Charlie Hebdo's Biggest Problem Isn't racism-It's Punching Down--Western Society at Its Best & Worst

[KoKo]

Last edited Wed Jan 14, 2015, 12:55 PM - Edit history (2)

Moving away from the important "Freedom of the Press" issue...this is an interesting take on Charlie Hebdo and how it could be interpreted differently from satire. It's a long article and even discusses the "New Yorker" Cover which had Michelle and Barack Obama portrayed as Terrorists that caused much backlash...and how that cover was different from what Charlie Hebdo was doing in the past years.

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Charlie Hebdo's biggest problem isn't racism, it's punching down

Within the French culture war, Charlie Hebdo stands solidly with the privileged majority and against the under-privileged minorities. Yes, sometimes it also criticizes Catholicism, but it is best known for its broadsides against France's most vulnerable populations. Put aside the question of racist intent: the effect of this is to exacerbate a culture of hostility, one in which religion and race are also associated with status and privilege, or lack thereof.

The novelist Saladin Ahmed articulated well why this sort of satire does not exactly have the values-championing effect we want it to:

In a field dominated by privileged voices, it's not enough to say "Mock everyone!" In an unequal world, satire that mocks everyone equally ends up serving the powerful. And in the context of brutal inequality, it is worth at least asking what preexisting injuries we are adding our insults to.

The belief that satire is a courageous art beholden to no one is intoxicating. But satire might be better served by an honest reckoning of whose voices we hear and don't hear, of who we mock and who we don't, and why.


Jacob Canfield put it more simply:
"White men punching down is not a recipe for good satire, and needs to be called out."


This is a culture war with real victims. Fighting on the winning side and against a systemically disadvantaged group, fighting on behalf of the powerful against the weak, does not seem to capture the values that satire is meant to express.


Charlie Hebdo is Western society at its best and worst


So if Charlie Hebdo's cartoons expressed or indulged racist ideas, and if its satire "punched down" in ways that were more regrettable than admirable, then why does it feel so uncomfortable to criticize the magazine?

It's partly because, whatever the magazine's misdeeds, they are so utterly incomparable to the horrific crimes of the terrorists who attacked it that it can feel like a betrayal to even mention them in the same sentence.

But it's also because, with this attack, Charlie Hebdo really has come to symbolize something much larger than the satire embedded with its cartoons: a resolve to maintain freedom of speech even in the face of mortal threats. While free speech is not at the risk of being snuffed out in Western countries over these sorts of attacks, it is an abstract value that is constantly under siege in the world and requires constant defense. The cartoons have become a symbol of that fight.

"Unforgivable acts of slaughter imbue merely rude acts of publication with a glittering nobility," Matthew Yglesias wrote last week. "To blaspheme the Prophet transforms the publication of these cartoons from a pointless act to a courageous and even necessary one."

And yet, raising these cartoons to something much grander does have victims. As is so often the case, those victims are society's weakest and most vulnerable, in this case the Muslim and non-white subjects of Charlie Hebdo's belittling ridicule.

"The elevation of such images to a point of high principle will increase the burdens on those minority groups," as Matt put it. "European Muslims find themselves crushed between the actions of a tiny group of killers and the necessary response of the majority society. Problems will increase for an already put-upon group of people."

The virtues that Charlie Hebdo represents in society � free speech, the right to offend � have been strengthened by this episode. But so have the social ills that Charlie Hebdo indulged and worsened: empowering the majority, marginalizing the weak, and ridiculing those who are different.

Continued (Long Article with Photo's) at:

http://www.vox.com/2015/1/12/7518349/charlie-hebdo-racist

[KoKo]

1. Link is fixed.