zlacker

>>crbela+(OP)
“Humor is one of the most powerful weapons against priggishness of any sort, because prigs, being humorless, can't respond in kind. Humor was what defeated Victorian prudishness, and by 2000 it seemed to have done the same thing to political correctness.

…

My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not. It took about ten minutes, and I still hadn't covered all the cases.

In 1986 the Supreme Court ruled that creating a hostile work environment could constitute sex discrimination, which in turn affected universities via Title IX. The court specified that the test of a hostile environment was whether it would bother a reasonable person, but since for a professor merely being the subject of a sexual harassment complaint would be a disaster whether the complainant was reasonable or not, in practice any joke or remark remotely connected with sex was now effectively forbidden. Which meant we'd now come full circle to Victorian codes of behavior, when there was a large class of things that might not be said ‘with ladies present.‘“

I’m linking two thoughts the essay doesn’t explicitly connect, but which I think is important to the thesis of why 2010-era cancel culture didn’t get cancelled itself, and that’s its almost autoimmune capacity to cancel comedians.

That said, Graham elides over how cancel culture was renamed “woke.” Was it the left or the right who did this? I suspect the latter, at which point we have to contend with the existence of two mind viruses, the cancel-culture/woke one and the anti-woke totem of the left.

Also, this requires more thought: “publishing online enabled — in fact probably forced — newspapers to switch to serving markets defined by ideology instead of geography. Most that remained in business fell in the direction they'd already been leaning: left.”

Why? And why have right-wing publications failed to gain comparable traction?

>>JumpCr+0v
> My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not

See how much pearl clutching you will get by southern “anti-woke” folks when someone imitates their voice or start saying the only thing they care about is “Gods and Guns”.

FWIW: I was born and raised in southern GA and have only lived in two states my entire life - GA and FL.

They are very sensitive if you talk about their way of life or say anything that can be interpreted as anti-Christian.

>>scarfa+rA
I don't disagree, but I do think it's important to note whether the person is mocking the southern accent or just imitating it as a form of flattery. Often it's the former rather than the latter. The (vast) majority of the time I hear someone doing a southern accent it's for purposes of making fun of them, especially for being stupid/redneck. I don't think it's unreasonable to be offended when somebody is mocking you.

>>freedo+wh1
There is no world where people imitate a southern accent as a form of “flattery” any more than when a White person immitates how they perceive Black people talking or how imitating Indian accents use to be the norm.

Of course the exception I can think of for imitating southern accents would be acting

>>scarfa+Rk1
I think you're probably right wrt flattery of southern accent, but for white people imitated black accents I have to disagree. Growing up one of my friend idolized Will Smith and thought he was the most badass dude on the planet. He would often quote movie lines from him with the accent, and it was 100% a form of flattery. It is also very common for white people to rap along with black artists using the same accent, and it's because they love the song and the style. Nowadays most parents will immediately try to silence their kids for doing that in public, and anyone older than about 12 is now terrified of doing that, so it's quite possible things have changed.

That said, I would agree that the majority of people doing accents are likely to be mocking. I'm not sure how to prevent throwing the baby out with the bath water though.

>>freedo+Em1
Will Smith has never had a stereotypical “black accent”. (I’m Black by the way). But do you notice that no matter how accepted an actor is in the Black community or even the Black hip hop community - ie Eminem - that they never say “the N word” in public or in their lyrics? Of course in movies you will hear it.

As an aside, I do think Robert Downey Jr. may be the last White guy who can wear Black face in a movie without getting canceled.