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Re: Mercedes new livery and drivers suits
« Reply #14 on: July 08, 2020, 11:16:18 AM »
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My generation and the one coming through are also more aware of the number of people who actually get hurt by many of the things that are called "jokes".
I know this topic is a minefield and nothing to do with F1. Unless you have ever been the minority at the end of the 'joke' I guess you have no idea of how hurtful it might be. For that reason I fully support better diversity and understanding. My problem is that the protests are having the negative effect of actually causing racism! Many people have interpreted 'Black Lives Matter' as meaning 'Black Lives Matter more than any other colour' - of course that wasn't the intention but it is what is happening. Then there is the ludicrous attack on history. Slavery was abhorrent but it is history, it happened, it has made the World what it is today - nobody knows how the World would be if it hadn't happened and none of it was the fault of today's generation. How far back do we allow things to offend us - the Vikings raped and pillaged the indigenous English; the Moors wiped out whole civilisations; the Romans enslaved every nation they conquered ; etc. It's History and can't be rewritten!
I am more than happy with the F1 approach of WeRaceAsOne - it hopefully stands for equality irrespective of Gender, Race or Ability.
So, the deal with statues/hero worship of flawed figures is complicated, of course.
In the USA many of the statues being torn down were nominally built as memorials, but that's not what their intention was. When the Confederate States lost, they were embarrassed by their defeat. They never celebrated it, they never had a 'culture' or 'heritage' of celebrating the people that lead to them being humiliated. What the statues represented was power. The generation that had grown up with the humiliation of treating slaves and their descendants as people could not bear it, and they're the ones who started putting up statues, saying it wasn't always like this. Once upon a time 'brave' men stood up for oppression, and they longed for more brave men to stand up to the oppression of not being allowed to oppress anyone.
Now, once anger at these particular monuments grew, people started to wonder about statues/worship of other people who thought nothing of oppressing human beings. Statues of Washington, John A MacDonald (our own Canadian hero/monster) and Columbus seem like they're fair game, even though they were never put up to commemorate the awful things they did, but rather the great things they did. It's certainly dicier to try to decide WHY a statue was put up, but it was an open secret that the Confederate Statues were basically burning crosses to let the former slaves know that it could happen again. From there, it's easy to pile on and show how progressive you are.
Columbus himself is interesting, as he was turned into a hero to FIGHT racism. When Italians were immigrating to America they were seen as worthless. They pointed out that an Italian had discovered America, and gosh darn it, if you want to celebrate America, you HAD to celebrate Italians. (They even got Washington Irving, the famous writer, to create Columbus' back story.) Up until then, no one cared about Columbus, and if you said he was a slave trading demon, anyone would have agreed.
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