This also reminds of something the comedian Ricky Gervais often says (I'm paraphrasing): You can joke about everything. The problem is people mistaking the target of the joke with the subject.
This also reminds of something the comedian Ricky Gervais often says (I'm paraphrasing): You can joke about everything. The problem is people mistaking the target of the joke with the subject.
The complete sociological ban on the utterance of any words that even sound like "the actual N word" is so bizarre to me. As a kid in the early 80s it was very clear and unambiguous to me that actually calling someone the N-word was extremely taboo and racist. But it wasn't like using the phrase in a sentence such as "Calling someone the <N word> is extremely taboo and racist" was considered offensive. When I first heard about a story where a college professor was suspended for giving a lesson in Chinese where the Chinese word just happened to sound like the N word [1], I was convinced it was either an Onion article, or an example of the right trying to make a caricature of anything that smelled of "wokeness". But alas, it was actually real, and just as absurd as I originally thought.
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/fight-agai...
The joke: Turk and JD go to a college party dressed as each other, in whiteface and blackface respectively. Turk gets distracted and leaves just as JD opens the door to an all-black frat. The frat beats the shit out of JD for his blackface.
It wasn't the blackface that made the joke racist, in my opinion. It was the tired stereotype of violent black men without deeper emotions. It was the assumption that racism is transactional in this way; you do a racism and you get your ass beat if you get caught.