It does! Often when someone is in a position of privilege, they will look at the past as "before the x marginalized group messed everything up", believing The Transes didn't exist in their day, or that autism was invented in 2015 when John Autism wanted an excuse to be lazy, or that a black cashier is diversity being shoved down their throat.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are all good things, but it's relatively common for (privileged, conservative) people to consider it the downfall of society.
I just have to hard disagree with this. Technology is getting better, the crushing weight of capitalism and its exploitative practices are making many many things worse over the past ~100 years that these memes usually cover.
In 1925:
- Women had only recently been given the right to vote in the US, with many other countries not providing equal voting rights yet.
- Many parts of the US were still segregated, with discrimination against black people being de facto allowed everywhere. Literacy tests and other similar devices were used to disenfranchise black people at the voting booth as well.
- Sodomy and homosexuality were actual crimes in many western nations. These laws were enforced.
- The concept of being transgender was not yet formed in the public eye, but would end up facing legal discrimination in the coming decades.
- The economy was rigged to blow at the expense of the working and middle class, you can't even say the economy was better.
- Many diseases and disorders were far harder to treat. Insulin had only been extracted and purified a few years earlier and was just starting to become a valid treatment for diabetes, for instance.
- Also, treatment for mental health was still in its infancy and was bad. It would go through a lot of bad stuff over the coming decades (like lobotomies!) before getting better.
Have certain things gotten worse over the past ten or so years? Maybe. But over the scale of multiple decades, things have gotten a lot better for everyone who is a racial minority, a gender minority, a sexual minority, disabled, mentally ill...
Women had only recently been given the right to vote in the US, with many other countries not providing equal voting rights yet.
We still live with a gendered pay gap, and we have a reformist movement actively seeking to take away no-fault divorce. Sexism has made significant steps forward compared to the rest of your examples, but still has a very long way to go. Partial credit for present times
Many parts of the US were still segregated, with discrimination against black people being de facto allowed everywhere. Literacy tests and other similar devices were used to disenfranchise black people at the voting booth as well.
Apart from segregation in public facilities, we have made approximately zero progress in this front. Communities still fall into the redlines drawn at the "end" of segregation, voter disenfranchisement has gone nowhere and come back with a vengeance. Institutional racism has been barely acknowledged, approximately zero progress has been made toward rectifying it. The fact that the law has changed to allow us to pat ourselves and turn a blind eye has barely changed the reality on the ground. No credit.
Sodomy and homosexuality were actual crimes in many western nations. These laws were enforced.
Homophobia is still pervasive through most of both the USA and the world. There are safe havens and areas where equality has been nearly attained, but overall this problem has made minimal progress. Partial credit.
The concept of being transgender was not yet formed in the public eye, but would end up facing legal discrimination in the coming decades.
Those discriminations have gone nowhere, and we are genuinely staring down the barrel of trans people being put into camps in America. Negative credit.
The economy was rigged to blow at the expense of the working and middle class, you can't even say the economy was better.
Specifically in the '20s okay, yea, wealth distribution was similarly concentrated to the top 10% and 1% of Americans, but I said over the past 100 years, and I'm assuming you used the disingenuous approach of taking the snapshot because you know how distribution was significantly changed over the next 2 decades and settled into a well distributed form until the policies of the 70s began allowing concentration to start ticking up again and has been supercharged since then to recover the rates previously seen in the 1920s. Negative credit again.
Many diseases and disorders were far harder to treat. Insulin had only been extracted and purified a few years earlier and was just starting to become a valid treatment for diabetes, for instance.
Inapplicable, this is technology.
Also, treatment for mental health was still in its infancy and was bad. It would go through a lot of bad stuff over the coming decades (like lobotomies!) before getting better.
I could argue that this is also technology, but I'll give you the grace on that. Our understanding of mental health is improving in the academic sense, but the application of those psychological learnings has been predominately in the field of advertisement, not mental health. The advancement in this understanding SHOULD be good for society, but because of the corrupting force of capitalism, it has actually been a net negative on our mental health as a whole. Negative credit again.
We are floundering under the boot of infinite growth at the expanse of the human condition. I'd love to hear any further counterpoints you have, though.
