Racist humour is humour though. It’s not meant to offend.

Humour about race can be funny.

Racist humour is RACIST!

The banana throwing does seem clearly racist as white people haven’t had bananas thrown at them. I only said it’s not guaranteed. But I admit, it’s very likely. I’m not giving that one the benefit of the doubt any more (mostly because I’ve looked into it further and noticed it only happens to black people).

Do you finally get why this was so frustrating to me? Something tells me you don’t. You just kept ignoring the facts of the situation over and over and over. You kept telling me my “view” was wrong without even bothering to fully know what you’re arguing against. Think of all the time wasted just because you couldn’t be bothered to inform yourself about something has been clearly defined countless times. This should not have taken you so long.

Again, I know blacks and apes have been associated together with racist intent. Just that this isn’t an example of such a case, for the reasons implied by the questions in that last paragraph.

But that’s just your opinion, which doesn’t seem to fit with the majority opinion. Like I said, you act like he did this in a vacuum. Why would he do it? Why would the other media entities post the racist things they did? If your only argument is that you don’t think someone would do something if they feared repercussions then that argument fails in my opinion. If he were truly naive about the situation I think he would have fought back more. Innocent people usually don’t just accept being convicted in the public court so quietly. And you don’t need to do a deep-dive into the history of racist tropes to figure this one out.

The idea that I’m deprioritizing the experiences of someone who’s black is ridiculous here.

But you’ve been doing that to me this entire time. It’s why it’s so frustrating to me. It’s why I suspected you were just trolling me. And it’s why I began to think that maybe you just had an emotional disconnect that explained your way of thinking. If that were the case then I could believe that your intent this entire time was not simply to piss me off.

Thanks for finally reading the article about positive intent. You can pick apart the examples used in the article but I believe the overall concept to be valid and very relevant to our discussion. It was kind of eerie that it popped up in my suggested reading list right after we started.

I feel like we’ll go nowhere though, since your idea of what’s hateful and my idea of what’s hateful seem to differ wildly.

I find it odd that two people’s definition of what’s hateful would differ “wildly.” I’m sure we would agree on the vast majority of things that are considered to be hateful. Obviously, what hurts you may not hurt me. But your dismissal of other people’s feelings based on their experiences can actually be more hurtful than the events they are trying to relate to you. And I can’t look at certain things said or done as simply being jokes or even worse, complements. It seems like you simply took all these things as solitary incidents with no consideration of the environment in which they happened. You ignored the historical context as well as the personal experience I continually tried to express to you. You insisted I wasn’t considering your view but you kept missing the point that I’ve considered this view since I was child and have plenty of reasons to not simple accept it or tenaciously argue against in some cases.

It’s good for you that you have a way to deal with racism that allows you to be happy. It still seems like you haven’t experienced anything really hateful that cannot simply be separated from the incidents you laugh off as jokes. I hope someday you can understand why a lot of us cannot and don’t continue to add more pain by simply brushing them off as the rantings of someone not as enlightened as you.

Good luck.