Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Ch, cha, Changes...

So since I've cut the cord with my cable company and gone back to using an antenna, I found something I'd come to miss, given the plethora of channels available on cable: Saturday morning cartoons.

I used to watch English Premier League soccer on ESPN, but since that is no longer an option, I've found the broadcast channel RTV to fill my Saturday morning downtime. For those who don't know, RTV stands for Retro Television, and it plays awesome stuff like the original A-Team and the old school He-Man cartoon.

But this is not an ad for RTV, it's about Mr. Magoo.

So there I was, three-quarters of the way through my usual pot of Saturday morning coffee, when I noticed that 'Mr. Magoo' was on. I've been a fan of Mr. Magoo for years. For some reason, my parents bought a collection of the series on VHS that my little brother and I watched a lot. You know, back when movies were recorded on tape.

I enjoyed the nearly blind, yet well intentioned fuddy-duddy and the shenanigans he would get himself into. But, I also remember was his trusty sidekick, Charley.

It's Charley that really spurred this most recent rant.

See, Charley was Mr. Magoo's houseboy. Charley also happened to be Chinese, and being that the cartoons hey-day was the 1950's, Charley was one horribly stereotyped caricature. Charley sported slanted eyes and spoke with an accent saying things like “Mister Magloo,” or referring to himself as “Cholley.” *The Wikipedia link above has a more in-depth description of the Charley character, if you are interested.

But, even with the over-the-top racism, I still remember Charley as Mr. Magoo's intelligent sidekick. Think 'Kato' from the Green Hornet.

So I was a bit lost as I recently watched Mr. Magoo and heard Charley's voice for the first time in years...he had a Brooklyn accent. He still looked the “it's the 50's and we'll be racist if we want” part, but gone was the over-the-top ESL accent.

I was none-too-pleased.

Especially in light of the recent hub-bub over the removal of racially charged language from some of Mark Twain's most famous works.

The thing about it is that it happened. Charley's character was totally and utterly racist. A fact that was only reinforced by the fact that the re-runs of the Mr. Magoo cartoon were changed. But that doesn't change the fact that these shows were initially written, recorded and aired in an offensive way.

The same goes for Twain's works. The books represent a time when slavery/racism where not only rampant, they were for the most part, accepted. This simply was how America was for a long time. Changing some terms in a book doesn't change history, but I fear what revising history in this way, does for the future.

Much like Holocaust museums and memorials encourage to “Forgive, but never forget.” I think the same rationale should be applied to this move towards revisionist history that is taking place before our very eyes.

Now I am not a minority. But that is not to say that I have never been on the receiving end of racial slurs or poorly treated because of what I looked like. I have.

But I have never experienced the downside of institutionalized racism which the above examples illustrate. So while I understand the powerful demeaning nature of the N-word, I will not venture to state how an African American should feel about the changes to the Twain literature.

But while I refuse to utter the term myself, I think it is important to remember what gave the term such power. There is a history there that many would like to forget, as opposed to address and deal with. Dr. Cornel West recently described the changes to Twain's work as nothing more than a futile attempt to “deodorize the funk of the text.”

Continuing with that analogy, you can wash the socks as much as you want, but until you clean the feet, the core issue remains, and needs to be dealt with.

Should we move-on at some point? Yes, I hope we can.

But don't confuse simply sweeping issues under the carpet with growth. And to be clear, giving a stereotyped caricature a different accent and finding-and-replacing the N-word in literature is not growth.

No sum-up here. Just my usual call to be diligent and aware of the world around you.

Hopefully, we can all get to a point where this discussion no longer stirs such emotion. But until that is the case, we all need to be willing to acknowledge an address that this issue is alive and relevant.