Blackface is, by it's nature, a cheap smear. It's a vulgar misrepresentation done for laughs by cynical people who honestly don't care who they hurt.
The humor in Big Bang Theory is deliberately hurtful and degrading. The show is horrifically misogynistic, it marginalizes (often even glamorizes) bullying and hazing, it's cavalier towards foreigners and mental illness, it makes cheap jokes about poverty and torture, pretty sure it goes through every base trope from the 90s and tries to revitalize them. It's a vile show on a whole host of levels.
And the show legitimizes all of it by slapping a Marvel/Star Wars/LotR pastiche over the top.
So maybe "Nerd Blackface" is imprecise. Nerdom isn't being used to condemn their horrible behavior, but condone it. "It's ok for Nerds to behave like human slim because they're intrinsically better than us" is the message being delivered. So perhaps "Whiteface" is the more appropriate turn of phrase.
Blackface is, by it’s nature, a cheap smear. It’s a vulgar misrepresentation done for laughs by cynical people who honestly don’t care who they hurt.
I need to object to this characterization because it ignores historical context. Blackface was a way to denigrate and exploit a marginalized and enslaved people. Nerds aren't on that fucking level, they never were, they never will be. You can say what you like about it, but there's no -face happening here. Especially not with all of the nerd performers who have leaned into it. Nerd isn't a fucking ethnicity.
Nerds aren’t on that fucking level, they never were, they never will be.
It's not a matter of levels. It's a matter of the core assumption that some people deserve to be dehumanized.
BBT tends to dehumanize women, first and foremost, and couch the behavior in the Nerd context. They also love to vilify and denigrate foreigners. But they still have plenty of self-loathing for their own protagonists, portraying them as gross, emotionless, and otherwise less-than-human.
That BBT doesn't go to sufficient extremes (I'd argue its humor is plenty extremist) by declaring the objects of ridicule irredeemable or completely inhuman fails to improve the base assumptions that some deplorable behavior is acceptable if performed by a man-child with an Ivy League diploma.
Appropriating superficial physical characteristics and deplorable personas to create a derogatory stereotype.
BBT is all about applying Nerd Pastiche to actors and having them behave like sociopaths.
The big difference between BBT and the Jim Crow character is that the Nerds are painted as lovably naive goofballs who just need to be "fixed" by their normie friends. BBT ends up being an eight season long My Fair Lady. Where as the default assumption in Minstrel Shows is that Jim Crow can never be redeemed no matter how hard naive white liberals try.
my greatest shame is that at one point (very very long ago) I unironically made that argument about the show
I mean, Big Bang Theory is to MIT grad students as The Green Book is to working class Italians.
It... seriously is "nerd blackface". Whether they deserve the derision is another question entirely.
To call it “nerd blackface” is to seriously undercut and cheapen the term blackface.
Blackface is, by it's nature, a cheap smear. It's a vulgar misrepresentation done for laughs by cynical people who honestly don't care who they hurt.
The humor in Big Bang Theory is deliberately hurtful and degrading. The show is horrifically misogynistic, it marginalizes (often even glamorizes) bullying and hazing, it's cavalier towards foreigners and mental illness, it makes cheap jokes about poverty and torture, pretty sure it goes through every base trope from the 90s and tries to revitalize them. It's a vile show on a whole host of levels.
And the show legitimizes all of it by slapping a Marvel/Star Wars/LotR pastiche over the top.
So maybe "Nerd Blackface" is imprecise. Nerdom isn't being used to condemn their horrible behavior, but condone it. "It's ok for Nerds to behave like human slim because they're intrinsically better than us" is the message being delivered. So perhaps "Whiteface" is the more appropriate turn of phrase.
I need to object to this characterization because it ignores historical context. Blackface was a way to denigrate and exploit a marginalized and enslaved people. Nerds aren't on that fucking level, they never were, they never will be. You can say what you like about it, but there's no -face happening here. Especially not with all of the nerd performers who have leaned into it. Nerd isn't a fucking ethnicity.
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It's not a matter of levels. It's a matter of the core assumption that some people deserve to be dehumanized.
BBT tends to dehumanize women, first and foremost, and couch the behavior in the Nerd context. They also love to vilify and denigrate foreigners. But they still have plenty of self-loathing for their own protagonists, portraying them as gross, emotionless, and otherwise less-than-human.
That BBT doesn't go to sufficient extremes (I'd argue its humor is plenty extremist) by declaring the objects of ridicule irredeemable or completely inhuman fails to improve the base assumptions that some deplorable behavior is acceptable if performed by a man-child with an Ivy League diploma.
I'm talking only about the use of the term blackface. I don't think it's an accurate description and it's tone deaf to centuries of racism at best.
Appropriating superficial physical characteristics and deplorable personas to create a derogatory stereotype.
BBT is all about applying Nerd Pastiche to actors and having them behave like sociopaths.
The big difference between BBT and the Jim Crow character is that the Nerds are painted as lovably naive goofballs who just need to be "fixed" by their normie friends. BBT ends up being an eight season long My Fair Lady. Where as the default assumption in Minstrel Shows is that Jim Crow can never be redeemed no matter how hard naive white liberals try.
This isn't what blackface is, so I don't know if you're trying to explain how this doesn't apply or it does.
It's literally putting grease paint, fake lips, and kinky hair on your head.
Which means nothing without the context of the behavior and the culture from which it springs and what it is intended to achieve.
It's a bad term to invoke, man, just drop the parallel and your argument can stand fine on its own.
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The correct term is "fake gamer girl"
I'm a radical centrist and have always hated both that show and people who called it nerd blackface.