Nice, diverse, liberal Minnesota hired a black man to play Santa at the Mall of America, and some people lost their goddamned minds. The Strib has closed their comments, they got so bad, but our local CBS station still has them up. A sampling:
stgeorgeschapel
Get used to these kinds of shenaigans! Over the past year and a half, I have met thousands of Trump supporters! They are the LEAST “racist” and MOST postive people you could know. They want what is best for ALL Americans, including a whole lot of black supporters. These are the ANGRY Hillary / Soros supporters who are doing all they can to undermine Trump, so that Hillary the horrid can run against him in 4 years. There is NO END to her ambition. She wll run until she is DEAD!
“Shenanigans”? What’s so awful about hiring a black man to play Santa? And of course this is all a conspiracy by Hillary Clinton to undermine Trump. You know, sometimes a mall Santa is just a mall Santa.
Tony Johnson
Problem is, society today, as a whole, is uneducated. If you were educated you would know that Santa clause was based on a monk named St. Nicholas who was, now get this…… CAUCASIAN! I don’t care how “color blind” you think you are, that fact will never change.
The ‘historical’ St Nicholas was a man born in Asia Minor in the 3rd century AD. If you’re going to get upset about historicity, complain about the red-suited rosy-cheeked fat man who lives at the North Pole.
What color are the elves supposed to be?
Victor Edwards
I clicked on the story fully expecting that they picked a Somali to play Santa. That would be fitting for Minnesota. Have a radical muslim who hates America and the western world play Santa. Give him a gun and some knives under his red suit and when the little Christian children come sit in his lap, he can cut their throats.
Somehow, this guy transformed a mall Santa into a child-slaughtering Radical Muslim, all in his head.
John Oakman
Oooooooooh, now I can die knowing “dat Santa bees black”. What BS.
Wouldn’t be a racist roll call without someone doing dialect.
Eileen Finnin Hargrove
Is he also transgender???
Or someone bringing gender into it.
Vox Veritas
Next = One-legged, female Santa with facial piercings.
We got all the stereotypes.
Peter Morgan
Stupid. Incredibly stupid. Santa is WHITE. BOYCOTT Mall of America. Maybe they should change their name to MALL of RAGHEAD LAND.
Please do boycott all these places that treat brown people as human. It’s one way for me to get a racist-free experience.
It’s all just downhill from here.
Barry Sorretoa
FUKIN DISGUSTING
NIGERS ARE DESTROYING the NATION
EXTERMINATE the NIGER RACE
SAVE HUMANS from the MONGREL APES
Laquisha Reynolds
I hope every self respecting White parent does not take their children to this atrocity.Santa Claus was a German character from centuries ago when blacks were eating each other in Africa…this imitation of traditional White characters from TV and movies to historical figures such as HAMILTON is a cancer that must be stopped .Blacks have very very few characters that would be worthy of being replaced with Whites but if MLK were played by a White person ..blacks would try to kill him.
Yeah, everyone knows Santa is supposed to be a white positive role model.
I need to take a shower now.
Americans are an awful, horrible people, as they keep demonstrating to me.
Wow, lookit all the Megyn Kelly fans speaking out!
You think it’s just people on Breitbart or folks from who knows where swarming your major metropolitan daily. But then you sign up for something like nextdoor.com and you find out it’s your neighbors too.
shit, that last inclusion in the OP is from Bad Santa, an obvious parody to bolster the positive images we have of the mythival/legendary/character of Santa.
geewizz remember last year when a Faux Noise correspondent was declaring
So WTF is wrong with telling your child, the pictures of Santa on cards are simply cartoons, not accurate portraits. The “real” Santa is right there. Go say Hi.
I mean, shit, already lying about reality of Santa, why not add that he is really ‘not-white’? Why Not! What T. F..
‘kin-A’.
[the following is directed at f-wads quoted in the OP]: Get a grip. You really want your kids to see you fly off the handle? You know this is trivial, eh? Okay, go to a different mall, boycott all you want, you not wanted here with that attitude anyway.
