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“Judge me for my own merits, or lack of them, but do not look upon me as a mere appendage to this great general or that great scholar, this star that shines at the court of France or that famed author. I am in my own right a whole person, responsible to myself alone for all that I am, all that I say, all that I do. It may be that there are metaphysicians and philosophers whose learning is greater than mine, although I have not met them. Yet, they are but frail humans, too, and have their faults; so, when I add the sum total of my graces, I confess I am inferior to no one.”
“No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking.”
Patterns of Culture. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1934.
Last saturday, Danilo Gentili, one of the guys who run ‘CQC’, a very well-known tv show in Brazil, made a polemic joke on Twitter. He said:
“King Kong, um macaco que, depois que vai para a cidade e fica famoso, pega uma loira. Quem ele acha que é? Jogador de futebol?”
Translating it, it would be something like:
“King Kong, a monkey that, after going to the city and getting famous, hits on* a blonde girl. Who does he think he is? A soccer player?”
*There’s a pun here in Portuguese. ‘Pegar’, which means ‘to get’, is also a slang for ‘date’.
Since it’s not a Portuguese language’s exclusive privilege to make racist jokes using the word ‘monkey’, you may well have already understood what happened. Off course, in a country where brown and black people make up for 50% of the population – statistically; although I think it might be way more -, and considering that Gentili has approximately 15.000 followers, there were A LOT of people feeling offended about what he said.
Since I don’t follow him on Twitter, I didn’t know about this mess until today, when someone sent me an article about it. At first, I didn’t understand. No, I didn’t see the racism in his joke. And I personally think he sincerely didn’t meant that as racist.
Later in that night he posted a tweet saying he wasn’t referring to one’s color, but to the fact that blondes always date famous soccer players for money – a typical steriotyped relationship in Brazil.
I see a – pardon my words – fucking lot of trouble in here. In his statement, in what people understood and in the way he tried to explain himself. First, no, I don’t think that it was racist. At least, at first, I got what he intended to say. And I think it would have gone like that if nobody told me about the problem. Maybe I don’t have a very good sense for this kind of thing, but I really think it wasn’t supposed to go that way.
Then there was the people reacting pretty disgusted. Ok. That’s good. You should always reject prejudice. The thing is, those are the same people that see no trouble on calling gays ‘veados’ (something like ‘fag’, but still felt as pretty offensive), or using the word ‘elephant’ to refer to fat people, as Gentili correctly pointed out on his blog today (27-07-09 – it doesn’t allow direct links, sorry). There’s a HUGE taboo in Brazil about racism. It’s a crime – and Gentili will be investigated – and people will always tell you how horrible that is. But they think it’s ok to be homophobes or bullies when it comes to anything else.
And last, but not least – and this is where I have to say I’m disappointed, though not shocked, about what Gentilli said – there was him talking about ‘the blondes’. On trying to get himself out of the racist accusations, he ended up acting in a terribly misogynistic way. Yes, it’s true that there are many women after good marriages with famous soccer players – and whoever is under the spotlight -, but saying that as a joke does not help combating such a behaviour. As associating monkeys with humans wouldn’t help on the fight against racism either.
I think Gentili has given a quite satisfactory explanation on his blog, and I’m looking forward to see what the Justice will conclude of all of this, but I really think we should calm down our nerves for now – or try to act on everything else that has been left behind.
Marie Curie. Credits: Wikipedia.
Marie Curie was a French (born Polish) physicist and chemist. Along with her husband, Pierre Curie, and Henry Becquerel, both physicists, she received her first Nobel Prize in Physics, in 1903, “in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel.” She would receive her second Nobel Prize eight years later, in 1911, this time in Chemistry, “in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element.”
In 1894, she was denied a place in Kraków University because she was a woman.
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