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Just a thought, stemming from
I'd still feel a bit uncomfortable about sailing up to Dr Dre or Ice Cube over drinks and snacks with the salutation 'Yo, my n*****! Blood!' Although not as uncomfortable as I imagine I'd feel shortly afterwards.
It looks like what Takei's going for here is an extremely (for Hardaway) uncomfortable overfamiliarity -it is, to state the fucking obvious a very personal message of erotic physical desire, couched in terms and a tone that would not be out of place in a private conversation between lovers (for example). That is to say, without attempting to speak for Hardaway too much, one can imagine a situation where a hypothetical black female lover lauds his various physical attributes using the same words as Takei (including, let's say, the controversial adjective), and this is not problematic. In much the same way as Dr Dre might be somewhat affronted by a septugenarian white Englishwoman addressing him as 'my n*****! Blood', but the problem would probably not arise if the same term of address were used by a gentleman of his long acquaintance. In a similar way (although not the same way, because racism/=homophobia &c) that I don't see a problem in finding my female partner's attraction to other women appealing, because I am also In The Queers, wheras for the straight man on the Clapham Omnibus, a similar appreciation might be a little...queasy. Which is pretty close to how Takei is trying to make Hardaway feel, I'd imagine - by using intimate speech-patterns towards someone who will find this mode of address extremely offensive and alarming. However, the difficulty is that physicalised erotic address towards someone in public, of a different race to yourself, with whom you are not intimate is very likely to cross over into exotic fetishisation of Other traits if you're not very careful. Which I don't think Takei necessarily was. Then again, the problem is that it's not at all clear at what point a genuine appreciation for someone's (say) skin, crosses over into exoticisation. That is to say, I'm pretty sure Takei isn't intending to be racist, but may well have crossed over, via attempting uncomfortably intimate speech patterns, into saying racist things.
(After all that incoherency, a brief question: is exoticisation of others racial characteristics always tied by necessity into colonial oppression sort of thing? I can't help thinking of lad's-mag treatment of Swedish women, for example) |
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