I have to mostly agree with this in light of how Patricia Arquette was needlessly attacked after the Oscars, and how Richard Linklater and Boyhood were attacked and how Frozen has been attacked, etc. Words like “offensive” and such should be reserved to truly offensive things like the racist chants at the frat or how our congress treats our president. I see a lot of wasted energy putting people on trial for things that are really a matter of interpretation. Some will be offended by the “green card” joke, others will shrug it off. I can tell you there is a world of difference between saying that joke to Inarritu and saying it someone who has been the victim of oppression in this country for having immigrated as a Mexican-American. Penn clearly meant no offense by it and is one of the relics from my generation where we didn’t police every word that came out of our mouths. I think – you should target the real racists, bigots and sexists so that your cause can have power and be taken seriously. Wasting time on nonsense though? It really is just a chance to feel like you’re doing some real good in the world. Channel it in a different direction – look at the bigger picture.
re:steve, i honestly have no idea what you’re saying because it seems that you’re pandering to the belief that “today’s generation” wastes time writing about stuff on the internet instead of doing things… and you’re doing so by writing about stuff on the internet. further, that claim you reference by alan is pretty much garbage in both its scope of reduction and its actual merits. if my problem with this article and the people who echo it is the rhetoric behind it, i think a perfectly valid response is to reply, with words, in a way people can access those words: in this case the internet. finally, you completely cherry-picked that excerpt and missed the context of the quote. i never said the idea is to defend hierarchies; i said the problem with the rhetoric of this piece is that it defend hierarchies (“in this case, this piece reads as a defense of defending the hierarchy”). essentially, i said the opposite of what you thought i did. perhaps you should spend less time focusing on platitudes of empty critiques and more time on that collegiate rhetoric.
There is an issue that isn’t being mentioned here: Mexico, like most (all? except possibly Costa Rica?) Latin American countries is divided between the rich and the poor. The rich tend to be educated and of Spanish descent (Del Toro, Inarritu, Cuaron), the poor tend to be of Indian or mixed racial descent. Rich Mexicans have never had a problem with immigrating (if they wanted to), it’s the poor who are desperately trying to find a better life, who do.
This is true in all developing countries where the disparity between rich and poor remains an unbridgeable divide.
@NEVERTOOEARLYMP your story about your partner was quite sad, this truly shows how sensible the topic of immigration is. That introduction by Robin Williams with his “green card” joke lasted for 5 minutes ! Can you imagine a presentation that long now ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6Amvb8ZuwM
Re: Penn’s speech,
Am I the only one more offended by the “sons of bitches” than by the Green Card allusion ??
I’m not sure if anyone has brought this up yet, but this isn’t the first time green cards have come up during an Oscar presentation. The year that Bernardo Bertolucci won best director for The Last Emperor, Robin Williams said “And the Academy, along with the Oscar this year, is giving out a green card.” (All five directing nominees that year were from outside the US).
I don’t think Sean Penn’s comments were the end of the world, but I’m also not sure that “political correctness” is the problem here. Couldn’t it be that we as a society (or at least large parts of our society) have simply evolved on the issue of immigration, to the point that we no longer think of it first as a punchline but rather think of it as a real difficulty that impacts our friends and neighbors? And even if there are some people who are just sitting in front of their computers looking for something to complain about, what about all the other people who live with the fear of deportation every day? It took my partner 22 years to become a US citizen. He had to miss his mother’s funeral and that of two of his siblings because he didn’t have his green card yet and couldn’t leave the country. There were points where we both were paralyzed by fear of his deportation, and it impacted every area of our lives and every decision we made. Again, neither he nor I were particularly offended by Penn’s joke, but we can certainly understand how it might be taken wrong.
Has anyone actually done a fact check to see if Inarritu has — or even wants — a “green card”? Or is that just a generic (and racist) way of mocking Mexicans (or all Latinos, or all immigrants)? There are all sorts of work visas and other ways for someone to legally be in the United States long before they get a green card — indeed, long before they are even eligible for one — and all sorts of reasons that someone may want or need to work here without having any intention of ever applying for a green card. And in the context of a country where one party is trying to defund part of the government because their base doesn’t understand the difference between “deferred action” and a “green card” — much less how both those things are completely different from citizenship — Penn’s joke starts to look less and less funny.