Agree to disagree, I suppose. While I agree that things are not great today and have gotten worse over the past 10 years, I still think they've gotten better. The fact that it's reactionaries trying to drag us back is evidence of how it got better, at least to my mind. A lot of that is also heavily influenced by an American perspective - things are much better for trans people in other western countries, for instance. Stuff like the net benefit of the application of psychology is rather subjective too.
There's still a very long way to go, but that doesn't mean that there hasn't been some amount of progress. There could be more, but there's still some.
Choosing the Roaring 20s for your comparison is a choice. Being wedged between World Wars and the Great Depression definitely impacts things. The 60s-90s is what people are usually comparing to the modern day. I didn't live through those years, but I also think that they likely compare favorably to the 2000s-2030s. Improvements in some areas and regressions in others. Ultimately which era is best won't have an objective answer because it depends on which metrics are used and how they are prioritized.
I'm not the one who said 100 years ago though. That was the comment I replied to. A lot of those things have still gotten better since the 60s-90s though.
Fair point. I wonder what things he thinks have gotten better since 1925. It's hard to think of any off the top of my head. Medicine, machinery, food, working conditions, and more have all improved since then. I also wonder why people are downvoting my other comment. I don't find any part of controversial.
Maybe for the average straight white man, who was able to have a decent life. But for the rest? Black people, women, queer people, etc. They simply didn't matter, that's why in every fantasy of the past they show you a white man with a traditional family and an obedient wife.
And even for them, things weren't amazing. Even if we only consider technology and science, things did get better and our lives are easier in many ways.
See my other response, many things have, very clearly, not been as solved as some of us like to believe. It does feel nice to pretend we've solved bigotry though.
Its actually very much real, but probably not what most people think when they hear of the job name.
Its essentially a specialist that makes sure depiction of certain groups is accurate and respectful. You know, like a person to tell someone like JK Rowling not to name her Chinese character "Cho Chang"
Oh I usually hear those people called "sensitivity readers" and I believe theyre usually brought on for projects involving minorities so people can make sure they dont accidentally say something fucked up lol. But thay term might be for books specifically
Tbf sometimes its just not being culturally aware.
Niche example but when American Girl dolls made their Native American doll Kaya they made a brand new non-teeth-smiling head mould for her because they did research into her tribe (Nimiipuu/Nez Perce) with tribal advisors and historians for her books and wanted her doll to reflect that tribes cultural custom that baring teeth to someone is rude or aggressive.
If they hadn't included that it wouldn't have been "fucked up" per se or racist, but it would show a lack of care. The fact they consulted with the actual members of the tribe was great.
Nobody forced them to make that doll and yea consulting the people you want to sell something is a very likely smart move in figuring out what they want and deem appropiate.
? I never said people forced them to make the doll? I was just saying it as an example that sensitivity readers arent just to prevent straight up racism but also to ensure cultural accuracy
that tribes cultural custom that baring teeth to someone is rude or aggressive.
This isn't just cultural accuracy. It's basic, mutual respect driven by good faith. It takes effort to understand other cultures.
So I guess the answer that I found to my original question is : Most people are unhinged bigots and do not bother to expand their horizon. They also believe to be the center of the universe.
Because writing can reveal a lot about a person's prejudices and moral compass
Like a story where the foregin protagonist gose to a far awey land where people are "unclean" and "savages" and he "teachs" them the proper way of living or the infamous cases of writers barely disguised fetish
Those people aren't required to write about those topics. They do it out of their own free will. It's them reflecting their own thoughts into the world because they want them to be seen and convince others about their self proclaimed authenticity.
The subconscious thoughts which put native inhabitants of a country on the same level as wild beasts (that do not deserve respect or human rights because of this reason). There's 0 effort involved in not writing about this.
The Simpsons writers had to be told that fggt was too extreme of a word for Homer to say in a story about him learning to accept a gay character. Not every writer knows enough about every culture to include elements of that culture in a story without accidentally doing something offensive.
Thanks, I’m glad that it’s that. I heard that their job as also to hire preferably minorities to the job as well but I think it’s on company, not them hopefully
JK Rowling named a lot of characters silly named. Prof Sprout the Herbology teacher, Sirius the dog, Luna the Loony, Dudley the dull, Malfoy the malicious, Rita the writer, and that's just off the top of my head.
