Racist?

If you watch much television, you have seen some of Ken Levine's work. He wrote on M.A.S.H., Cheers, Almost Perfect, Frasier, and a few others...he has done broadcasting for several MLB teams including the Seattle Mariners...his credits are far more lengthy than this, but that gets you a start.

He also writes a blog at By Ken Levine in which he does a variety of things. Behind the scenes looks at writing for sitcoms, inside looks at baseball broadcasting, reviews of American Karaoke...err, American Idol. One of his posts ran at the Huffington Post and he was then accused of racism.



Now, as a general rule Ken Levine is several things:

- cruder than me

- further left, politically speaking, than me

- funnier than me



Racist? I think that is a stretch. Then again, those who have decided they are the self-appointed deciders of who and what is racist often make these stretches. It reminds me of an incident in class at Portland State.



The class in question was a '30s Cinema class. As a certified (and probably certifiable) movie-lover, that was a class I was pretty ecstatic to take. I like the "screwball comedies" and the gangster epics of that period, even enjoyed the occasional musical with the huge Busby Berkley set-piece, etc. What I did not enjoy were the comments by our self-appointed decider of what was and what wasn't racist finding EVERYTHING racist and sexist. Including me.



At one point she turned, looking for an example, and pointed at me. "He is racist and sexist. He can't help it because he is a white male."



Now, in the annals of stupid statements, that one ranks pretty high on my list. You need to know something about another person before you decide they are or are not racist.



Her inane, ignorant babbling wrecked any credibility she might have had. Thus her further arguments seemed more nonsensical than they might have otherwise.



Example; She claimed the Lord of the Rings trilogy was inherently racist because the (her words, not mine) "short, dark people are bad and those who are light skinned or follow the white man are good".



Never mind that

- Saruman, the traitor and one of the primary villains is...you guessed it...white

- Sauron, the primary villain, is just a giant Eye, no color at all

- dwarves are "short, dark people" and are on the side of "good"

- all the orcs, goblins, etc. are centuries old traditional images that have nothing to do with white, black, yellow, red, etc. in terms of skin pigment and everything to do with standard fantasy villain fare so you don't have to bother with coming up with nations.

To her, however, the entire thing was just another part of the patriarchal racist paradigm with no redeeming features.

As little respect as I have for Freud, I am still going to gaff one os his phrases; "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" and sometimes an orc is just an orc.

But to the more serious point; taking care of the REAL issues of racism that still exist in our world today are set back not by members of the Ku Klux Klan...we all know they are idiots...but by people like her. When idiotic statements like that are brought up, people who are not focused on things like racism, people who don't think about it hear those things and lump idiots like her with the idiots of the Ku Klux Klan, people on the fringe, and begin questioning the legitimacy of other issues. I would include nonsense such as the LeBron James/Giselle Bundchen thing and Ken Levine's Old Yeller comment.

Furthermore, unless and until you know me you cannot know if I am racist, sexist, or guilty of any other "ism"...and the same is true about me looking at you.