The Simpsons Mr. Smithers Race question.

[SaskGuy]

My god, am I the only one who has never watched the Simpsons?

In the '90s, it always felt so weird when you'd encounter someone who doesn't watch the show... usually it was because they were goody-goodies who thought it was vulgar. Now, a lot of people don't watch it for a variety of reasons.

 

[Taz]

I don't think I could laugh at a show of I didn't think someone was offended by it.

 

[JohnnyAnger]

Again both an unrealistic and an unfair expectation of satire.

Homer's voice is moronically dense and nasal. Marge's voice is daft and dippy. Milhouse speaks with a stopped up nose and is a mouth breather. Smithers speaks with a flat nasality that is monotone and deadpan. Doug Mclure speaks glibly as do several others TV personas on the show. Burns speaks with a snake-like lisp and lilt. Ned Flanders speaks with an idiotic goody-goody cheer that is exaggerated. Thelma and Zelda speak with cracked, smoker's old whoreish inflections. The scchool principle has a speech pattern to make him sound anal retentive and full of anger and frustration.

The list goes on and on and on. The speech inflections of Indians speaking English often IS sing-song and improperly inflected, with rising tones at the ends of declarative sentences. Apu is first generation immigrant and working class at that. Portraying Apu thus only makes him a caricature, but no more racist that to make every white character similarly degraded by making EVERYONE on the show sound stupid, up to and including the sympathetic characters like Lisa and Marge.

Singling out Apu as some sort of outrageous racist depiction is using a microscope to try to read a map. Zoom out. None of the characters are painted fairly. ALL of the characters are pretty much two-dimensional depictions of tropes, including the Indian shopkeeper in America.

He behaves in a mercenary mercantile manner, as MANY immigrant shopowners do, of whatever origin. And guess what? Indian cinema uses some of the most egregious stereotypical depictions of any cinema anywhere. Suggesting that somehow The Simpsons is a standout or condemnation-worthy is just an inaccurate focus on a detail that is not emblematic.

It's never too late to have an unhappy childhood.

Look the thing is, the only time I have ever heard anyone do a voice like that was when they were being racist to Indians. Maybe because the community in America is so much smaller you haven't seen and heard rampant racism towards people from the sub-continent, but basically its white people doing that voice.

The other issue is, he was the only representation of a person from the region on TV in the states at the time (its changed now that people like Aziz Ansari, Mindy Kaling, Kunal Nayyar) and that is kind of what made it worse + the only other cultural representation of Indians at the time were the monkey brain eating guys in Indiana Jones. It was him from Indian kids growing up in the states and the UK - and they got shit for it.

If you heard a white guy doing an Apu voice in public, would you think "oh thats a funny satire on an Indian voice"? Or like me, would you think it was some crazy racist National Front guy who's hobbies include smashing up the 'Paki shop'.

 

[JohnnyAnger]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/20/the-simpsons-apu-racist_n_3956603.html

Even Hank Azaria realises now the character was a misstep in the show.

 

[NotHardUp1]

If you heard a white guy doing an Apu voice in public, would you think "oh thats a funny satire on an Indian voice"? Or like me, would you think it was some crazy racist National Front guy who's hobbies include smashing up the 'Paki shop'.

Different ethnicities have arrived with different results on these shores. Whereas the most common pattern is for there to be some mass migration like during the Irish famine, a few groups just don't arrive in significant numbers. Indians and Pakistanis are both in that latter category.

The, about the time the Simpsons began, India and Pakistan both began gradually exporting nurses, doctors, and engineers. Those professional ranks gave Americans yet another biased view of those lands. Regardless of the endless news stories of filth, squalor, extreme poverty, religious strife, gang rape, etc., we still see and know professionals here who are received and treated completely as equals.

The sing-song voice is more of an amusing speech pattern that we encounter, so replicating it doesn't really become a superiority thing as much as it is a cultural difference noted. It also goes for that distinctive head wobble that Indians do when they emphasize their reaction to something. It is imitated sometimes here, but not as any putdown really.

