Is Bob Piper racist?
Saturday, December 09, 2006

Labour councillor and blogger Bob Piper is in a pickle.

He's published this image on his blog:

















Quite a few people, it seems, were upset by it, and right-wing bloggers in particular have been removing Piper from their blog rolls in protest. This is truly a tiff that could only happen online, and the comment thread on Piper's post is testament to all that is catty and crap about blogging.

But the question remains: Is Bob Piper racist?

He claims not. "If you think this image is designed to attack black people you need to study the art of satire, because it has clearly passed you by. [The image] is designed to show the way in which Cameron trys to adopt a chamelon-like approach to 'get with it' with young people, black people, wimmen, environmentalists in a totally false way." (Author's spelling errors preserved.)

Now, there's a chap called Mark Steven Greenfield, who has studied the racist overtones of minstrel pictures and tries to subvert them in his art.
"In my work I alter the context of the stereotype in order to buffer the viewer's visceral reaction to its grotesqueness. I challenge the viewer to suspend or embrace their emotional reaction long enough to analyze what they are looking at. I acknowledge the viewer's indignation by using text which is sometimes as counter culture as are the images," he says.

What you end up with is this:

















Draw your own conclusions. I know which I prefer.

[Cheers to Praguetory for the spot.]

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posted by Blamerbell @ 9:06 pm,

2 Comments:

At 4:11 am, Blogger Praguetory said...

Bob's ideas are getting tested outside the blogosphere for the first time. The reaction is not pretty. Bob's feelings/credentials etc are probably no longer important to the eventual outcome. I wonder whether Labour spin doctors work out-of-hours? And how long it will be before Bob takes his foot out of his mouth?

 
At 4:43 pm, Blogger Praguetory said...

Given you a sort of link on a recent post. Come over and share your thoughts.

 

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