Thin ice, but you'll get my point.

Over the Christmas period myself and my lovely wife watched a film of Richard Pryor's standup.

It was very funny.

A portion of his show is dedicated to the differences between black people and white people, along the lines of White people being a bit uptight and black people being not so uptight.

Now, this is all fine (and very, very funny) but how many white performers would get away with similar humour? Someone like Jimmy Carr is happy to have bash at jokes about religion, politics or taboos like incest but how many does he really tell about race?

It has its roots in something very "white". SHAME.

Classic Shame material is The Black And White Minstrel Show - here's something shameful:

Look at this! A guy colouring himself as a different race and performing demeaning and pathetic stereotyped behaviours of that race in order to get cheap laughs. Sick and wrong.










But look at this:


How is this any different? This film grossed more than 8o million dollars and is JUST as racist as the Black And White Minstrel Show. Was that even an issue? Nah.

It's also total arse as movie go, but even if it was genius on Blazing Saddles or Airplane! levels it would still be just as racist.

But why don't we moan about it?

Oh yeah - SHAME!

We "white folk" did things that were as bad once, true. That doesn't mean other races have the right to be annoyed about them AND THEN DO THE SAME THINGS!

If you do the same thing then you lose any moral high ground you had on the issue!

I mean, if someone I love is killed in a car accident, that doesn't give me the right to come and run over the son of the other driver because they did it first!

Sigh. Rant over.

A