Dr. Seuss, Justin Trudeau and the time-honoured practice of shooting Nazis in video games — all were deemed ‘racist’ in 2017

Whatever else 2017 is remembered for, there’s no doubt it was a banner year for people accusing others of racism. Left, right, black, white or brown; the only thing people seemed to agree on in 2017 was that everyone was racist except them. And we don’t want to alarm you, but sometimes those accusations had a tendency to be a bit overblown. Below, a shortlist of all the things that suddenly became “racist” in 2017.

Hoop earrings

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Photo by Edmonton Journal/Shaugn Butts

Seen everywhere from Ancient Egyptian wall paintings to Marilyn Monroe movies to Swedish erotica, hoop earrings would seem to have a diverse international pedigree. But according to Australian Vice contributor Ruby Pivet , when white girls wear them they are plundering Latin identity. “As for many women of colour before me, hoops play a large role in my self preservation and expression,” she wrote, describing an incident in elementary school when a fellow student stole her hoop earrings. “I learned just how comfortable white people are taking from other cultures,” she wrote.

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Casting a black woman as a Star Trek lead

Photo by Jan Thijs/CBS All Access

The original Star Trek featured what is often considered to be television’s first interracial kiss. It also gave a leading role to Japanese-American actor George Takei, who up until that point had largely been playing one-dimensional Asian stereotypes. But when black actress Sonequa Martin-Green was chosen as the lead in the new series Star Trek: Discovery, a choice group of alleged Trekkies decided to take it as a racial affront. “Star Trek introduces White Genocide in space,” read one complaint. In response, Martin-Green told haters “to key into the essence and spirit of Star Trek that has made it the legacy it is — and that’s looking across the way to the person sitting in front of you and realizing you are the same, that they are not separate from you, and we are all one.”

Quoting Beyoncé lyrics

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Back when she was a contender for the NDP leadership, Manitoba MP Niki Ashton tried to galvanize her supporters with a hip pop culture reference. “Like Beyoncé says, to the left,” she wrote in a tweet — even making sure to include the accent aigu on the singer’s name that most Americans omit. Black Lives Matter Vancouver, however soon chimed in with a note that “Appropriating Black culture is not intersectional feminism.” The song in question, Irreplaceable, was a multiracial collaboration between Beyoncé Knowles, a team of Norwegian songwriters and American producer Shaffer “Ne-Yo” Smith. Nevertheless, Ashton immediately deleted her tweet in the name of “racial justice.” She lost the leadership race, by the way.

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Dr. Seuss

Photo by Postmedia File

Like many American illustrators from the early 20th century, Theodor Seuss Geisel has an extensive catalogue of drawings that did not age well: Big-lipped, buffoonish caricatures of black people and wartime propaganda featuring buck-toothed scheming Japanese. But as the children’s author Dr. Seuss many of his most popular stories, such as The Sneetches and Yertle the Turtle, were anti-racism fables. Nevertheless, when First Lady Melania Trump sent 10 Dr. Seuss books to a Massachusetts elementary school in September, the gift was publicly rejected by librarian Liz Phipps Soeiro. “Many people are unaware … that Dr. Seuss’s illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes,” Soeiro wrote in a reply . The letter also included links to academic papers claiming that the Cat in the Hat is not a cat, but a racist minstrel show stereotype.

Having sex with immigrants

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During a commencement address at Iowa’s Grinnell College, Pakistani-born comedian Kumail Nanjiani advised graduates to “ have sex with an immigrant .” The talk also included Nanjiani imploring the crowd to get out of their bubble and understand those different from them. “Don’t disregard opposing viewpoints; listen to them, absorb them, oppose them if you feel that they are wrong, but allow them to affect you,” he said. Nevertheless, tweets soon came Nanjiani’s way accusing him of advocating “white genocide” by promoting miscegenation. “I’m being accused of promoting white genocide so to clarify: doesn’t have to be straight sex & people can come in or on any agreed-upon place,” Nanjiani wrote in a follow-up tweet.

Making fun of Southerners

Photo by University of Oregon

While at a reception at the Oregon Bach Festival, two men were making fun of the South. Acclaimed British conductor Matthew Halls was speaking to his friend, black Florida-born countertenor Reginald Mobley, and briefly attempted his best impression of a Southerner. “Do you want some grits?” said Halls. An unidentified complainant heard the exchange and swiftly got Halls fired by falsely reporting that the conductor had been mocking Mobley’s race. In a subsequent statement to the Telegraph , Mobley unequivocally said the exchange had not been racist, and noted the irony that nobody had even bothered to ask him, the supposed victim of the comment. “My voice has been taken away in a conversation about race that involved me, and technically that’s racist,” he said.

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Justin Trudeau

Photo by The Canadian Press/Paul Chiasson

The Canadian Prime Minister is accused of many things, but it’s safe to say that racism usually doesn’t make the shortlist. Nevertheless, in February Yusra Khogali, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto, decided to call him a “ white supremacist terrorist .” Her apparent reasoning, according to the rest of her speech, was that Trudeau is the leader of a state founded on the “genocide of black people” and that by inviting refugees turned away by the United States, he is trying to prolong the “genocide of Indigenous people.”

