and behaviors, and I think this can leak into wider ways of hurting and oppressing others outside of bad jokes, e.g. harassment. And of course stereotypes aren't the only reason why horrible things like this happen, but they're not an insignificant factor, so I feel like learning the kinds of "justifications" people use at the time to defend themselves is an important angle to look at. I can't think of a great specific example of this without opening a whole other can of worms, though, so I'm not entirely sure I should go into it. You may be right, though. Maybe learning/teaching about stereotypes is still an overall negative thing regardless. I'm kind of going back and forth on this in my head at the moment and I don't feel entirely convinced one way or the other.

The purpose isn't to get people upset "for no real reason," it's to keep people informed. As I said, we can work towards moving past the history of hate behind these words and stereotypes, but of course this can only happen after society learns to be self-loving enough to correct all the injustices that are still happening today. But to completely forget that these words and stereotypes existed, is to essentially pretend an important part of history of how some people have hurt and oppressed others never happened.

It's not racist at all to teach people about racist words or stereotypes, nor should we try to "forget" these words and stereotypes exist. We can try to move past the history of these things, but we should never forget. People can only be free when they know the truth, and that goes for everyone of every race. Also, got a great laugh out of the "well, technically," bit.

As far as other narratives about robots and/or slavery outside of film, Janelle Monae's Archandroid series of EPs/albums have themes which draw a lot of parallels to slavery, but can also reasonably be about other past/ongoing injustices in American society, e.g. marriage equality. There are of course some problems when trying to draw parallels between slaves and sentient man-made robots in these kinds of stories, though. Slaves were not "blank slate" programmable human beings, even though slave owners tried to make them so. Slave owners first tried to take away the slaves' culture and language before they could begin to try to "program" them. Therefore I think it's a bit problematic to try to do the "slaves-as-robots" kind of story, because it misses a significant act of dehumanization inflicted upon slaves: the attempt to erase a person's heritage. EDIT: Whoops. Original post landed in the wrong thread. My bad - edited this post to reflect the actual topic of this thread.

It makes me seriously sad that people still use the "it wasn't intended to be racist" argument. If I accidentally punch someone in the face, then can I argue that I actually did not punch a fool in the face?

One thing that kind of irks me about the whole Macklemore situation is that he suddenly got a lot of popularity just because he made a track that explicitly supports the gay community. Suddenly, everyone started going crazy about "that guy who made that one rap song in support of marriage equality!" But if people actually bothered to listen, Macklemore is nowhere near the first rapper to actually make rap music in support of gays (and no, I'm not talking about Lil . Murs did it on "Animal Style" in 2011, and the ahk Brother Ali did it on "Tightrope" in 2009. And I'm sure others have done it before that. Seemingly, the only reason why Macklemore gets all the hype is because Ryan Lewis made the beats incredibly poppy to appeal to the mainstream, where no one cares about hip hop outside of the most basic and shallow level. That's not to say Macklemore is a bad rapper. He's actually fairly good as far as mainstream rappers go. And he does it a little better than a lot of other pop-rappers do. So it's not an issue of race that Macklemore took it over Kendrick (or anybody else, for that matter, since none of the nominated albums were actually that amazing). At least, it's not directly about race. It's about appealing to the mainstream, white, pop-focused sensibilities. But honestly, the Grammys don't care about hip hop, so hip hop shouldn't care about the Grammys.