And even if Penn has a great relationship with Inarritu and doesn’t deserve the backlash he’s getting, why are we placing this into the context of “political correctness” instead of placing it into the narrative of how the Academy is too white, old and out of touch? We complain that they didn’t nominated any women or African Americans, but are ok when he minimizes their one moment of some diversity with a joke? If the Academy is older, whiter and more male than the general movie-going public, isn’t it also composed of more citizens and less immigrants than the general movie-going public? If they’re considered out of touch for not embracing superheroes and IMAX, aren’t they also out of touch for not embracing one of the fastest growing domestic demographics?
We throw around the phrase “political correctness” as a way of saying that people are too sensitive, but I have to wonder if the facts don’t better suggest that Penn was a little too insensitve in his comments. Perhaps not to Inarritu directly, since they are SUCH good friends, but to anyone who might want to see “one of their own” be honored without getting the backhand in the process.
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Penn is the model of how we should treat people. If the proper way to honor the second Oscar winning Mexican director in history is by joking about “who gave him a green card” , then I presume we’ll all be fine when the second female director to win is greeted with an equally cordial “Who let her out of the kitchen?”, or the second African-American director (after we’ve had the first) gets greeted with….
Yeah, I’m not gonna finish that last sentence. Because even Sean Penn isn’t a “good enough friend” to get away with it.
Alan Green: Wait what? No one objected to the “sonofabitch” portion of Penn’s quip. That’s not anyone’s point of contention. You talk about living in the “real world” but you responded to a complaint that, at least to the best of my knowledge, is totally imaginary.
“What do you expect from a generation that lives click to click, in a darkened room, eating chips and wiping grease on their pants?
We don’t live in a real world anymore. We live in a completely sterile fabrication of our own making.”
Mr. Green, for the win.
on the other hand:
“there is always a dominant class and hierarchy, even within dominated subgroups. in this case, this piece reads as a defense of defending the hierarchy so that the goals of the people of the top stay the same. again, it isn’t that the people who dominate a particular group are necessarily flawed in their ideology, but very often that group does not consider the lives of other people who make up the group (people who don’t get to control the rhetoric of the movement).”
No, Robby. The idea is not to defend the hierarchy, but to challenge it – constantly and from ALL sides. We’re mammals. That’s how we learn. Not from a keyboard or a screen filled with rhetoric, but from the experience of taking stands and surviving blowback. It teaches the speaker, expands the knowledge of the challenger, and enriches everyone within earshot.
To paraphrase Alan – gotta get real.
In my dad’s day, calling someone a ‘sonofabitch’ was often a compliment. Not always, but much of the time. That was a long time ago. Today, of course, it doesn’t convey anything outside its literal meaning. So, when millions of people online, who mostly have done very little with their lives and have little emotional scope, see someone call a person of Latino descent a ‘son of a bitch’, they go crazy. ‘Why is this rich white guy calling this person of Latino descent the male offspring of a bitch (who is also a person of Latino descent)?’ they ask.
What do you expect from a generation that lives click to click, in a darkened room, eating chips and wiping grease on their pants?
We don’t live in a real world anymore. We live in a completely sterile fabrication of our own making.
Yeah, I agree the guys in the video on all points.
Did the attacks on Boyhood’s “white female savior” who gave a Mexican man advice, hurt it and help a Mexican director win an Oscar? Maybe. What was ignored while people were railing against “white saviors” is that in Birdman there are insults made about Koreans and people with Down Syndrome (guess they are not covered by political correctness).
There are bloggers all over who make their living off the “Brotherhood and Sisterhood of the Perpetually Offended”. Political correctness should cover not hurting people’s feelings for something they cannot help (being an illegal Mexican immigrant, being Korean or having Down Syndrome). It shouldn’t include ignoring any instance (historical or fictional) of a white person helping someone who belongs to a minority. That’s really a case of being Perpetually Offended for no useful purpose.
I find this post extremely “offensive and such”!
While think at this point the discussion on this topic has become a little drawn out (Penn shouldn’t have said what he did when and where he did, it was a poorly-considered move, own up and move on), I think it’s wildly inappropriate for BILL MAHER of all people to be leading this discussion on how the “PC Police” are trampling on people. Dude’s woefully ignorant of half of the things he talks about, and a known bigot besides – the fact that Penn decided to turn to him to discuss this does little to make him look any better here.
College campuses are banning words! Political correctness has beaten down free speech and expression into the mud of “feelings” and bogus empathy.
