In the news again: racism is alive and well in the United States.

Members of a Philadelphia area swim club complained heartily when a day care center brought a group of children to swim in the club’s pool.  The reason: some of those children were black.  The center’s money refunded with no explanation.

I first read about this here, but the major news networks quickly picked up the story.  

Swim club president John Duesler said in a statement released to the media, “There was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion … and the atmosphere of the club.”

I don’t know if he meant “complexion” literally, but he might as well have.

It makes me physically ill to see this kind of thing happen.  Perhaps no one thought racism was completely eradicated, especially considering its persistence in mainstream cinema, but it’s never easier to swallow when it happens again.

Luckily, people are doing something about this.  From the CNN article: 

“The stepfather of one of the children was filing a complaint against the club with the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, the panel’s chairman, Stephen Glassman, said Thursday.”

We already knew Michael Bay was a hack.  Now we also know he’s a racist.

Forget, for a moment, that Transformers 2 was just plain putrid.  It was.  It was about an hour and a half longer than it needed to be, considering it was completely plotless, nearly 3 hours of unconvincing CGI robot fights and hackneyed dialogue.

Michael Bay’s a major studio darling, capable of churning out pure crap and still convincing the groveling masses to shell out cash to see it.

Yet the massive amount of money Transformers 2 made in theatres, despite having no redeeming features, isn’t even the greatest travesty.

The real problem: the movie is chock full o’ racism.

The two small twin Autobots in the movie, Mudflap and Skids, put on a bumbling, bickering show from the moment they show up on the screen. It’s clear they’re intended as comic relief, but something else becomes equally clear soon after.

They’re caricatures of American black culture.

They speak in exaggerated jive.  They have prominent gold teeth (Do robots even have teeth?  No, but these do).  At one point, when Shia LaBeouf asks them to translate something written in the language of the robots, they respond to the effect of, “We don’t do much readin’.”  They refer to the movie’s Latino character with vaguely racist terms.

Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that racism has come back out of the shadows in mainstream movies.  Hollywood has been guilty of perpetuating every type of derogatory stereotype.  Even so, it seems like it’s getting worse, not better.

Americans are so desensitized to this kind of thing that many people are unaware of the blatant racism present in the movie.

How far have we come?  The crows in Dumbo acted like this.  Decades of fighting for civil rights, all for naught.

Perhaps we have bigger problems to be worrying about.  The recession, wars in the Middle East and North Korean aggression are obviously more pressing concerns.  Even so, we shouldn’t take this laying down.

Michael Bay has defended the characters, refusing to acknowledge even the possibility of some accidental racism.  Instead, he’s smugly insisted the racist robots are “good, clean fun.”

Anyone interested in complaining to Paramount about its support of racism can call the studio at (323) 956-5575.  Also try info@paramountstudios.com, Brenna Girard at brenna.girard@paramount.com, or CEO Brad Grey at
brad.grey@paramountstudios.com.