Monday, April 1, 2013

All those brown people look alike, huh?


No, this isn't an April Fool's joke. Yesterday, Google used the above image to recognize the birthday of Cesar Chavez, labor leader and civil rights activist.

Conservatives hit the ceiling, partly because they confused Cesar Chavez with Hugo Chavez, the late Venezuelan president. Now, all you had to do was click on the image to get information about the man, but that was apparently too much for many people.

Check out these tweets. (Warning: Unless you want to lose all faith in America - indeed, all faith in humanity - I wouldn't browse much in their archives. This one page is bad enough!)

Most of them can't tell one Latin American from another. Some of them don't care. "Wtf is up with this shit we have some Mexican on the google page." "Why is there a spic on google and not jesus?" "Instead of putting a picture of easter... they put a picture of a wetback, how nice." How nice, indeed. I'm sure glad these good Christians have their priorities straight, aren't you?

But even those who knew the difference between Cesar Chavez and Hugo Chavez - at least, after everyone started laughing at them - were outraged, often enough, because Google didn't put Easter eggs in the logo, or "a bunny."

Do these Christians really think that the Easter bunny is in the Bible? Do they imagine that Jesus started the practice of coloring eggs? How clueless would you have to be not to realize that these are pagan images of fertility and springtime, that Christians merely added Jesus to an Easter that already existed?

Now, the casual racism is the worst of this, of course. But being religiously outraged because of the lack of colored eggs and bunnies is almost more astonishing, isn't it? Of course, this is the 'war on Easter,' right?

How dare those people! Everything has to be about your own particular religion, or you're being discriminated against. Google has recognized Easter in the past, but this year, they chose to remember a civil rights' leader on his birthday, and that's just beyond the pale, huh?

Frankly, it's the combination of things which really bothers me here. It's the casual racism, the complete cluelessness about their own religion, and their arrogant demand for unquestioned supremacy, all combined into one toxic right-wing stew.

I'm not a Christian, but isn't this about as far from Christ-like as you can get? All you'd need would be assault weapons to make this complete.


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