Ok, I have seen these kinds of pictures on blogs with this kind of text/speech and as soon as I saw one I got the kind of heebie jeebies I get when I hear white people imitate "black talk" and/or "poor talk." The "IZ" is without a doubt, an imitation of the stereotypical way "black" talk is represented in racist movies like "Gone With the Wind." Someone defended them saying that basically, it's supposed to be the incorrect way cats would talk if they could. So, when imagining a way a dumb animal would talk, white people generally associate it with the way they stereotypically think black people talk? That's racist shit right there.
I'm sure other people have already deconstructed this crap way better than I have, but yeah.
CLICK HERE
That's one example, but I have seen many variations of this.
14 comments:
Hi Davka, have you tried googling "LOLcats is racist" yet? There's plenty of discussion out there. I've been watching this thing evolve over the years, and I'm pretty sure it's just cats, not people of color, and also "iz" is the phonetic spelling of "is"- "iz" is actually the way we say it. The idea is that cats are bad at speaking english so they would spell everything as phonetically as possible.
Wait! I found it! An article about the LOLcat language with a very thorough discussion afterward (in the "letters" part)- http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/11/15/pathos_lolcats/index.html
With you on the racism analysis.
But the sentence construction - "I can has" and so on - reeks of Stupid Hipster Shit. Which often has racist undertones, so I guess it still works.
It started out being the way that cats would talk. Because there are only so many phonemes that a cat can produce, they could be expected to make certain kinds of mispronunciations if they were speaking English. It was kind of clever and endearing. But then people started writing captions with any sort of crazy misspelling, and yeah, some of them end up being pretty distasteful.
carrot, that makes sense- but the way IZ is used is for "I IS" instead of IZ as in "IZ THIS RACIST?" That's all. When it's used like "I IZ HUNGRY" it is too reminiscent of the stereotypes for me to be comfortable.
I'll take your word for it- checking the link isn't happening right now.
funny thing is- this entry just reminded me of the time the word ebonics was created and defended by many civil rights activists, as a dialect.
this is slightly off topic,
at this very moment i'm writing a paper on two oral history books, one of which is called "Remembering History" and features a number of interviews recorded with former slaves during the great depression. one of the things one of the editors, Ira Berlin, talks about in his introduction is how the interviewers transcribed the recordings inconsistantly, Some were responsible for either "'cleaning up' nonstandard pronunciation, grammar and syntax” whereas others “painstakingly transformed the ex-slaves’ speech into stereotypical “Negro dialect”… so common were such contrived renderings that officials of the FWP (Federal Writers’ Project) eventually saw fit to prescribe “Approved Negro Expressions” while banning others” (l)
i find it interesting that these interviews have made it into this book that is considered a landmark for "adding" ex-slaves voices into history, and yet many of the interviews were altered decades ago, so there is no way knowing what they though... the editors of this book were aware of the changes, but decided to work with the interviews anyway, so as to prevent even further alteration.
like i mentioned, not totally related...
Hey dude. That's my picture. I'm not racist. I wasn't trying to imitate anything but LOLcat speech. The only thing I might have done wrong is do a bad imitation of how cute cats speak. I just used a z, so please don't explode and decide that I am a racist.
why did you add the z? why there?
do cute cats speak stereotypically like black folk in old civil war movies (white created.)
were those guys cute too
why did you add the z? why there?
do cute cats speak stereotypically like black folk in old civil war movies (white created.)
were those guys cute too
Does no one remember the famous Far Side Cartoon "Cat Fud?" It seems to me this and the text/leet speak that people use in chats and on their mobile devices is much more responsible for this than racism.
Well, apparently that's a really touchy place to add a 'z'
It didn't occur to me that it might look racist to someone - I'm just not good at coming up with the best lolcat speak. I'm not a lolcat pro. I'm also not a racist or a sexist or even a macho dude. I'm a weak little innocent person who gets his feelings hurt when people think he's a big scary monster. But I'm not a monster. And I doubt you're a monster either. You're yelling at the wrong person.
if you meant IZ to mean "I AM" or "I is" than it was racist. This doesn't mean you are a monster. And we are all racist in a culture that thrives on white supremacy. Admitting it is the first step to going beyond it.
Also, no one is yelling at you.
Well, I don't know if you have changed the photo, or the person 721sandwiches is somewhat mistaken, but this photo and caption are actually mine. In this case, IZ means "Is it (safe now)?" and I still can't truly understand why if it meant "I is/am??" would be racist. Maybe because I am not native english speaker, and also unfamiliar with the "stereotypical way "black" talk is represented". I like cats and imho if they could speak they would speak every human language with some alien accent, that's why lolcat language suits them. I usually compose it from totally random misspellings and misplaced words. Or use the first automated translator google finds if i'm lazy.
Actually most of my countrymen speak English worse than lolcats, and some who speak better than me, find it very hard to understand when written in lolcat.
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