As regular Harpy readers know, I am a renowned hater of what I think of as liberal dude-ism. Now, dudes who identify as liberal who may be reading, please understand: I don’t mean you. Necessarily. I mean the kind of dude who believes that his lifelong membership to the Democratic party and his memorization of all of Obama’s stump speeches mean that He Has Risen Above. Above what, you might ask? Oh, above racism! Sexism! Any -ism! He totally took those classes at Harvard/Stanford/Princeton, yo, and they reassured him that he himself is a liberal’s liberal.
And then he does something like this:
Sigh. This picture was from Jon Favreau's Facebook, if you missed that little hullabaloo.
But now I’ve seen something that suggests there may be hope (ha!) for these dudes. Okay, not much hope, but a little.
As should be patently obvious, Jon Stewart is a deity among Liberal Dudes, and the Daily Show is something like scripture. But it can be a problematic one. The appeal is easy to see: largely, the writing staff of the Daily Show is largely composed of white liberal dudes who were Ivy-league edumacated. Liberal Dudes are their choir.
Now, I like the Daily Show, and watch it religiously too, but it hasn’t escaped my notice that the show can be less than sensitive to the wide world beyond Liberal Dudes and Liberal Dude concerns. Despite the fact that the show tries to be open about its male loser roots (I have heard about Jon’s pot habit too many times to count) there are a lot of dick jokes. And a lot of fratty behaviour. And, um, not so many women around.
Watching them last night covering Sotomayor was very interesting in that context. The Daily Show is still struggling to develop race-and-gender consciousness. The relevant clips are below: what do you guys think? My general impression is that brushing off the can’t-pronounce0her-name and “she doesn’t understand America” stuff is good, but then the whole segment descends into a not-particularly-funny send up of racist behaviour (but don’t worry, they had the brown guy do it, it’s okay!) and references to the redundant “Latina woman.” (Has this word ever before been heard on the Daily Show, Latina? My guess is no.)
I want to give them credit for trying, of course, because bitterness has not taken over my entire soul, and hey, if we can’t convince these guys to stop being inconsiderate pricks and educate themselves I don’t know how we can convince anyone else.
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I watched last night and honestly I was expecting better. No mention of the LARASA/KKK comparison and the like? No skewering of the idea that being a non-white female judge would impair her ability to decide cases impartially? eh. weak.
Oh ugh, that Jon Favreau picture. Ugh ugh ugh. FAIL.
I suspect that part of the reason this came off so poorly has to do with, as you said, the fact that this is the first time that the word “Latina” has even come up for the Daily Show. In my experience, white folks, even white liberal folks, draw a blank when it comes to Hispanic culture. It’s still invisible to them, unlike, say, African-American culture, which underpins a lot of pop culture in the US.
I’m a classic white liberal elite myself, but I went to majority-Latino public schools with Latino friends and speak fluent Spanish. And yet, when I tell other white liberal elites this–esp. middle-aged ones–they’re stunned. It seems completely radical and exotic to them. So many people–even well-intentioned liberals–simply don’t “get” how large and important and diverse the Hispanic community is, and how radically it will shape our culture over the next couple generations.
Yes! I became disenchanted with Liberal Dudes very quickly. It’s like they love everything about being liberal… except for feminism!
I thought the last part was supposed to kind of be saying that “this is what the media looks like when they talk about this and it is stupid when they do that” and then picking Aasif for the delivery was supposed to be an added joke of hahaha the stupid media would probably think the indian guy is latino. So I don’t think if i’d put it in the same category as Favreau, but then again I’m probably biased when it comes to Stewart and Colbert.
@Teresa: They were going for too many cheep laffs for this to be the case. I think they had a Carlos Mencia Moment, in that they exploited what they were supposed to be criticizing (also known as a Fight Club Moment).
And shortly after reading this I went to my iGoogle page and glanced through what articles were on the news feeds and usatoday and msnbc both had the headline “Sotomayor tells senate she’d follow the law as a justice”
I didn’t have the patience to click on the article but what senator really thought that’d be a good question to ask. Like she’d say no. Incredible.
