I'm in the middle of tearing apart the arguments of a chick on Tumblr trying to argue that the "Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals, Or Whatever" is racist regardless of whether or not it's satire.
Her most profound misunderstanding of reality is that Stephen Colbert making that statement is a character. He's a fictional construct who exists only to mock right-wing pundits and stupid people by essentially being a living, subtle strawman of their antics. So subtle, in fact, that some have even taken him seriously and especially stupid right-wingers have even agreed with his satirical points as if he was a real person stating his real opinion. Stephen Colbert The Character saying something racist is literally no different from the villain in a book saying something racist. He's a caricature.
But then you look at exactly where the joke came from. The owner of the Washington Redskins tried to respond to the constant negative publicity of his team's name being arguably a racial slur by founding the Washington Redskins Foundation for Original Americans. Stephen Colbert's joke about the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals, Or Whatever was calling out Dan Snyder for exactly what you may notice: he's trying to cover his ass about a somewhat racist sports team name by making a foundation to assist them with the same racial slur in its name. It's essentially like someone creating the "Niggers For Freedom Foundation for the Advancement of African-Americans". It's so ironically bad that the guy must not even understand what he's doing wrong.
But this Tumblrina (and almost nobody supporting her; the post only had something like 13 notes at last check and I was two of them) seems to think that even having a fictional character make a racist joke as a way of painting racism in a bad light is bad. I brought up A Modest Proposal and she tried to defend herself with "Well, obviously I didn't think Swift wanted people to eat Irish babies."
Then why the fuck do you think Stephen Colbert is a racist jerk?