~
shit, I seem to be projecting some suppressed rage at these caricatures.
need more coffee.
BRB
To sum up the complaints: “I’m not racist, but don’t remind me that blacks, hispanics, Muslims, LGTBQ, etc. exist by allowing them be anything but in the closet, or if visible, only working menial subservient jobs.”
I’m not surprised as their privileges are showing.
written@2:
shhh, Don’t let Fox hear you speak of how prevalent the attitudes have infiltrated. shhhh
It’s easy to say FauxNoise is just reflecting common attitudes, while it might have started that way, there ha become a little feedback loop where each influences the other into the “spiral of death” [technical jargon]
Let’s break this loop by boycotting FoxNews. (I know that’s hard to quantify, but flip channels asap, channel surf past it quickly, etc) FauxNoise has been a persistent slow acting poison. Time to vomit. They sucessfully tricked “innocent” people into electing our CheetohDust Toupee POTUS. Time to applaud them off the stage (with a big middle finger salute).
re @4:
yeah, what you said is a concise summary; they like them as concepts, intangible vaporware, yet not as actual physical people.
*disillusioned*
slithey tove@6: typically, hatred comes from hating the concept, not the actual physical people. Example: Roof having second thoughts at the church he massacred, when he actually met the congregants (unfortunately he powered through that sudden feeling of empathy).
That’s why racism is rife in less diverse rural areas, and much reduced in the cosmopolitan cities.
St. Nicholas of Myra is actually very unusual for a late antique saint in that we still have pretty much his entire skeleton. It was taken from his tomb in Myra after the region was conquered by the Seljuk Turks in the 11th century AD, by worried Christians from Italy who thought this would make pilgrimage to the site more difficult. Half of the skeleton ended up in Bari in Apulia, including the skull, the other half was taken to Venice several years later. Modern tests have confirmed that the two sets of bones come from the same skeleton.
Forensic work was carried out on the Bari remains in 2005. Apparently the real St. Nicholas was only five feet tall, maybe a little shorter, with typical Greek features and a badly broken nose.
So if you see a Mall Santa who isn’t a tiny little Greek man in Roman Episcopal robes, it’s only fair to punch him in the face as hard as possible, so he at least has one authentic feature from the character he is playing.
We also, or so it is generally accepted, have a sample of St. Nicholas’s actual handwriting. The manuscript is currently in the keeping of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem. So if you are worried that the reply to your letter from Santa isn’t entirely legitimate, hop on a plane to Israel and do a comparison.
Though if it’s not written on papyrus or parchment in 3rd century koine Greek you can probably save yourself the trip.
Oh, so he *was* what is currently considered as white in the US.
re @7:
exactly
you saw what I failed to say.
What I was trying to imply was, “they claim they like them conceptually, yet when encountering then as actual people, their facade dissolves and [dot] [dot] [dot]”
*shrug*
cartomancer — How did they know in the 11th century that those bones were the bones of the actual St. Nicholas?
numerobis @ #10
If you look at photos of Russian Orthodox icons of St. Nicholas, you’ll see that he is often depicted as dark skinned. This may be an artistic artifact…the Orthodox tradition seems to have liked dark figures…or it’s an artifact of the aging of the piece itself. Or, maybe it’s what the artists thought that’s what a “Greek” looked like in the day.
robro
Well, they were in St. Nicholas’s tomb outside Myra. It would be a very odd Roman tomb indeed if it didn’t have an inscription identifying it as such (both pagan and Christian Romans were very keen on doing this). I suppose it is possible that someone got in and changed the corpses at some point, but the Myra tomb was a popular pilgrimage site pretty much from Nicholas’s death onward, so the chances it was left unobserved for any great length of time are small.
slithey tove@11: if you think we’re in agreement, then I don’t understand what you’re saying.