Yeah, I was not impressed by Jon last night either. Especially the subtle “yeah, I’d totally ‘do’ Sotomayor too. Heh heh heh.” come on, man
Eh, I gotta say, I could not be less disturbed by these clips — not when there are still so many proudly conservative men (and women!) extant in the population. Cracking on Liberal Dudes for being insufficiently liberal seems a lot like calling out certain “waves” of feminism for not being feminist enough. Once the Conservative A-holes start paying lip service to concepts like feminism, then I’ll worry about whether Liberal Dudes really “get it.”
Really, I’m not scared of Jon so much as I’m scared of the people who are apparently even more ignorant, particularly those who do not seem to know that Puerto Rico is, in fact, part of the USA.
When I’m done being scared of them, I’ll deal with Aasif and Jon. Like Becky said, they’re missing some knowledge, but at least they know how to pronounce a name in Spanish, or they at least knew how to find someone who did.
Hey, I’d take Jon over Newt any day of the week, but he doesn’t get a pass either. His first comment on Judge Sotomayor is that she’s fuckable? That’s low.
I really would not put Jon Stewart in the same category as Favreau, at all. Jon Stewart may miss the mark a few times, but the intention with his humor is consistently to poke holes and to raise questions.
The Favreau boob-grab was pure misogyny absent of any higher intent.
I disagree with Kivrin and DangerMouse on this one, because the game is never going to be about winning over the rightwing nutters. The whole game is about shifting “normal”. The larger, day-to-day, casual normalizing of disrespect for women or minorities, or “othering” of any kind, is what gives the extemists a platform. Remove their platform and they have nothing to stand on. Doodz – stop bending over and making yourselves into platforms, just to show you’re above the doormats.
@Becky: I’ve always wondered how that could possibly be the case, given the demographics of population, especially where I’ve lived, Dallas and Los Angeles. I didn’t have a huge amount of exposure to hispanic culture growing up, but aside from my brothers and father, my family is comprised of latinas. And now I live in the same area as them so I see them at every big holiday. It does still shock me how many people have no idea what it is.
I didn’t like any of it. But I especially didn’t appreciate the adding in of gay issues. Is that really necessary? Why can’t we actually have a discussion without having it turned into “Well, we’d have the gay people represented if she would have been a lesbian, or if we had one of the justices fuck dudes most of the time.”
@aspiringexpat: Totally agree. I think that in a lot of ways it’s a class thing–Latinos are written off as immigrants, or perceived as all being low-class “Mexicans” (even though many of the large and powerful Hispanic communites here are definitely NOT Mexican).
Even when Jon Stewart took the Fox News dude to task when he said “Does Sotomayor know what it means to be American?” he didn’t fully grasp how insulting that comment was. Not only was Sonia Sotomayor born an American citizen, her parents–and grandparents–were born American citizens, and Sotomayor’s mother served in the US army. Puerto Ricans have been US citizens since 1917.
Gah. But to Fox News, everyone with a Hispanic last name is just a Mexican here to mow their lawn.
Yeah I was less than impressed with Monday night’s Daily Show. After a minute or two of silence during that bit, my SO looks at me and says, “This is really dumb.” All I could say was, “Yeah.” It takes quite a while for Jon to tell Asif that these are inappropriate stereotypes and by that point, the jokes are so tired that there was no way to save it. He has done this bit before (in different contexts) and made it work, but all the times I can think of, it was Jon making the stereotypical jokes and getting told off by a correspondant. That dynamic actually works since it is so clearly Jon (the white guy) who is so clearly in the wrong that he just end up hanging his head and sputtering nonsense by the end.
@Becky: You got it. The reason Latin@ culture and Spanish isn’t well known is because it is considered low-class. This is the very reason people learn French in school instead of Spanish (even though Spanish would proove more useful). I remember a girl’s mother telling me that her daughter had to take ASL because she is NOT going to take a Spanish class (annunciating Spanish as if it were a bad word).