Racist Comedy?

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Fri Aug 24 09:27:39 PDT 2001



> > >"Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even
>> >though the thing one is fighting is abominable." - Foucault
>>
>> Foucault's counsel doesn't make sense, in that no one has ever said
>> that "one has to be *sad* in order to be militant." I'd think that
>> one has to be *angry* against injustice, exploitation, or oppression
>> (of at least some kind, even if s/he has yet to see the ensemble of
>> social relations that creates & recreates it) in order to get
>> involved in political actions. Overwhelming sadness depresses you,
>> making you inclined to turn inward & withdraw from the world,
>> sometimes to the point of paralysis. In contrast, anger -- if you
>> are not consumed by it -- motivates you to do something about the
>> object of your anger (e.g., racism). The difference is rooted in
>> biology: "when you get angry, your heart rate and blood pressure go
>> up, as do the levels of your energy hormones, adrenaline, and
>> noradrenaline.... Anger is a natural, adaptive response to threats;
>> it inspires powerful, often aggressive, feelings and behaviors,
>which
>> allow us to fight and to defend ourselves when we are attacked" (at
>> <http://www.apa.org/pubinfo/anger.html>). The point is to control
>> anger & use it productively.
>>
>> Yoshie
>========
>Sadness is more intricate than you suppose in the above, but I'm not
>sure e-lists are good place to grapple with the issue.
>
>Ian

Does it make you sad or angry or both to see that freedom of speech in the USA is quite often reduced to a matter of freedom to use ethnic & racial slurs, to tell ethnic & racial jokes, etc.? Well, if you don't like that, "you have no sense of humor."

Yoshie



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