For Goodness Sake 2 ☆☆☆☆☆

Any pretence that this was meant to be anything more that conservative propraganda has been utterly dropped. A polite, fifteen-minute tirade against affirmative action.

It undermines itself right off the bat. Dennis Prager says “My parents came to the United States from Poland.” Larry Elder, seated next to him, responds “I, on the other hand, don’t have a lot of Polish ancestry.” This is meant to be a slightly humour understatement of the obvious difference between the two that Prager is white and Elder is black, with the intent to highlight that this surface difference is fundamentally unimportant and tells you very little about each of the two men. But while it’s true that their skin colour itself is, or at least, should be, irrelevant, it still highlights a very stark difference in the social reality of African Americans: Dennis Prager can tell you where his ancestors came to the new world from, Larry Elder cannot. He comes from a population whose history and culture faced deliberate, systematic and largely irreversible erasure as part of the project of chattel slavery that was fundamental to the building of the United States.

But as with the previous short, such systematic forces cannot be acknowledged. Racism is presented as a ludicrous, cartoonish and old-fashioned idea and as a thing of the past, as shown by Trey Parker and Matt Stone doing a skit about hiring discrimination with faux black and white film effect, dismissing the idea that such things might still happen outside of dreaded liberal reverse-racism. Systematic problems don’t exist and if we have to admit that they do then they are a thing of the past and if you try to solve them you are the one causing the problem. And of course if you make hiring decisions based on diversity then your business will fail because people who are “diverse” are inherently inferior.