Yup. It's just basically continuing her naming theme. There's a lot of things wrong with her, namely her opinions on transpeople, but her naming theme isn't really one of them.
But that's exactly the problem. Her Chinese character is named to illustrate nothing about her character except that she's Chinese. Basically, JK seems to have wanted to include a Chinese character and thought that being Chinese was a sufficiently expansive character trait to base the character on, which is what people have a problem with. Such an obvious thematic name based around her Chineseness also underscores that "Cho Chang" is really not very far from "Ching Chong" or other racist pseudo-Chineseisms.
Through my training/a little film & theatre experience: it's nowhere near commonplace, but it is becoming a teensy bit more common to have a "diversity" person in charge of certain aspects of DEI on set/in venue. It's also being talked about a lot more in training, in my experience at least.
By no means talking as if I'm super widely travelled though!
The community has decided that this IS an antimeme!
Orchard
https://preview.redd.it/2jvnxizx9d6g1.jpeg?width=1242&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1d336e465b1e8d3fd60b5116adc5b5367c42236a
Interesting, I'm used to antimemes turning boomer humor into zoomer humor but this one appears to have gone the other way
conversion of zoomer humor into refined zoomer humor
you have to have a lot of reclaimed zoomer humor to make a refined tho, wonder how many hats oop had to grind down for this
One of the rare "then vs now" memes where the "now" is better
Now is better 90% of the time but people just like rose glasses i guess
I think it’s most often because people are bigots, but maybe that’s just me
Doesn’t relate at all but whatever
It does! Often when someone is in a position of privilege, they will look at the past as "before the x marginalized group messed everything up", believing The Transes didn't exist in their day, or that autism was invented in 2015 when John Autism wanted an excuse to be lazy, or that a black cashier is diversity being shoved down their throat.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are all good things, but it's relatively common for (privileged, conservative) people to consider it the downfall of society.
I just have to hard disagree with this. Technology is getting better, the crushing weight of capitalism and its exploitative practices are making many many things worse over the past ~100 years that these memes usually cover.
In 1925:
- Women had only recently been given the right to vote in the US, with many other countries not providing equal voting rights yet.
- Many parts of the US were still segregated, with discrimination against black people being de facto allowed everywhere. Literacy tests and other similar devices were used to disenfranchise black people at the voting booth as well.
- Sodomy and homosexuality were actual crimes in many western nations. These laws were enforced.
- The concept of being transgender was not yet formed in the public eye, but would end up facing legal discrimination in the coming decades.
- The economy was rigged to blow at the expense of the working and middle class, you can't even say the economy was better.
- Many diseases and disorders were far harder to treat. Insulin had only been extracted and purified a few years earlier and was just starting to become a valid treatment for diabetes, for instance.
- Also, treatment for mental health was still in its infancy and was bad. It would go through a lot of bad stuff over the coming decades (like lobotomies!) before getting better.
Have certain things gotten worse over the past ten or so years? Maybe. But over the scale of multiple decades, things have gotten a lot better for everyone who is a racial minority, a gender minority, a sexual minority, disabled, mentally ill...
We still live with a gendered pay gap, and we have a reformist movement actively seeking to take away no-fault divorce. Sexism has made significant steps forward compared to the rest of your examples, but still has a very long way to go. Partial credit for present times
Apart from segregation in public facilities, we have made approximately zero progress in this front. Communities still fall into the redlines drawn at the "end" of segregation, voter disenfranchisement has gone nowhere and come back with a vengeance. Institutional racism has been barely acknowledged, approximately zero progress has been made toward rectifying it. The fact that the law has changed to allow us to pat ourselves and turn a blind eye has barely changed the reality on the ground. No credit.
Homophobia is still pervasive through most of both the USA and the world. There are safe havens and areas where equality has been nearly attained, but overall this problem has made minimal progress. Partial credit.
Those discriminations have gone nowhere, and we are genuinely staring down the barrel of trans people being put into camps in America. Negative credit.