This also flies in the face of the notion that racism is always color-based. Indians, like several Far Eastern ethnicities, enjoy higher status in many communities here due to their reputation for excellence and brilliance in the sciences.

 

[luckynumbah7]

If you heard a white guy doing an Apu voice in public, would you think "oh thats a funny satire on an Indian voice"? Or like me, would you think it was some crazy racist National Front guy who's hobbies include smashing up the 'Paki shop'.

I suspect that depends on where you're located. If I heard what I notice is a white guy with an indian accent, it's probably my roommate explaining that his Spanish teacher spoke with an Indian accent and Spanish inflection and as such, passed it right down to his Spanish learning students. 2 accents outta one mouth when the man isn't either of them is something to see.

(After a certain timespan of 'married life', at this point my brain tunes in to make sure info isn't new and then I just let him gently prattle on. It's easier that way, and he does something similar. The accent is part of his 'school stories' list headed under 'benign'.

 

[Taralen]

You have the right. You also have the right to make yourself look a fool about it. You're not getting any traction. It's strange that no one is aligning with your pique about it.

You're not even getting the usual suspects like Kane.

Sit in the corner and pout, but you haven't demonstrated even malice by the creators making the decision. It's your interpretation of their motives.

The Simpsons is not oppressive, is not lily white, does not portray black figures any more disrespectfully than the others. Your suggestion that it somehow hurt or deprived you or blacks in general is just silly. You watched it all these years, but now you're sure you've been cheated out of 40 acres and a mule.

TV execs do what is commercially viable. It's not about keeping you down.

Sour grapes, and you haven't proven anything except your intent to be unhappy no matter what it takes.

Why you have to bring Kane into it? Just because he's gay and black like myself, doesn't mean we always have to agree and doesn't mean we think alike. I think that's where the issue is. I'm going to assume you're not black, and I know that you're not. So that's probably already a fraction of the issue, is you can't really relate to the issue in that way. I mean you can generalise as we are all LGBT and we are all in the same fight, but you probably don't have any idea what it's like to be black and gay.

And Kane and myself aren't the only ones that bring up these issues on how the LGBT community in the media is whitewashed. It's a big issue and just because you don't see it is, doesn't mean that it isn't.

Second, you are right in the regard that I don't know for sure the exact reason Smithers character changed races. But I'm fairly sure that it was done out of fear of what the audience thought, whether there were homophobic/racist elements in play or not. Where you are wrong is where I don't have the right to bring discussion or dialogue about it.

For example whites are allowed to wear their natural hair at work, but when blacks wear cornrows or afros, dreds to work, they are fired and told that's against the rules. There are racial undertones towards that, as they seem black natural hair doesn't give a good image to their company. Smithers being black, didn't have a good image towards the show. That's racist, everyone should be equal and if everyone looked the same, gosh the world would look so boring and dull wouldn't it?

I was never really a big Simpsons fan. It was just one of those things every family watched whether or liked it or not. Similar to Family Guy and King of the Hill. Whether you watched it or not, someone in your family did and you were forced to watch it. Which is why it would have been nice if they kept him black to showcase that.

TV exces do what is commercially viable, but we as the audience have a big say in it.

Looking was cancelled because it was a show about the gay lifestyle, and all the men where white, or white hispanic, and the black and asian guy were gone by the second episode. So the way the audience feels has a big impact on the show.

That's why Childish Gabino voiced Miles Morales, the black Spiderman in the Ultimate Spiderman Cartoon on Disney Channel because people kept bitching about no black spiderman.

With all due respect, please sit down I don't know you from Adam and likewise, so don't throw personal attacks at me, when I'm not doing the same towards you.

 

[Taralen]

Yes. How could I forget this one. Yes.

 

[Charon]

Plus how many black gay characters are there animated or live action? None.

The Boondocks.

 

[Taralen]

The Boondocks.

What? To me if anything, the Boondocks is the complete opposite, has many homophobic undertones.

Hell one of the catchphrases on the show, the boys say "N**** you gay." etc.

Boondocks is an alright show. I don't care for it, but the art is nice.

 

[Taralen]

...................