What I think you’re saying is that racists claim to like certain groups in concept but when they meet a member of that group in person, they hate them personally.
I’m saying the *precise opposite* — racists hate people in concept, but when they meet a member of that group in person, they tend to feel empathy towards them.
re 14:
you’re right, I don’t know what I’m saying. I guess I’m just playing around with the common “I’m not a racist” lie, used by racists.
I don’t know how to express my thoughts until you all become psychic, get to it, chop chop.
Some people (not the type of assholes quoted in the OP) are more flexible about it I suppose. However, people often have this image of ancient Greeks, due to I guess Renaissance/Enlightenment-era European paintings of Plato or Zeus or whatever, or for example of Spartans in the movie 300 (as opposed to the Persians). But a culturally-Greek person at the time, in southern Turkey, could easily have darker skin and more multi-ethnic sorts of features, from ancestry that over the centuries originated all around the Mediterranean and the Middle East. They wouldn’t look particularly German or British or Scandinavian (or North Polander?), if that’s your idea of a paradigmatic white person.
Ah, OK. You’re talking of those who say “I’m not racist but [I’m totally racist]”
I think they, like other racists, generally hate the concept rather than the individuals. Heck, don’t all I’m-not-a-racists have a black friend as a prop to prove they aren’t racist?
consciousness razor@16: Greeks today have swarthy skin and multi-ethnic sorts of features originating from the mediterranean. In my dad’s youth they were definitely not white, and neither were Italians and Spaniards. Saint Nick became white during my dad’s lifetime.
I wonder whether Jesus will become white during my lifetime, he and Sargon of Akkad.
Maybe if I live a long time, Aryans will even become white!
A black Santa? That’s like a black sheriff! Next you’re going to be telling me that a historically accurate Jesus wouldn’t have blue eyes and dirty blonde hair!!! /s
You know, I think it would be fascinating to see a racebent remake of Selma with all the white roles played by black people and all the black roles (including MLK) played by white people. Maybe that’s the only way to get some white people to empathize with black people.
It would be a quite wonderfully transgressive trip though. “Come on kids, we’re going to Italy this Christmas to visit the tombs of Santa Claus!”
A black Santa? What’s next, one made of nothing but bones, who speaks in all caps?
“a badly broken nose.”
Guess Arius struck back.
If these idiots are to be consistent with their reasoning based on historicity, they will no doubt also insist that all depictions of Jesus be of a middle-eastern Jew. Right?
*crickets*
For all you (white) kids at home…
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XYlJqf4dLI"
@23, Holms: I’d love to see a Jesus movie with him as a shlubby neurotic NY Jew. Looking at you, Jon Lovitz. Get on with it.
Speaking of German Christmas characters… There is Krampus.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/12/131217-krampus-christmas-santa-devil/
Which is what exactly? And how’s that different from a lot of “typical Turkish features”? Or for that matter Syrian features? Having known quite a lot of individuals from these three nations I can tell that I would be hard put to tell any individual’s home country, but I’m also certain that they are on average way more swarthy than your average white wonderbread person.
#26, I was hoping someone would mention this alter ego Santa Claus, the “black santa” who is still somewhat present in festivities around northern Europe. He arrived on a boat in Holland (don’t know if they still do that). As far as I know he derives from the psychopathic butcher that chopped little kids into pieces and pickled them, before good ol’ St. Nick showed up at this door (read your legend of St. Nicholas, charming stuff). And his presence in festive ceremonies as a black santa (dressed in black robes instead of the red garbs) was quite common till recently. He carried a big stick and a bag, into which he would stuff children who had not been good during the year. So it was a way of threatening little kids to obey their parents. It is a bit similar to the mardi gras celebrations here, which often include diabolic figures representing demons, witches, goblins, etc, and who try to carry off children from the throngs. Now if you americans started representing the black santa, I guess the racists would be delighted, a role tailor-made for those people of colour. Except he was as white (or whatever colour he actually was) as St. Nick, but that nuance would escape these people.