Specifically in the '20s okay, yea, wealth distribution was similarly concentrated to the top 10% and 1% of Americans, but I said over the past 100 years, and I'm assuming you used the disingenuous approach of taking the snapshot because you know how distribution was significantly changed over the next 2 decades and settled into a well distributed form until the policies of the 70s began allowing concentration to start ticking up again and has been supercharged since then to recover the rates previously seen in the 1920s. Negative credit again.
Inapplicable, this is technology.
I could argue that this is also technology, but I'll give you the grace on that. Our understanding of mental health is improving in the academic sense, but the application of those psychological learnings has been predominately in the field of advertisement, not mental health. The advancement in this understanding SHOULD be good for society, but because of the corrupting force of capitalism, it has actually been a net negative on our mental health as a whole. Negative credit again.
We are floundering under the boot of infinite growth at the expanse of the human condition. I'd love to hear any further counterpoints you have, though.
Agree to disagree, I suppose. While I agree that things are not great today and have gotten worse over the past 10 years, I still think they've gotten better. The fact that it's reactionaries trying to drag us back is evidence of how it got better, at least to my mind. A lot of that is also heavily influenced by an American perspective - things are much better for trans people in other western countries, for instance. Stuff like the net benefit of the application of psychology is rather subjective too.
There's still a very long way to go, but that doesn't mean that there hasn't been some amount of progress. There could be more, but there's still some.
Choosing the Roaring 20s for your comparison is a choice. Being wedged between World Wars and the Great Depression definitely impacts things. The 60s-90s is what people are usually comparing to the modern day. I didn't live through those years, but I also think that they likely compare favorably to the 2000s-2030s. Improvements in some areas and regressions in others. Ultimately which era is best won't have an objective answer because it depends on which metrics are used and how they are prioritized.
I'm not the one who said 100 years ago though. That was the comment I replied to. A lot of those things have still gotten better since the 60s-90s though.
Fair point. I wonder what things he thinks have gotten better since 1925. It's hard to think of any off the top of my head. Medicine, machinery, food, working conditions, and more have all improved since then. I also wonder why people are downvoting my other comment. I don't find any part of controversial.
Maybe for the average straight white man, who was able to have a decent life. But for the rest? Black people, women, queer people, etc. They simply didn't matter, that's why in every fantasy of the past they show you a white man with a traditional family and an obedient wife.
And even for them, things weren't amazing. Even if we only consider technology and science, things did get better and our lives are easier in many ways.
See my other response, many things have, very clearly, not been as solved as some of us like to believe. It does feel nice to pretend we've solved bigotry though.
executive has no business interferring with creative work
diversity specialist is not a real job
It is if they're getting paid for it
And there isn't much more of a punchline. Just "past bad" instead of "present bad."
I'm pretty sure I have seen this meme as an answer to a bigot "present bad" meme, so the punchline is just mocking the other person.
Meme is already outdated.
Should be AI prompt engineer 4 times
Asbestos supplier would have been a fire job. As in my lungs are on fire from always inhaling asbestos particles
Ironic because asbestos is fireproof iirc
Is diversity specialist actual thing? Even so, nice to see how many jobs are there
Definitely not lol
Its actually very much real, but probably not what most people think when they hear of the job name.
Its essentially a specialist that makes sure depiction of certain groups is accurate and respectful. You know, like a person to tell someone like JK Rowling not to name her Chinese character "Cho Chang"
Oh I usually hear those people called "sensitivity readers" and I believe theyre usually brought on for projects involving minorities so people can make sure they dont accidentally say something fucked up lol. But thay term might be for books specifically
Why is it so difficult for people not to say something outrageously racist or discriminating? It literally takes 0 effort to not say anything.
Tbf sometimes its just not being culturally aware.
Niche example but when American Girl dolls made their Native American doll Kaya they made a brand new non-teeth-smiling head mould for her because they did research into her tribe (Nimiipuu/Nez Perce) with tribal advisors and historians for her books and wanted her doll to reflect that tribes cultural custom that baring teeth to someone is rude or aggressive.
If they hadn't included that it wouldn't have been "fucked up" per se or racist, but it would show a lack of care. The fact they consulted with the actual members of the tribe was great.