Let’s not forget the double standard of Penn’s comment. Had a conservative pundit made the same joke, I’d bet Sasha and Mr. Penn would be singing a much different tune. But the joy of liberalism is the same as what I hear from my wife and our newborn son, “do as I say not as I do”.
can you imagine Streep, or many other women saying that when presenting an Oscar? Boys will be boys my ass.
It’s not a matter of freedom of speech. You’re even free to join the Klan. It’s not behaving like a cutesy semi-bigoted jackass.
i have a problem with the use of “political correctness” as a pejorative term– not even getting into the whole history of the term actually having to be a well-versed person in marxism. the phrase has been appropriated to lampoon anyone who speaks out against something for being “too sensitive.” the problem with that logic is it creates an ethos in which people who are crossing a line can devalue the objections of others in a way that’s actually rooted in a stigmatization of women as weak (i.e., you’re too sensitive, too emotional, too weak to handle the truth… this is all ripped from the playbook of the binary of masculine and feminism yin-yang discourse). furthermore, a position is not defensible (or indefensible) simply because you feel others can’t get the joke or the truth or whatever is being questioned. whether someone means to be doing something positive or not, to be humorous or not, does not dismiss the charge of being in the wrong. and using the excuse that there are worse abusers to go after is a faulty one: discrimination is institutionalized, and often the most abhorrent patterns result from the everyday indoctrination of causal offense. for example, to say patricia arquette (whom i adore) can’t or shouldn’t be critiqued for her acceptance speech is wrong: as well-intentioned as she was/is, she repeated the exact missteps of second way feminism in which heterosexual, middle/upper-class, white women defined feminism at the exclusion of other voices. when you don’t correct someone like arquette and dismiss people of color or anyone else who objects, what you’re really doing is defending the hegemonic control of the system. essentially, it becomes some version of white people telling non-white people they’re being too sensitive. there is always a dominant class and hierarchy, even within dominated subgroups. in this case, this piece reads as a defense of defending the hierarchy so that the goals of the people of the top stay the same. again, it isn’t that the people who dominate a particular group are necessarily flawed in their ideology, but very often that group does not consider the lives of other people who make up the group (people who don’t get to control the rhetoric of the movement). so when someone says frozen was a problematic movie because it featured an all white, upper-class, heterosexual, privileged group of beautiful people, that person is not wrong and should not be labeled as so because someone else is taken by the idea that the film succeeded in presenting women in leading roles without depending on men or resorting to love plots. the film can be both progressive in one sense and entirely problematic in another– just as sean penn or particia arquette can be empowerers on certain progressive points while simultaneously being guilty of other transgressions. looking at the big picture, this is exactly what people in ferguson and all over the world mean when they say casual racism (or whatever ism you want to talk about) goes unchecked and excused by those who are not affected by said issue.
finally, i think this goes without saying : bill maher is a repulsive man. trying to defend mr. penn by proxy of his discussions with mr. maher is like trying to say the exclusion of ava duvernay from best director was warranted as espoused by the of out touch old white men of the academy.
Everyone just needs to listen to “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” from Avenue Q.
And I need to get a Hello Kitty avatar.
“There are utterly no drawbacks to freedom of speech unless you’re an over-sensitive bitch.”
I am so stealing this.
The problem I have with the PC police is when there is a double standard. One cannot maintain the moral authority if one uses the condemned epitaphs. Context can come into play to explain it, but it still undermines the original message.
While I find Penn’s comments fine between two friends who really understand each other’s sense of humor, I just wish that he didn’t do it in front of millions of viewers on international TV who most likely do not know their friendship. I knew when I watched it that Sean Penn is not racist. My thought afterwards was “Oh fuck that narcissistic piece of shit won Best Pic.” But afterwards, I wished Penn hadn’t introduced that easy to misinterpret dynamic into his presentation.
“There is a difference between “equally honest feedback” and the “needless attacks” Sasha mentions”
Absolutely, and in most cases it’s anonymity that’s the problem; but does anyone take faceless/needless attacks as anything more than noise? Of course, there’s nothing brave about viciously attacking someone in 140 characters from the safety behind your HelloKitty avatar. Those members of the media that openly judged Penn and Arquette were judged in return when the context of the remarks were revealed. They looked liked imbeciles. “HelloKitty” on the other hand, had already moved on looking for other things to heckle. Social media is in its adolescence and Tweet attacks are its acne.
