Why the Onion's Crappy Apology Is Worthless

The satirical site's mea culpa to Quvenzhané Wallis makes it OK to take things even further.

• By: Madison Gray

When I watched Quvenzhané Wallis telling the story of a little girl called Hushpuppy and her adventures living in a poor Bayou area in Beasts of the Southern Wild, I was enchanted by how well she articulated her life and the world around her. I had so much hope that she might be the youngest person ever to take home a golden statuette and wanted to believe that everyone else on the planet shared my sentiment.

The best actress trophy went to Jennifer Lawrence for Silver Linings Playbook, and the pervasive thinking for Quvenzhané was probably something like, "It's OK, Princess, you were still wonderful." But that wasn't the case in the offices of the Onion, the Chicago-based satirical news website. Someone, possibly a social media editor, as yet unnamed, decided to place this on Twitter:

"Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but that Quvenzhané Wallis is kind of a c--t, right?"

The tweet was reportedly taken down an hour after it was posted, but not really. Anyone who follows the Onion on Twitter and everyone who doesn't got wind of this tweet, and it spread across the Web like, well, the smell of bad onions!

The controversy has, at least for half a day -- which is equal to months on the Internet -- became to the Oscars what the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" became to Super Bowl XXXVIII. Nobody's even thinking about Argo or Ben Affleck or red carpets or lengthy, tearful speeches now, and anybody with access to a keyboard is pissed, and rightly so (except for those who try to explain that the joke was aimed at Hollywood itself and not the girl, and make themselves sound fugazi in the process).

"How dare they use that kind of vulgar language when referring to a 9-year-old girl?" "This wasn't funny!" "They've gone too far!" ... And on and on it goes. That's until something else catches people's short attention span.

Onion CEO Steve Hannah, betting on short attention spans, quickly whipped up a mea culpa for the tweet, offering his most humble "we screwed up" plea for forgiveness.

But that's why the Onion's half-assed apology for the tweet, while maybe sincere, isn't enough, and nothing they can do ever will be.

Miss Wallis, you are young and talented and deserve better. All of us at The Onion are deeply sorry.
When you put something out there in the media, good or bad, it's out there and can't be taken back, no matter how sorry you are. Just ask Don Imus. His infamous "nappy-headed hoes" quip was heard and never unheard, because the damage was done, like throwing acid in the face of a girl in Afghanistan who is trying to get an education, or a slave owner raping one of his slaves. It's just that sexist and racist, and I'm not sparing the feelings of anyone at the Onion, since they didn't spare Quvenzhané's.
So while an apology is part and parcel when someone says or does something this thoughtless, it only really pushes the envelope a little further for someone else who believes that in order to be funny someone needs to be offended.
Don't get me wrong -- edgy comedy is funny. Hell, Richard Pryor did it for years, and I'll argue that he's the funniest man of all time. But as raunchy as his language was, he never directly aimed it at anyone's child. He was smart enough to know that what he said had to be carefully engineered not only for maximum impact, but to make the social statements that he intended.

So perhaps that's the takeaway from all this: When you try to be funny, be adhesive. What came out of the Onion was the opposite. In fact it was like dress socks on a bamboo floor: It caused the people at the Onion to slip and fall on their unfunny asses.
This is why, as many n-words and M-Fs as Pryor spewed, he never once had to apologize for them, because there was nothing to apologize for. It was just hot, sticky truth.

Madison Gray is a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based writer 

What Is It About Skin Color?

A top expert on the evolution of our pigmentation explains how we all became so color-struck. By: Nina G. Jablonski | Posted: February 6, 2013 at 12:55 AM

 

Digital Vision/Thinkstock

- Skin color is one of our most important biological traits. Its many shades evolved as humans moved far and wide into regions with different intensities of sunlight. Skin color is also a trait that has come to have deep cultural meanings -- developed over many centuries -- that influence our social interactions and societies in profound and complex ways.

We notice one another's skin because we are visually oriented animals, but there is no genetically programmed bias to favor one color over another. Over time, however, we have developed beliefs and biases about skin color that have been transmitted over decades and centuries and across vast oceans and continents.

