"Come on, man, it's in your African blood, like eatin' chitlins and selling your own people into slavery."
Imagine, for a moment, that the previous statement were aired, in the form of an underhanded joke, by an ignorant character, on a major Fox sitcom.
Imagine now if "emperor" Murdoch of Fox corp. released a short statement about the incident, half apologizing yet half passing the incident off as a misunderstanding of the people of the script. What if he said that the joke was relatively transparent as ignorant, because it was uttered by an ignorant character?
Would any of that matter? Or would the NAACP make sure that heads roll?
It would be front page news, as well as the talk of every major news program in the Western Hemisphere. Major boycotts would be raised against Fox, and Murdy and company denounced as racists.
When Don Imus made a tasteless joke about "knappy haired" black women athletes, his career was over by the next morning.
Let me suggest that making a joke about "knappy haired" African American women, no matter how terrible, does not quite compare to insinuating that an innocent and victim nation collaborated with the Nazis in some of the greatest attrocities of the 20th century.
Make it a Polish joke, and it stands. Not bad for a country which claims to be struggling to eradicate racism.
Thousands of phone calls flood Fox, every major Polish American organization makes public complaint, and even members of the Polish government contact Fox.
Meanwhile, Fox releases a half-assed apology, and I couldn't even find the story in the papers.
This is hardly fair: shouldn't the pursuit of equality be an equal-opportunity program?
Will the slur be erased from future episodes? One can only hope so. After all, a lie oft-repeated soon becomes truth...
A minor victory was won at the end of this week, as Emperor Murdock and Fox Corporation apologized for their underhanded anti-Polish slur on the "Back to You" sitcom on November 14th.
I am still remiss as to why a public apology -- either by the writer or Mr. Murdock himself -- was not aired before the next episode. This shows a dismissal of those who called Fox on their error, and Murdock's ultimate anti-Polonism.
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1 comment:
Mark,
thank you for posting this blog about the FOX's ani-Polish slur. You show the double standard that is in US media and the reaction when it relates to other minorities. Fox's so called apology can not be considered a full apology until they do the following :
1) Public apology in the mainstream media on the national level in the form of News broadcast in the United States and Poland
2) Apology statement before airing the next “Back to you” episode
3) All Persons responsible for allowing this to be broadcasted, to be sent to sensitivity training
4) Assurance that this kind of demeaning, offensive language will not be included and aired again in any of your programs
5) Removing the content of offending statement from future distributions of this particular episode. (I wonder what can be done with this episode that viewers have recorded on VHS and/or TiVo)
6) Creating a program about Poland’s suffering during World War II that is consistent with the true history with conjunction of World War II survivors and historians like Prof. Nowak
pozdrawiam, Zbig
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