At its worst, political correctness is shortsighted, self-defeating, and fascist. It misses the forest for the trees. It promotes over-sensitivity…hmm, this isn’t the best way to segue into my modest, impromptu Saturday defense of political correctness. But I’ll do it anyway, haha
I have no problems fundamentally with political correctness, which I view as an attempt to have a more empathetic culture, to have more thoughtful and inclusive discourse. I find that important, especially in an online age where many are guilty of saying things impulsively without taking even a second to consider their overall impact. If we were a lot better at empathy, at respecting one another and our value, political correctness wouldn’t be needed, much like how affirmative action wouldn’t be needed if our institutions were better at diversity, or how feminism wouldn’t be needed if we were better at gender equality (and men weren’t the self-absorbed idiots they are).
I had zero problems with what Arquette and Penn said at the Oscars, and I especially find the reaction to Arquette particularly infuriating, considering she has been a lifelong advocate for equality. That being said, I can certainly understand why some people would react the way that they did (although I would reply to them that there are bigger issues to redirect that energy towards).
And as self-defeating over-zealous P.C may be, concurrently I feel there is a very obvious reverence, a fetishization even, of political incorrectness, where it’s often lauded as “bucking the trend” instead of calling it for what it often really is – reductionism and a manifest disregard of understanding why it’s sometimes necessary to adapt behavior and language to modern cultural/social realities. Those who outright dismiss any value of political correctness miss the trees for the forest – there are big, big cultural/social/political problems that absolutely deserve our energy and attention, but the little things still matter too, to many people.
Political correctness is a way, awkward and stiff as it may often be, for us to adjust to an environment where we are exposed to so many newfound POVs and life experiences that completely differ from our own. Emphasis on awkward. Self-modulation is not the easiest thing for a person. But it’s necessary to adapt in life.
I myself have never had any issues self-filtering myself, even on the occasions I adopt a combative/adversarial tone (which I don’t particularly enjoy, but sometimes you have to). But I reckon that may be directly related to a person’s empathy quotient – as an Meyers-Briggs INxP and a highly-sensitive person (HSP), perhaps navigating through the minefields of politically correct behavior isn’t all that difficult for me – my empathy is always working on overdrive, haha. There may also possibly a generational upbringing factor in play here – most Millenials I know don’t bat an eye when it comes to P.C. or don’t view it with particular disdain. Obviously YMMV.
Political correctness taken to an extreme divides and impedes the very progress it seeks to achieve. But applied reasonably and in moderation, it’s a good faith attempt in promoting understanding and compassion in an incredibly diverse world. Actions taken in good faith, when it comes to liberalism/progressivism as everything else, are not a small thing. They are gestures that say, basically, “we’re trying”: to see things from each other’s viewpoint. To respect each other’s experience. And to understand, if not agree with, each other.
I’ve always felt that having the freedom to make remarks, then getting equally honest feedback from various sectors you may not have even considered or been aware of was the number one benefit of freedom of speech.
There is a difference between “equally honest feedback” and the “needless attacks” Sasha mentions in the article. Some people in the media unfairly disparaged Arquette and Penn without acknowledging the multiple interpretations that their words had.
I’ve always felt that having the freedom to make remarks, then getting equally honest feedback from various sectors you may not have even considered or been aware of was the number one benefit of freedom of speech.
There are utterly no drawbacks to freedom of speech unless you’re an over-sensitive bitch.
I’ve always felt that having the freedom to make remarks, then getting equally honest feedback from various sectors you may not have even considered or been aware of was the number one benefit of freedom of speech. That’s how we learn as a society. PC police can be a tad overindulgent sometimes, but, of course, that’s their right, as well.
While I probably wouldn’t want to spend more than five minutes in either’s company, Maher and Penn are masters at taking things a bit over the edge and directing our attention, making us think and form an opinion.
Social change is not cheese – it doesn’t improve hidden under a cloth in the dark.
Impossible to dial it to the right setting. All in all I’d rather we err on the side of PC.
We saw that this week when the hosts compared the Oklahoma frat boy chanting to hip hop. I’d rather not give the bigots tools to create confusion that excuses their bigoted messages. I hate that kind of speech even when it is relatively benign. Penn should have made that joke to his friend in a private setting and I think its fine he caught some shit for making it in front of so many people who can use his example to excuse their own racism.
We’ve given the guys too much slack for far too long.
True dat, but I’d rather the debate was channelled by different people, not just in a different direction. A pair of old, grumpy, rich white dudes moaning on about the state of societal progression, no matter how awry it’s going, doesn’t do it for me.
No matter how much sense Bill and Sean may or may not be talking in the above video, as far as I’m concerned they can both fuck off.