Steve Martin’s King Tut sketch

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In 1978, during a tour of King Tutankhamen artifacts through the United States, comedian Steve Martin debuted a song on Saturday Night Live mocking the commercialization of the ancient pharaoh. Breifly reaching number 17 on the Billboard charts, the song has since become a go-to way for “hip” history teachers to keep their pupils awake during classes on Ancient Egypt. But for activist students at Oregon’s Reed College, a screening of King Tut sparked near-apoplectic outrage. “That’s like somebody … making a song just littered with the n-word everywhere,” a member of the group Reedies Against Racism was quoted as saying in the Atlantic . The over-the-top faux Egyptian garb, meanwhile, was equated with blackface. The rest of the Atlantic article, incidentally, details how other Reed College students — many of them non-white — ended up organizing against the extremism of Reedies Against Racism.

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Dunkirk

Photo by Melissa Sue Gordon/Warner Bros. Pictures via AP

Dunkirk dominated box offices everywhere from Japan to South Africa to Germany. Still, it weathered a barrage of critical complaints, most notably that it was somehow racist for featuring only white male characters – despite the fact that the actual Dunkirk evacuation was pretty white and male itself. The U.K. would eventually win the Second World War with one of history’s most ethnically diverse military alliances, but in the spring of 1940 it was still mostly a low-melanin conflict.

Shooting Nazis in video games

Photo by Internet Game Database

Speaking of Nazis, the video game Wolfenstein II, the New Colossus depicts an alternate reality 1961 in which Nazis have conquered the United States. So, a white protagonist joins a multi-ethnic resistance group and shoots Nazis until they’re all dead. Pretty standard video game stuff, really. Nevertheless, gaming forums soon lit up with accusations that the game was “anti-white” politically correct propaganda. In response, a representative for the game’s developer said “we don’t feel it’s a reach for us to say Nazis are bad and un-American.”

Get Out!

Photo by Universal Pictures via AP

Another film that tore up box offices regardless of the colour of the ticket-buyer. Given its low budget and massive returns, in fact, Get Out! was the most profitable film of 2017. Spoiler alert: The movie is a kind of black Stepford Wives. In the film, black protagonist Chris Washington visits the family of his Caucasian girlfriend. What begins as an awkward encounter with earnest white liberals, however, soon transforms into a horror film about a gruesome conspiracy to steal and inhabit the bodies of black people. Nevertheless, the National Review’s Armond White accused the movie of being a “get-whitey” film that was somehow simultaneously racist against black people, too. “The actor’s dark-skin/bright-teeth image inadvertently recalls the old Sambo archetype,” wrote White (note: lead actor Daniel Kaluuya was appearing in his natural skin and teeth). A handful of Rotten Tomatoes reviews similarly took offence, claiming that the film was literally an attempt to frame all white people as mad scientist body-snatchers. “All white people are bad. That is the plot,” wrote one.

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This Dove ad

Photo by YouTube

The above are screen shots from a three-second Facebook ad for Dove. It depicts three women from three different ethnicities morphing into one another by removing their shirts. The idea was to illustrate the fact that Dove’s facial cleanser works for all skin tones. However, Facebook user Naythemua soon excerpted only the first second of the ad , which shows a black woman transforming into a white woman. This was then widely cited as evidence that Dove was promoting a racist notion of white people being cleaner than black people. The characterization was notably disputed by the ad’s black model, Lola Ogunyemi. “The narrative has been written without giving consumers context on which to base an informed opinion,” she wrote in an op-ed for the Guardian . It made no difference. Dove pulled the ad and issued an apology. The apology was then criticized for being too “ flip .”

A German anti-litter campaign

To encourage citizens in the German city of Duisburg to use trash bins, officials began a campaign to emblazon garbage cans with ads that called on citizens by name. “Come here, Kevin,” read one. “Get to it, Hanna,” read another. And, since Duisburg has a large Turkish community, some garbage cans included Turkish names like “Gülcan.” However, some Duisburgians only saw the Turkish-named cans and assumed the local government was implying that only Turkish people generate garbage. “I would like to say that it is not a deliberately Turkish-hostile campaign,” local politician Melih Keser soon clarified in a joint German/Turkish Facebook post.

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Wearing latex gloves

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In July the reigning Miss South Africa, Demi-Leigh Nel-Peters, visited a soup kitchen event in the Johannesburg township of Soweto. Like every other volunteer at the event, she was asked to don latex gloves. The reasoning was that she would be handling food and, in lieu of a handwashing station, the gloves would prevent the spread of bacteria. Nevertheless, as photos of the glove-wearing beauty queen hit social media, critics immediately accused Nel-Peters of not wanting to touch black children. “Miss SA actions have no justification THEY ARE DISGUSTING AND OF A RACISM ACT,” read one heavily shared reply. Despite ample attempts by supporters (both white and black) to point out the normalcy of wearing gloves at a soup kitchen, Nel-Peters still had to issue an apology. “I really apologize if I offended anybody,” she said in a video.

The word “clan”

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“Clan” is a synonym for “clique,” a word to refer to families in the Scottish Highlands and, if you spell it with a “k,” it can evoke the most notorious domestic terrorist organization in United States history. It’s also the name for the Simon Fraser University athletic teams, in reference to the Scottish origins of the school’s founder. Philosophy professor Holly Andersen knows the SFU teams aren’t named after the KKK, but in September she campaigned for the name to be changed anyway . “This is not a history we can just wish away by saying, ‘but that’s not what WE mean by it!’” she wrote in an online petition.

Taco Bell not serving fries

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This may be it: The pinnacle of all 2017 questionable racism accusations. An unidentified woman walks into a U.S. Taco Bell and orders medium fries. A cashier then informs her (several times, in fact) that they are a Taco Bell and do not sell fries. After a few moments of goggle-eyed confusion, the woman concludes that prejudice is afoot. “This is racism,” she declares.