Friday, May 23, 2008

Draw Circle, Bang head here.

So there I was, sitting in front of the computer pressing that oh-so-addictive ‘Stumble’ button.

One of the interests I have set for Stumbleupon (as you can probably guess from my recent posts) is drawing.

I found a rather cool video…followed by just about the dumbest most ridiculous comment I have ever read.

Now, comments on the internet are usually pretty damn idiotic. For example I once saw a comment on an animation that said, and I quote:

“This sucks, you suck, your entire family sucks. Go die in a fire.”

Bit of an overreaction, no?

Anyway, as a long-time citizen of the Internet, my bullshit filter is pretty high. It takes a lot to make me actually sit up and take notice of something…and it takes a hell of a lot to make me react to a user comment. This one almost made me bang my head on my desk for a solid hour.

Ok, the video was a tutorial by a talented artist. The tutorial was about drawing the head and face. So went through the usual steps and towards the end said:

“Remember, these proportions aren’t set in stone. You’ll obviously have to bend them a little to fit your character. For example, women tend to have higher, more defined cheekbones and black people tend to have more pronounced lips and wider noses. Just play around with these basics and you can make your character look any way you want.”

Hmmm, I thought. Good tips.

However, the first commenter didn’t agree with me. The comment said:

“OMG. You are SO RACIST!!! How dare you! We’re all human and we’re all the same! I should report you and have your websight (sic) taken down!!!!!111!!!1!”

Is it just me, or is anyone else getting sick of how touchy people are about race? I mean, when we’ve got to the point where a guy can’t make a valid, accurate statement about different races’ facial features…and for a perfectly good reason… something has gone terribly wrong in our society. He didn’t even say something like “All black people have big lips”, he said “black people tend to have more pronounced lips’.

How much more ‘politically correct’ could the guy be?

Oh, and 20’ll get you 1 than the commenter was white.

I mean, all you have to do is look at a few people. Black people do have more pronounced lips and wider noses. Women do have higher cheekbones. If we want to look into this a little further, Asians have softer and more rounded features than both whites and blacks.

To be honest, I think the thing I hate most is this mantra that ‘we’re all the same’.

Guess what? We’re not all the same. We’re all different. Saying we’re different is only racist when you take our differences and say one is better than the other.

Of course, this commenter’s reaction means that he or she will one day will attempt to draw a black person and basically draw a Caucasian with a very dark tan. I wonder if s/he will see the irony when someone calls her racist for it.

Before I close this post, I’d like to point out that I have in the past been called a racist for daring to call a black person ‘black’ instead of ‘African-American’ or a ‘person of color’, something I have also done in this post.

I do this because, personally, I think assigning a nationality to someone is a little more prejudice than describing the color of their skin.

Let’s just say I’m from England where I had friends who were neither African or American. They were English. Why should I call a guy ‘African-American’ or ‘African-English’ when he was born in England and so was his great-grandparents? As for ‘person of color’, I don’t go in for euphemisms or sugar coated names to make rich white people feel better about themselves.

The sooner everyone stops being so touchy about this shit, the better. Again, these people just don’t see the irony. A bunch of idiotic white people telling everyone what the ‘acceptable’ way to refer to a black person is…Isn’t that racist in itself?

2 comments:

Kelly said...

I typed a really long comment and it crashed. I can't be arsed to do it again.

Suffice to say I agree with you...

OzzyC said...

You're not a racist. You're a misanthrope.