Is blackface always offensive?

[Rev. Rye]

In a thread supposedly concerned with offending people, I find it extremely hypocritical that some people consider it fine to be as offensive, judgemental and arrogant as they like, as long as it’s directed towards someone who the in-group consider to hold a "wrong" opinion.

Really disappointing. I’ve noticed this going on in other threads too. Just insult people so that the wrong opinions either go away or submit to attacks from groupthink. The insults don’t count because they are righteous. I was recently driven away from another forum in exactly the same way.

I’m not going to bother to elaborate on what I actually meant, as people seem quite happy to just make up stories about me and put me in neat little boxes.

Honestly, groupthink aside, I honestly think there's one fundamental thing about human nature that I've observed throughout my life, something I like to call The Dexter Hypothesis.

Human beings are flawed. We have desires that we know are bad and we want to find an outlet for it where the consequences can either be mitigated or turned into a positive. One particularly extreme example is Dexter Morgan. He's a serial killer, driven by urges to kill from his early childhood, and, by the end of the series, the Dexter Wiki calculates a body count of 135 people, a body count confirmed to be dwarfed by exactly one Flesh World serial killer. Even just counting the 51 people he kills on screen, that's still more than Gary Ridgeway, the most prolific serial killer in American history. How does he maintain his sympathy long enough to keep the show on for eight seasons? Simple: he only kills (for the most part) people who are guilty of some crime (preferably murderers), following The Code of Harry (a code his father made up to keep his murderous desires in check).

But we're not all serial killers with the resources to prey on other predators. And most of us probably wouldn't want to be. But we do have lesser desires that we know our neighbours wouldn't look kindly on, and it can be as simple as looking for an excuse to act like an asshole. But, given the right reinforcement from the people around us, we can find the sort of loopholes that give us permission to the awful behaviours we've always wanted to do, acting like a right bastard and potentially even being celebrated for it. Have less than ideal thoughts about minorities, and if you can find yourself a group of people who share those views, you can find yourself succumbing to temptation. You believe all people are created equal, but are willing to make an exception, and meet more people willing to make the same exceptions, the same thing happens.





To Illustrate this point, here's a true story: Imagine a man, old enough to have several grandchildren, many of which (as well as his wife and some of his sons) live with him. He loves to crochet, and watch Wallace and Gromit cartoons. In addition, at the moment, he has a friend and his family staying over. Now imagine that, in the middle of the night one night, police break into his home and start shooting people. No charges given, no warning that they may have to resort to deadly force that was met with rifle fire, no nothing. The old man, one of his sons, and that friend (as well as the friend's wife and brother) are all dead. The old man was shot in the face while unarmed and still wearing his nightgown.

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Now, here's the twist: This incident did happen, and you almost certainly have heard about it. That old man was Osama bin Laden. Literally the only thing I outright changed from the historical record (as opposed to simply omitting) was that the police were actually Navy SEALs (yes, even the crochet thing). You almost certainly changed your initial reaction to the story, didn't you? It's not hard to see why you changed your mind about it; the motherfucker was responsible for 9/11 and even before that, he was on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted list for terror attacks. Because the victim in this case was a monster responsible for the deaths of more people than most natural disasters, we hear about this and just shrug it off. Who cares about what happens to him?

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The line between the sociopath and the common man is a lot thinner than we'd like to think.

TL;DR: Deep down, a lot of us want to be bastards, and we want to keep looking for loopholes to validate our own bastardry.