Political correctness gone too far (shocking, right?)

[Dannichu]

Thing is, there's a continuum here; there definitely are things that it makes no sense for people to be offended over. To me, that includes this ad and the "Yellow Line", but even assuming that's just my inability to understand it, we can move further along the continuum and eventually we'll come to things you will all agree are just not offensive and to take them that way is an overreaction. Is Pokémon Yellow Version racist? Yellow crayons? Is there actually some fundamental quality the "Yellow Line" has that they don't that makes it offensive and not them?

Pokemon Yellow, as with the Yellow Line, isn't inherently racist in any way. It becomes racist when it is applied to a group of people to whom "yellow" is a derogatory term.

I don't assume we live in a world where everyone is equal and it is understood that any view to the contrary is a joke or otherwise not serious. I know that it's not true. But it never will be if people keep saying that their names are off-limit because of their race.

I totally missed this before. Are you implying that prejudice, racism, etc. exists because of the minority in question? Those black slaves probably wouldn't have shipped themselves off to work on the sugar plantations. Women don't actively seek to be raped by men. Gays don't ask to be beaten up, and I don't think it's any group asking for equality that's stopping them from, y'know, actually achieving it.

Jokes about groups of people aren't the same. A joke about a white person (I can't even think of a joke where the face someone is white is the punchline) wouldn't have the same impact as one about a racial minority because whites don't have a long history of oppression that, to an extent, still exists in the present day.

I think Colton's point was that we should have the freedom to make jokes without being called discriminatory or being harassed.

You've said this before. I said:
"Nobody is out to say you can't make jokes about minorities. However -and this is very important, so listen carefully because you don't seem to be getting it - if you do so, you should be expected to be called out on it."

opal said:
Of course people should be able to. But they can't, because discrimination exists. You seem to assume we live in a world where everyone is equal and it is understood that any view to the contrary is a joke or otherwise not serious. This simply isn't true.

Zhorken said:
Liberty: sure, you can make fun of people. People can call you out on it! Nobody's tying you down by telling you not to make annoying jokes about minorities.

Pick the response you like the best.

That was a typo, I meant to write "Personal opinion of the victimised on its own is unreliable." Hence, also from of that paragraph, "The persecuted demonises the persecutor. They're a biased source."

Naturally, using focus groups for research works just fine; you get the total sum of opinions from Then an unbiased third party draws their own conclusions from what they have to see.

I'm confused here. Who, exactly, do you think a researcher investigating, hypothetically, what it's like to be a victim of discrimination, would have in their focus groups, if not victims of discrimination?
A group of women who have suffered domestic violence would all "demonise" their abusive partners. Would this invalidate the research? No.

At least, unless the researcher decided while writing up their study, "these women might not have the best clarity on the issue. As individuals caught in the eye of the storm, they can't really tell me how strong the storm was or how much damaged it caused. I'll find someone else, who hasn't been affected by domestic violence, who can give me a better opinion on what it's like to be a victim of domestic violence."

Again, you say that I don't see that the joke is offensive Hispanic people, while quoting the exact line in which I say that I do.

Apologies for not getting this; I just don't understand how you can say that, yes, it is offensive to a marginalised group within society and then keep defending its usage.
Saying "I don't get why it's offensive; jokes like this are okay!" is one (rather short-sighted, self-centred) view, but "This is offensive; jokes like this are okay!" is... I'm not actually sure.

And those are all very valid reasons to be mad at somebody making a joke about your name but they're not making the joke about the name. The way you and ... are talking, it seems like the fact that the name is Hispanic automatically attaches anything that is done with the name to the entire Hispanic community.

The intent of the joke is irrelevant; the punchline of the joke is a person unable to pronounce a Hispanic name. If the world was that which opal mentioned before, where everyone was equal, then the joke would be completely harmless and nonoffensive (as it would be if the guy in the ad couldn't pronounce "Joneses"), but it's not.

Again, if it were a perfect society, a slight on one Hispanic name wouldn't be a slight on the Hispanic community, but it's not. We've talked before about representation of minorities in the media, and representation of Hispanic people as a whole is very rare (telling the world, whether they mean to or not, that "Hispanics don't exist/matter!"), so a single Hispanic person on television suddenly becomes, say, 20% of all Hispanic representation, and shapes people around the world's views of Hispanic people. Yes, people should be intelligent enough to be able to separate one Hispanic person on TV from an entire race living out their lives, but that simply isn't true.

So according to you, laughing at a joke in which mispronunciation of a name by some delivery is the same as laughing at the delivery guy.

Laughing at a joke in which the mispronunciation of a Hispanic name is the punchline is the same as laughing at Hispanic names.

If a comedian gets on stage and tells these jokes, will three Argentinian immigrants get refused service in a shop the next day because of it? [...] If there was an ad where someone had trouble pronouncing "Wójcik", would more of the Polish immigrants in America be denied jobs than normal? Will some employer see the ad then walk into a work a while later and demand his Polish employees change their names to simplify his life? If the name had used Adamicz instead of Hernandez, would it cause more racism towards Polish people?

Obviously, a single incident of what may-or-may-not-be-racism isn't going to suddenly cause a surge mass unemployment among minorities overnight, your examples are ridiculous.
Racist jokes have an impact, even if it's hard to see when you're looking at a single, isolated example. Any single example will sound like an exaggeration or crying wolf when presented in the absence of anything else, particularly when the joke is not explicitly racist and it can be argued that anyone getting offended about it is simply "taking it the wrong way". But if you take that joke and add the weight of all other jokes that point out the "hilarity" of Hispanic names, and add on all the incidents of what could be racism that happen to Hispanic people on a daily basis and anybody should be able to see how the weight of all that could affect someone's life?

By that logic, laughing at some mispronounce the word "aristocracy" is the same as laughing at the word "aristocracy". Or laughing at someone pluralising "barracks" as "barrackses" or even "barracks...es...es" is the same as openly mocking the word "barracks".

Highlighting the "strangeness" of words that have no sociological context have no sociological ramifications.
The word "barracks" is sociologically neutral, so saying it wrongly would have no effect other than making you look a bit silly. The word "aristocracy" does have a lot of sociological weight, but mispronouncing it is not offensive in any way because the aristocracy have never suffered because their class and names are "foreign-sounding". The name "Hernandez", as mentioned above, when said on television, often becomes representative of Hispanics everywhere, and thus butchering its pronunciation in an attempt at a joke, affects many people.

No, I don't think I've addressed everything you've mentioned, but I've gotten a little bored with this discussion and have a whole host of other things I'd rather be doing. The lack of empathy for other people in this discussion is making me feel a little ill, and since you're clearly not going to change(/open) your mind, this exercise has grown, it seems to me, a little pointless. It's been fun, but pretty much everything in my above message is repetition of stuff I've said before, and I just can't be bothered anymore.