I guess I haven’t put in my two cents about whether or not Star Wars EP2 was a deliberate stab at Mexicans. Probably because it strikes me as nonsensical. Is this the news of today? George Lucas has a pointy white-hooded robe draped over his director’s chair? Well, I’ll be. We never thought of this back when we were buying our Tie fighter models back in ’77.
What you’re looking at is traditionally called, “Baiting Whitey”. White supremacists do a different thing in their own literature—what they do is called, “Scaring Whitey”. In other words, if you’re a white person in American, you can rightfully expect a wide-ranging assortment of opportunists to vie for your attention. Their interest is political. They either want to get a hostile reaction out of you (which will consolidate their fellow minority supporters around the belief: yes, whites are fundamentally angry creatures who hate everyone, therefore, buy radical magazines and music even though it bores you to tears); or—in the case of supremacists—they want you to be so frightened of Mexicans, Blacks, Asians, Jews and Arabs you will make the supremacists look less isolated in their paranoia (not to mention the fact you will might also buy their ill-spelled supremacist magazines and their pathetic music).
I’m a white guy on the outside. Inside, it gets a little harder to explain.
A while ago, on Newgrounds, some person submitted a Flash about “4 AM News” (the joke was, nobody watches 4 AM news, so the newscasters have to fight for material). Now, on this guy’s site (his webpage) he was selling a bunch of Native American masks. I looked at his masks, and they didn’t particularly interest me, so I went elsewhere. What does interest me, however, is the fact that when I was a kid I looked up Native American masks in the Encyclopedia and—those masks in the Encyclopedia (which were considerably uglier Native American masks than the ones on his website; I remember these were used for private ceremonies)—scared me to death. Right after I saw them, I tried showing that picture to my babysitter and she laughed at me. She didn’t see them the way I did. The way I saw them, they were familiar. Now, you tell me why a bunch of traditional Native American masks are hauntingly familiar to 5-year-old white boy whose mom buys all her furnishings out of a Harriet Carter catalogue.
You tell me if you know.