Ehm, well, no.
In Southern Germany and other places where the Krampus is located he is a devil creature, usually dressed in goat skin and an often elaborately carve wooden mask. You are right that he’s the counterpart St. Nick, but he is NOT BLACK in the sense of race or skin colour (which doesn’t make sense because he dates to a time and place where black people were probably unknown.
In other parts of Germany you get Knecht Ruprecht who’d give bad kids a beating, the two of them practically being a bad cop good cop routine.
He’s since become kind of St. Nick’s grubby companion. Actually, Albert fits him nicely.
Please, Americans, don’t just take others’culture again and twist it into something unrecognisable to the original owners of that culture.
robro @ 12
With a lot candles being burned in churches, the religious artifacts may be more or less covered in soot.
Ice Swimmer
Sure, but they also look like that when new ;)
Giliell, #27
I’m guessing “Greek” in this context means “Eastern Mediterranean”, as opposed to Northern European, Asian, African etc. Most people in the Roman Empire would have thought of Turkey, Syria etc. as culturally Greek, and there had been plenty of cultural and ethnic mixing in these regions since Hellenistic times. I suppose describing remains from this period as typically Greek is to differentiate them from individuals who may have lived in the Greek East but have had very different origins – with the ubiquity of slave trading and the movement of merchants there was no shortage of Northern Europeans, Western Europeans, Arabs, Africans and others living in places like Myra or holding high offices. St. Augustine is generally thought to have been of Berber ancestry for instance.
FTFY
You must have thought that Tim Allen movie was a documentary. Tsk tsk
cartomancer
I hope you see the problem with that, which is exactly why I was posing the question. I cannot comment on the discourse of nation-culture and ethnicity in ancient Greece, but since that description isn’t from ancient Greece I think it’s important to comment on the features he presumably had instead of simply throwing around a stereotype, because right now the question of “typically Greece/German/British/French” is a heavy club wielded against populations whose features don’t match that sterotype.
re 33:
Klaus =?= Claus
still, ooh I get it now.
The Christmas guy is Santa [period] Simply a mononym like Bono, Madonna, Jaylo, etc
the “clause” is that Santa can only be portrayed as Creamy White, no color allowed other than rosy cheeks,nose, and clothes.
Blue eyes of course. His hair is all white of course. I guess that clause was in very extremely fine print, at nanoscale.
sheesh
Santa sure gets sloshed around alot this time of year, poor guy, with such a big job to do in such a short time window.
Must be a secret Time Lord with his TARDIS disguised as a sleigh.
In related anecdotes, last year one of the local catholic churches decided that some of their new parish members would be the perfect fit for the holy family in the nativity scene/ christmas play: a christian refugee family fro Eritrea with a baby. You know, drawing parallels, highlighting Jesus as a refugee himself, driving home the Pope’s message about love and compassion for refugees, you know, feel good christianity with a humanistic conscience.
Apparently some good moral upstanding German christians walked out in protest causing quite a stir…
re 36:
SNL did a nice little Nativity Scene last night, throwing a little realism into the story. /smirk
Let me throw in Sulu.
George Takei twote [[?]]:
re 38addendum:
go see Allegiance, Dec13 one day only cinema showing of the Broadway show.
History must always be reflected upon.
Let me see if I have this correct: PC hating right-wing asshats outraged over Mall of America not being PC in their hiring of a mall Santa? Que surprise.
“A black Santa? That’s like a black sheriff!”
Why not? It worked in Blazing Saddles…
malta @19:
Something similar has already been done, but AFAICT hardly anyone watched it, much less changed their views about anything over it. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114928/
#29 actually Giliell if you read my text I did say that he was white, only his heart is black. And in northern France he is not depicted as a devil, just a black-garbed nasty snarling version of Santa. They even appear together, Santa up front waving to the little kids, the bad guy lagging behind and looking for naughty kids to put in his bag. FYI.