The first scientific classification of humans, published by Carl Linnaeus in 1735, was simple and separated people into four varieties by skin color and continent. Later, Linnaeus not only added more physical traits to his descriptions but also changed them to include information that he had surmised about temperament. Europeans were white and "sanguine," Asians were brown and "melancholic," Native Americans were red and "choleric" and Africans were black and "phlegmatic."

This analysis was the first authoritative classification that combined physical traits with folk beliefs about dispositions and character. The folk beliefs had little to do with fact or observation but were mostly just fables -- racist pronouncements that were personal and emotional expressions of, at best, discomfort and, mostly, prejudice. From this point on, debasing associations of physical appearance with temperament and culture became commonplace and were considered scientific. Racism had found its intellectual foundation.

The first person to formally define "races" was the noted philosopher Immanuel Kant, who in 1785 classified people into four fixed races, which were arrayed in a hierarchy according to color and talent. Kant had scant personal knowledge of human diversity but opined freely about the tastes and finer feelings of groups about which he knew nothing. For Kant and his many followers, the rank-ordering of races by skin color and character created a self-evident order of nature that implied that light-colored races were superior and destined to be served by the innately inferior, darker-colored ones.

Despite the strong objections of many of his contemporaries, Kant's ideas about a fixed natural hierarchy of human races, graded in value from light to dark, gained tremendous support because they reinforced popular misconceptions about dark skin being more than a physical trait. The preference for light over dark -- strictly speaking, white over black -- was derived from premedieval associations of white with purity and virtue, and of black with impurity and evil.

The light-dark polarity was extended to the human sphere with the establishment of the slave trade and hereditary slavery in the Americas. Negative associations of dark skin and human worth were now profitable. As the transatlantic slave trade became more lucrative, the moral polarity of skin colors was accentuated to the extent that light and dark were respectively associated with human and animal, creating one of the most sinister and long-lived patterns of unfairness that the world has ever known.

The notion that the superiority of the white race was part of the natural order was deviously reinforced by the rise of modern "scientific" racism in the late 19th century. Certain "stocks" of humanity were considered to be more highly evolved and civilized because of their color, superior "fitness" and "adaptations." "Racial souls" were seen as mapping onto unique suites of physical traits, creating crazy ideas of ranked human types and civilizations. The association of color with character and the consequent ranking of people according to color stands as humanity's most momentous logical fallacy.

Today one of the biggest concerns is the reinvention of clinical concepts of race, based on inaccurate generalizations about the susceptibility of people to certain disease risks. If clinical constituencies redefine and repackage the races as real biological entities, then we face a new era of scientific racism no less frightening than the first. Clinical authorities hold a sanctified place in American society and are capable of creating a new reality of labeled races that will be widely believed and promulgated because it is "for the good."

The idea that race is a social construct is becoming more widespread, but that doesn't diminish scientific racism as a real concept in the minds of many people who want to believe in it. Nor does it lessen the lived experience of racism today. Racist beliefs, anchored in the scientific racism of a bygone era, persist today but are mostly hidden because it is socially and politically unacceptable to air them. 

Indeed, the bankrupt concept of fixed and immutable human "races" -- packages of physical and behavioral traits -- ranked by color has led to the creation of potent and persistent racial stereotypes. When these stereotypes are propagated widely by revered authorities and transmitted faithfully from person to person and generation to generation, they can last and last.

"Races" are not just labels, because they can determine fate. Race labels that are associated with negative or positive depictions and narratives can have powerful effects by planting in people's minds the idea that their own group is superior, inferior, smarter, stupider, stronger or weaker than another.

Stereotypes are not realities, and the behaviors they engender are not inevitabilities. Human attitudes are constantly subject to revision through experience and, more importantly, through conscious choice. Biases can be modified and eradicated on the basis of experience and motivation, and stereotypes can be changed when people are motivated to think about someone, in any way, as a member of their own group. Educating our children and youths about the evolution of skin color, the history of race and the dangers of stereotyping may have remarkable and positive results for humanity.

Nina G. Jablonski is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. This essay is based on her new book, Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color.