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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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To my way of thinking, I predict that many positive black representations current today will eventually be seen as racist.

I noticed recently that, at least prior to 2017 (The Problem With Apu), it was absolutely industry standard for people making cartoons not to care too much about voice actors' races. People are trying to enact a taboo today on cross-race voice-acting (at least in the case of less-white characters voiced by more-white actors), but even aside from the moral depravity of the principle in a vacuum, I don't think the people advocating for the taboo understand just how widespread the practice was before (because voice actors are "invisible", at least if they're doing their job right - people typically don't notice when white VAs are playing black cartoon characters, and so on). If all media breaking this rule becomes seen as dirty and worthy of purging, then it'll get a pretty significant chunk of pre-2017 animation.

You can't watch a lot of Robin Williams' comedy now without imagining the ways it probably pisses people off. The guy did a lot of accents and was good at it, and got a lot of (not only white) laughs. In this clip with Martha Stewart you can hear the enthusiastic response to his "brown sugar" riff, and, just like I know ChatGPT's "juniper" voice is modeled after a black woman voice, I can hear the black womenfolk's laughter here.