Nobody forced them to make that doll and yea consulting the people you want to sell something is a very likely smart move in figuring out what they want and deem appropiate.
? I never said people forced them to make the doll? I was just saying it as an example that sensitivity readers arent just to prevent straight up racism but also to ensure cultural accuracy
This isn't just cultural accuracy. It's basic, mutual respect driven by good faith. It takes effort to understand other cultures.
So I guess the answer that I found to my original question is : Most people are unhinged bigots and do not bother to expand their horizon. They also believe to be the center of the universe.
Because writing can reveal a lot about a person's prejudices and moral compass
Like a story where the foregin protagonist gose to a far awey land where people are "unclean" and "savages" and he "teachs" them the proper way of living or the infamous cases of writers barely disguised fetish
Those people aren't required to write about those topics. They do it out of their own free will. It's them reflecting their own thoughts into the world because they want them to be seen and convince others about their self proclaimed authenticity.
Its their subconscious thoughts, that's why they don't realize what they have written is problematic
The subconscious thoughts which put native inhabitants of a country on the same level as wild beasts (that do not deserve respect or human rights because of this reason). There's 0 effort involved in not writing about this.
i love subconscious bias. it's the perfect ghost hunting idealism to ensure grifters are employed forever. and people gobble it up.
The Simpsons writers had to be told that fggt was too extreme of a word for Homer to say in a story about him learning to accept a gay character. Not every writer knows enough about every culture to include elements of that culture in a story without accidentally doing something offensive.
Thanks, I’m glad that it’s that. I heard that their job as also to hire preferably minorities to the job as well but I think it’s on company, not them hopefully
Or the black character "Shacklebolt"
it's exactly what I would think it does lol
I assumed it was the person responsible for what the right calls wokeness :P
That's just an editor
JK Rowling named a lot of characters silly named. Prof Sprout the Herbology teacher, Sirius the dog, Luna the Loony, Dudley the dull, Malfoy the malicious, Rita the writer, and that's just off the top of my head.
Why is that name the one that gets picked on?
Follow your own line of thinking here. All the names are alliterative or allusive of the characters' primary or defining trait. Cho Chang the Chinese.
Yup. It's just basically continuing her naming theme. There's a lot of things wrong with her, namely her opinions on transpeople, but her naming theme isn't really one of them.
But that's exactly the problem. Her Chinese character is named to illustrate nothing about her character except that she's Chinese. Basically, JK seems to have wanted to include a Chinese character and thought that being Chinese was a sufficiently expansive character trait to base the character on, which is what people have a problem with. Such an obvious thematic name based around her Chineseness also underscores that "Cho Chang" is really not very far from "Ching Chong" or other racist pseudo-Chineseisms.
I mean, there's the Irish character, Seamus Finnigan and his only thing is that he got exploded one time.
Not every character has room to be fleshed out.
Because ching chong is a literal slur bro, it's not that complicated
And that's not her name.
Chang is a common Chinese last name, so is Cho. It's like naming an American Jackson Smith.
Like who gives a shit?
cho is a korean name
It's a job, private companies use them for the tax benefits and state agencies to give jobs to party members. https://www.infojobs.net/madrid/especialista-diversidad-igualdad-empresarial-con-certificado-discapacidad-h-m-d/of-id127ff0698476ebfe770048946b5a0
Through my training/a little film & theatre experience: it's nowhere near commonplace, but it is becoming a teensy bit more common to have a "diversity" person in charge of certain aspects of DEI on set/in venue. It's also being talked about a lot more in training, in my experience at least.
By no means talking as if I'm super widely travelled though!
To be fair, in the industry now, the executive producer could also probably get the pedophile label.
can someone give me a different version where its now vs future instead and the future one looks unhinged
I'm pretty sure that kind of directors still exist to this day
the OG is almost an antimeme itself.
https://preview.redd.it/nzvgovyahd6g1.jpeg?width=1220&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a8aa2304a8ff3d254020425f9dfc680255b1ca65
this would've been the real antimeme
Aren't the jobs from the past still present in this present of ours?
depends, not many 2d animated movies nowadays
https://preview.redd.it/rn6tm45zce6g1.jpeg?width=480&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3d3b2a0de44801c41939d6e334c3dac261d54248