Subject: RE: Song Req: 'There was China Man...'
From:
John C. Bunnell
Date: 06 May 21 - 03:57 AM
Responding to Joe's post from last December:
The great difficulty with teaching folks about this is that Joe is exactly right.
> And when you demean other people, even if
> you are well-intentioned, you're racist.
The trouble is that "racism" and "racist" are trigger-words, because we associate them so closely with the conscious, malicious racism of white supremacy, the Ku Klux Klan, and other large-scale social injustices such as the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. So when people hear those words used to describe their own actions, they feel as if they've been accused of being capital-E Evil themselves, even though that's most often not the case.
The secondary problem is that for a sizeable chunk of the 20th century, comedy in America - for understandable reasons, mind you - was very strongly rooted in ethnic humor of various kinds. I'm not thinking only about Polish or Jewish jokes, where the central figure is the open target of ridicule, but of comedy based on pure misunderstanding, on the order of "a Swede, an Italian, and an Irishman walk into a bar". Ethnicity was the source of an immense amount of humor, and a lot of the jokes were funny enough, irrespective of the particular group being depicted, that their influence on today's comedy is still substantial.
This was humor that was wholly socially acceptable to our parents and grandparents - and almost no one, not its writers nor performers nor listeners (even when their own ethnicity was in play), would have understood it to be racist at the time. Some of it might have been counted as offensive, but even that offensiveness wouldn't have been chalked up to racism. Rather, it would have been regarded as tasteless or demeaning on a general level - and most of the time, that judgment would have been correct.
And that's the lesson that we're slowly beginning to learn in the 21st century: that the real, underlying cultural problem isn't racism as such - it's that there is a very long and very persistent strand of storytelling, in song and story and visual media, that seeks to demean its subjecst for being different. That's a lesson that transcends race and ethnicity to encompass gender identity, body shape, physical capability, and more. This is one reason I can't watch most TV situation comedies - I find too large a proportion of them rooted in humiliation/embarrassment humor at the expense of the "weird" character(s).
So what does one do with the Chinaman songs? Just what Joe did, I think - but part of that process has to be the larger lesson, that there's nothing inherently wrong with the nonsense-verse as a musical form. It's simply that these particular verses ground their nonsense in words that inappropriately mock Chinese language.
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sj
