When White People Lecture Other People On What Isn't Racist Or Racialized

 

My last friend who frequents Eschaton tells me that Duncan didn't rouse his lazy ass to ban Simps, Simps left when he was critisized for being such an example of old, white, male, middle-class privilege that he didn't acknowledge the inherent racism of the old Ernie Kovacs Nairobi Trio sketch WHICH IS BLATANTLY AND OBVIOUSLY PRESENTING AN OLDER, WIDELY USED RACIST SHOW BIZ STEREOTYPE OF BLACK MUSICIANS AS APES THAT GOES BACK BEFORE JAZZ AND INTO THE MINSTREL PERIOD and, indeed, well back into white, European racism.  

It's so thoroughly embedded by racism into the thinking of, not only white people but in human culture that it even appears, unplanned and unconsidered in the algorithms that computer scientists come up with.

Back in 2015, software engineer Jacky Alciné pointed out that the image recognition algorithms in Google Photos were classifying his black friends as “gorillas.” Google said it was “appalled” at the mistake, apologized to Alciné, and promised to fix the problem. But, as a new report from Wired shows, nearly three years on and Google hasn’t really fixed anything. The company has simply blocked its image recognition algorithms from identifying gorillas altogether — preferring, presumably, to limit the service rather than risk another miscategorization.

Wired says it performed a number of tests on Google Photos’ algorithm, uploading tens of thousands of pictures of various primates to the service. Baboons, gibbons, and marmosets were all correctly identified, but gorillas and chimpanzees were not. The publication also found that Google had restricted its AI recognition in other racial categories. Searching for “black man” or “black woman,” for example, only returned pictures of people in black and white, sorted by gender but not race.

I don't think there's much of a question that Ernie Kovacs may well have imbibed the same thing, perhaps unwittingly the images of racism so deeply embedded in American as well as European culture,  when he heard the piece of crap song "Solfeggio" and immediately linked it to a parody of a racist music-box image of Black musicians as Gorillas, it is even less of a surprise when his wife and the other all-white members of his company (and, according to Simps in our earlier go round on it, the white Jack Lemmon)* didn't see any problems with it.  I wish I could find out if there were any contemporary Black people who commented on it because I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't have any problem seeing it for what it was at the time.  

And, really, calling it the "Nairobi Trio" is rather a dead giveaway of the racist nature of it. 

It is rather presumptuous for a white guy to declare that a bunch of white show-biz guys in one of the most racist periods of reaction against the great Civil Rights Movement, dressing up and personifying a very old, racist stereotype taken directly from the past and their very present, present were not, in fact, doing what they were obviously doing.  I'm glad to live in a time when, especially younger people fed up with that long history are no longer willing to just skip over that and to call it what it is, no longer impressed with the admitted though very much exaggerated genius of Ernie Kovacs and those who participated in it with him.  

Oddly, enough, one of the most interesting confirmations of the racism of using ape and, specifically gorilla images that has been ubiquitious was the Brit-American use of exactly the same images used against Black People against the Irish in the 19th and very early 20th century.  But that ended, though the same bias is certainly present in Brit comedy and attitudes today . I wouldn't expect that most Irish Americans would worry about that kind of bigotry regaining its former ubiquity though note what David Pilgrim, a Black sociologist who started the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia has to say about how his assumptions of the diminution of racism even a few years ago has been proved to be wrong by the racist rise of Trump and the Republican-fascist part. 

I saw several images in his collection that are reflected in the Nairobi Trio skit. 

*  You can hear Edie Adams talk about how not only Lemmon but Milton Berle and Tony Curtis put on the gorilla suits to participate in it all without seeing any problem in impersonating a well-practiced racist stereotype.  I'd like to know if any Black People ever worked for Kovacs and his team, I strongly doubt it.  If any did I'd love to hear them on this topic.