You Coon Too?
In the span of about 45 minutes, I watched Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi appear in a commercial on WWE Smackdown (She will be competing in a match at Wrestlemania) and I watched Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino on Comedy Central roasting Donald Trump. There isn’t a question mark large enough to capture the state of befuddle that I was in. It appears that there is no end to the hurricane that is Jersey Shore and it makes one thing very clear.
America loves a coon.
Last year, I wrote a piece on Flava Flav, defending his right to use his celebrity to earn an income for himself and his family. As a result, many people in the black community labeled Flav as a coon. This feeling is derived from a long history of blacks embarrassing themselves for the entertainment of their white audiences. The concept of cooning however, isn’t unique to blacks. When Jersey Shore quickly became the most successful show in MTV history, the Italian community complained that the show only re-enforced negative stereotypes. Guess how many black people aided in the protest of the show? About as many as Italians that demonstrated against The Flava of Love. This makes another thing clear.
Cooning is okay as long as it’s not your people.
You show me a demographic, and I’ll show you a coon. Cooning is everywhere and it’s incredibly popular. No, not every gay man is prancing around wearing pink and values fashion over football but when Bravo created a show with 5 flamboyant gay men showing a straight man how to dress, the ratings went through the roof. In fact the most flamboyant of the bunch, the self-proclaimed fairy Carson Kressley, was easily the most successful as he’s headlined several more shows since.
There’s a thin line between cooning and representing one’s own culture. George Lopez is the most popular Latino on television and the first to have his own late night show. However, due to his style of comedy, he’s just as likely to be viewed as a pioneer as he is a coon . The truth is, we need cooning because things would be incredibly boring without it. The problem is we’ve created such racial tension that we can’t see past our stereotypes to appreciate the entertainment. In order to move forward as a country, we have to be able to laugh at ourselves and learn to not take things too seriously. Because if you think that Flav shouldn’t be on television but are one of the 6 million people that tune in to watch “The Situation”…
Then you love a coon too.
great observation. we love embarrassing characters as long as they're not embarrassing us. so true.
ReplyDeleteDave Chappelle was the master of this. He understood it, took advantage of it, and made fun of all racial stereotypes. God I miss him.
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