Meet the New Outrage, Same As the Old
As long as I can remember, white people have been getting very angry about the pop culture black adults have created for other grown-ups.
I was twelve years old when NWA’s Straight Outta Compton was released in 1988. So I got to experience firsthand the performative outrage of adult moralists shocked, yes shocked, that their children, their precious, precious, lily-white children, might have their innocence robbed by exposure to the potty mouths and filthy minds of those deplorable gangsta rappers.
It sure can feel like the furious Culture War that we are engaged in now has always been with us. The names and times might change but the themes and racial/racist overtones of the reactionary rage remain the same.
We are currently in the midst of a culture-wide freakout over the popularity and ubiquity of Megh the Stallion and Cardi B’s anthemic smash “WAP” (as I’m sure I do not need to remind you, WAP is an acronym for Wet Ass Pussy).
“WAP” has driven conservatives and moralists like Ben Shapiro into fits of white-hot (emphasis on white) rage for a while now, ever since it dropped on August 7th, 2020. Nothing pisses off right-wing busybodies quite like women being aggressively sexual, particularly if the woman expressing sexual desire happens to be a woman of color.
But ever since the Seuss Estate removed six books with racist and offensive imagery from active circulation and Disney added disclaimers to some old episodes of The Muppets, haters enraged by the existence and success of a song about female pleasure have felt the need to juxtapose what they see as the unforgivable, Nazi-like censorship of innocent, harmless kiddie fare like The Cat in the Hat and Kermit the Frog with the equally unforgivable non-censorship and non-cancellation of a song they find morally offensive.
In a frenzy of false equivalency, these angry souls inquire why something they consider not only non-offensive but downright wholesome, like the books of Dr. Seuss, can be “cancelled” and subjected to banning and book burnings while something they consider unbelievably offensive, like a song in which women of color discuss their sexual appetites, is not only not banned, canceled or censored but extremely popular?
When a Facebook friend posted the popular meme angrily/disingenuously asking what kind a world we live in where Cat in the Hat is censored for being offensive yet “WAP” wins “Song of the Year” (it doesn’t matter from whom, or if that’s even true) one of the comments came from a woman who shared her rage and demanded consistency in what is removed from circulation and what is not.
Since the Seuss Estate were the folks who pulled the Seuss books for having offensive and racist imagery I asked the woman if she felt, for the sake of consistency, that the Seuss estate should take the unusual step of trying to censor, ban or cancel something in an entirely different medium for an entirely different audience released nearly three decades after Dr. Seuss’ death.
From the way these folks talk about “WAP” and Dr. Seuss you would think that every time a child or parent tries to read such “beloved” Seuss titles as The Cat's Quizzer, McElligot's Pool and On Beyond Zebra! they are instead to watch an uncensored video for “WAP” by SJWs.
If these folks weren’t complaining about “WAP” they would be complaining about something else. There’s always going to be something that white people can point to as the end of civilization as we know it, and it usually involves non-white people expressing ideas that are considered too sexual or violent or profane.
The culture war will never end because there’s just too much to be gained on both sides. So we will continue to feign outrage over every new transgression without ever bothering to look inward as to why we get so angry so often and what this rage says about us and how we see the world around us and race in particular.
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