In its advanced stages, 21st century political correctness becomes a kind of delusional illness, causing sufferers to interpret benign, harmless and even socially healthy conduct as offensive and sinister. An outbreak of this variety of political correctness is in full flower in Washington, D.C., where more than the usual number of officious defenders of that which needs no defending are trying to gin up public outrage against a creative, fun, and successful small business enterprise, Fojol Bros.
The company sends food trucks around downtown D.C. and serves strangely named hybrid ethnic dishes inspired by Indian, Ethiopian and Thai cuisines. The Fojol employees who hand out the delicious fare wear turbans, robes and fake mustaches, claim to hail from “Merlindia” and “Benethiopia,” and go by names like “Kipoto.” This was once called “theater” and “fantasy,” no more offensive than Disney employees in Frontierland dressing in cowboy and saloon girl garb and calling themselves “Tex” and “Lilly.” Now some are calling it “offensive,” because too many people have forgotten what offensive is.
Indignant screeds accusing the enterprise’s gimmick of being racist have cropped up in several online publications, and a hyper-sensitive twit named Arturo J. Viscarra has launched a petition over at Change.org demanding that the Fojol Brothers “stop the brownface minstrel act!” The petition has about 175 signatories, which is an encouraging sign that the outbreak will avoid reaching Stephen King proportions. One can usually attract more signatures than that at Change.org for a movement to change the National Anthem to the theme song from “The Facts of Life.”
These people are willing to wreck a successful business model, put the company’s employee’s out of work during a recession and reduce the food options in D.C., not because they can identify any genuine harm in what the Fujol Bros. do, but because it will give these destructive PC warriors a sense of power and glory if they succeed. Minstrel shows were part of a culture-wide system that excluded African-Americans from the rights of citizenship while stealing their art and culture. Dressing up as another ethnic group, or a parody of an ethnic group, in today’s U.S. does none of this. The Fujol Bros. do not instruct their workers to denigrate any ethnic group, and one would be hard pressed to identify what nationalities should be offended. Finding humor in ethnic and regional customs, habits, dress and speech has a long and distinguished history in America. When the nation was healthy, nobody was offended, and the groups being lampooned joined in the fun. Why is invoking an imaginary Middle Eastern culture to hawk food more offensive than the Geico Gecko doing a riff on Chicago accents, as he does in a recent commercial, or the Dish TV ad featuring a blue-collar Boston family talking loudly about “the Hoppah!”, or “My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding”? It isn’t. No one is hurt. No offense is intended. Nobody is being excluded from citizenship or set up for racial prejudice.
Allow the Art Viscarras of the world to drive the Fujol Bros. into bankruptcy using their trumped-up theories of imaginary offense, and the next targets will be “Achmed the Terrorist” (the ventriloquist dummy), the Gilbert and Sullivan shows “The Mikado” and “The Gondoliers” (which takes place in “Barataria” (which borders on both “Merlindia” and “Benethiopia”), drag shows, anyone singing “That’s Amore!” who isn’t Italian, “Dorf on Golf” and toga parties. The pathological politically correct are offended not because there is anything to be offended about, but because they want to be offended.
Let them. Just tell them to go be offended someplace else.
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Facts: Washington Post
Sources: DC Eater
Graphic: Washington Post
Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at jamproethics@verizon.net.
Ethics Alarms 
thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you
So explain why Sacha Baron Cohen’s movies and shows are funny, but this is racist?
Of course, these are the type of people who probably did get offended at Cohen; there were some online commentators who apparently assumed that “The Dictator” was mocking Muslims as opposed to, well, corrupt dictators.
Of course, one thing people sometimes fail to appreciate is that good-natured ribbing can co-exist quite well with respect and admiration. I enjoy poking fun at aspects of German and Japanese culture, but I also admire their intellectual, technological, artistic, and economic achievements.
On a more amusing note, does that mean that we can no longer make relatively benign fictional adaptations of real world cultures? Goodbye, medieval fantasy.
Honestly, I think everyone should appropriate and poke good-natured fun at everyone else’s culture. Of course, you might object by saying something about “historical oppression” or “institution racism” and all that, but trying to address those issues by banning something like Fojol Bros. is like trying to raise a country’s gini coefficient not by making the poor richer, but by making everyone equally poor*.
*Before the knee-jerk left jumps on me, I’ll clarify that I actually support proportionally higher taxes on the wealthy and all that.
His first two films used the stereotypes to make conservatives look like bigots, so it was OK, see. And his stereotype in Talledega Nights was French, and making fun of them will ALWAYS be OK. But “The Dictator” was an old fashioned spoof of a stereotype, so the pc critics panned it.
Political correctness is, at its heart, a power strategy. It’s given to a handful of elitists to decide what’s “offensive” to this or that ethnic group, thus enabling them to manipulate demographics in their favor. It lies at the heart of the omnipresent “divide and conquer” method pioneered by Tammany Hall a century and a half ago. It’s also one of the greatest threats to the First Amendment and the all-important protection to civil social discourse.
Please, nobody tell him about the Shriners.
it’s only a matter of time, I’m afraid!
Seems the ones who poke fun at their own ethnic group are fine but no one else is allowed to even if it isn’t done maliciously.
So what if it is malicious like some guy told me “you Chinamen are crooks” and I’m gravely offended? That doesn’t justify me for using criminal actions upon him because it is everything against what free speech stands for.
Accepting otherwise is a form of tyranny from the mentally immature who can’t accept the realities of life and simple logic.
True. Having a big,fat mouth shouldn’t be a crime. Too bad punching one is.
This could be a problem for my son, Max. He dressed up as Luigi for Halloween and walked around telling people, “I maka the besta pizza!” Then again, Max is 9-years-old, so I’m likely the one to face the wrath of the hyper-sensitive PC-police.
Don’t count on it, Debbie. The PC police have been on the job for at least a quarter of a century. They’ve been VERY active in schools recently.
Isn’t there some warning in the bible about “Those who go about like a raging lion, seeking something about which to be indignant”…? Maybe not.
Thee’s a problem with so many blithering idiots who think they have a Constitutional Right not to be offended.
Oops! “Blithering idiots” is offensive.
LATEST SILLINESS IN P.C. “YOU OFFEND ME” WARS (A.P. 5-29-12) Distillery in Ogden Utah makes brand “Five Wives Vodka”. Idaho officials will not stocck it in state liquor stores because it offends Mormons, 1/4 of Idaho population. I don’t get it: Mormons don’t buy vodka anyway.
It’s not so much the vodka, but the “five wives” thing they’re still a little sensative about!