Quote:
Originally Posted by H0RUS
It seems like its one in the same.
Yet people routinely dress like the opposite sex in American media and it's not considered offensive, why is that? I would bet that if I had asked you yesterday if it were inherently offensive, divorced from this entire conversation around race, you would have said no. You're saying it is now because you don't like the alternative conclusion, that the offensiveness of dressing up as another race is culturally constructed.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Trolly McTrollson
Part of the reason I don't find these Black Peter arguments convincing is that you could say the same thing about Southern minstrel acts. I'm sure if you helicoptered into 1920's Alabama and made a big stink about minstrel shows they'd think you were crazy. And should we really be imposing our Yankee cultural values on these people?
I think this is again confusion about where the problem lies. The problem with Southern minstrel shows was not blackface per se, it was that they were designed to belittle and denigrate black people. Some minstrel shows featured real black people, were those just fine and dandy?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Trolly McTrollson
Look, I'm sympathetic to the Dutch for a few reasons. It's relatively minor compared to other racist **** Euros do, like throwing bananas at soccer players or whatever. I get that Christmas traditions are special to people and hard to change. Also, yes, I get that USA#1 has it's own ugly cultural relics that we aren't great at dealing with, from the Washington Redskins to Confederate monuments to Donald Trump, so we're not in an ideal position to lecture people.
Having said all that, this is a mostly US-facing webpage with mostly American readers and I don't see any reason why I should mince words here: it's a dumb offensive tradition and they should probably knock it off.
Like I said, I agree that it needs to stop eventually, because the associations are painful to a lot of people and reasonably so. But it's something the Netherlands has to come to itself and it's super arrogant to expect them to adopt the norms of another culture overnight.
Imagine if some Euro country marched into the US and said "Right, this Santa Claus character has got to stop immediately, don't you understand that putting on fat suits is inherently disrespectful to overweight people? What the **** is wrong with you?". What do you think would happen? I'm going with the US losing its collective ****ing mind and burning flags of that country in the streets.