Sunday, October 25, 2009

The New Minstrel Show-Latino Brown Face

The other day I watched CNN's new show "Latino in America". I don't know what I even think about it-I do think it had a superficial coverage of the Latina/o community, but hell, I sort of could really care less.

One of my followers on twitter is the Latino comedian Mike Robles, star and creator of Qué locos. Over the past couple of days, he has been promoting a video of himself criticizing CNN's show and giving Soledad O'Brien a hard time. He claims that the show that she created doesn't show any positive role models of Latinos and that the show exploited Latinos.

So Mike spammed everyone left and right with his video link, including sending direct messages to pass it on to our people, etc. I retweeted his video, but then I asked him a question. I asked him something to the effect of, "Are you also going to hold Latino comedians, like George Lopez, accountable for also perpetuating negative stereotypes about the latina/o community?" Just making sure, since he was definitely sending tweets to George Lopez and retweeting stuff that George Lopez was writing.

He of course never answered. He sure did answer tons of tweets of people kissing his ass. I'm not surprised that he would spam everyone and then not respond to a question about being a big fat hypocrite. Because really, if you are going to criticize CNN for exploiting Latina/os, then we might as well have a productive conversation about the role of Latino comedians in this matter.

Now I have never seen Mike Robles perform a comedy act, and I really knew nothing about him until he retweeted something that I said.

As far as I'm concerned though, many Latino comedians, including George Lopez, are nothing more than chumps up on a stage, perpetuating the stereotypes of the stupid, ignorant lazy-ass-mexican myth. They are our very own present day brown face dumb asses performing a fucking minstrel show for everyone's entertainment.

You don't know what a minstrel show is? Well, basically it was a show where whites dressed up and painted themselves with a black face. They performed on stage like they were a bunch of idiots. Then there came a time when even some of the blacks were painting black paint on their face and acting like an idiot. You know-the "Oh, golly, gee" crap while scratching their head.

Here's a video of a reenactment of a minstrel show. It takes about a minute for these dumb asses to put the paint on their face.


As far as I'm concerned, what many Latino comedians do is tantamount to a fucking minstrel show. Our very own brown face entertainment. We've come a long way, baby. Now the whites don't have play the stupid latino part like they did in West Side story, now the latinos just stand up there and do it themselves!

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