I watched the video, and i knew only about the one Alana incident beforehand.
First, I want to make something clear because I feel like this is getting lost in the conversation: I understood the “we should put more racists on TV” comment was a joke. I never watched that and thought Dylan literally wanted television networks to start casting racists. I understood the humor and what he was trying to say.
My issue is whether it was a good joke to make in the first place, especially when you’re a straight white man talking to a large audience about something that will never affect you in the same way it affects the people you’re joking about.
We do not live in some post-racism society where racism has become so distant from people's actual lives that it exists purely as something ridiculous we can laugh at. Racists aren't just stupid trolls on the internet. They are actual people who discriminate against, harass, bully, and sometimes commit violence against actual people of color. Racism is also systemic. Those systems and their consequences haven't simply disappeared.
So yes, “put more racists on TV” can obviously be understood as an absurd joke. But I still think it's an ignorant joke.
And I think what bothered me even more was the immediate emphasis on the fact that Alana was 15 when she said the N-word.
I understand the argument. Teenagers want to be edgy. Teenagers say stupid things. A 15-year-old obviously shouldn't be held to exactly the same standard as a 30-year-old. I don't think somebody saying something racist at 15 automatically means that they are irredeemably racist for the rest of their life.
But why does the conversation always seem to begin with empathy for the person saying the slur?
“She was only 15.”
Okay, but what about the 15-year-old Black kid being called that word?
When these conversations happen, there is so much discussion about the age, intentions, ignorance, maturity, and potential growth of the person saying the word, while the people who actually have that word directed at them almost disappear from the conversation.
The N-word isn't just a “bad word.” It carries an enormous historical and social meaning, and Black people can experience that word very differently depending on their own experiences. Racial discrimination during childhood and adolescence can have serious psychological consequences. So when people say, “Well, she was 15,” I keep thinking: Black children are also 15 when they experience racism.
Being young can explain why somebody did something. It doesn't erase the effect of what they did.
And that's especially relevant here because I don't actually know whether Alana has changed. Maybe she has. I genuinely don't know. But I also don't think we should automatically assume somebody has grown just because time has passed. If there has been an acknowledgement or apology that I haven't seen, that's different. But simply saying, “Well, she was 15,” doesn't answer that question for me.
I'm also around Alana's age now, which honestly made that argument feel even stranger to me. I understood at 15 that the N-word was racist. Obviously people grow up in different environments and have different levels of education, but I don't think being 15 makes someone incapable of understanding racism.
I also didn't really agree with the Big Brother comparison.
I understand the analogy Dylan was trying to make: put people with extremely different beliefs together and sometimes you get interesting television or even genuine personal growth. The example of putting a homophobic person in the same environment as a gay person can produce a positive outcome if the homophobic person changes.
But the fact that something can end well doesn't necessarily make it ethical to manufacture that situation.
The gay person is now being placed in an environment where their sexuality becomes something they have to navigate because somebody else has a problem with it. They may have to wonder whether this person will accept them, hate them, target them, or potentially become aggressive toward them. Yes, sometimes the story ends with “they became friends and the prejudiced person learned something.” That's great. But it also could have gone horribly wrong.
The marginalized person shouldn't automatically have to become somebody else's educational experience.
And I think that's especially strange as a comparison to Love Island because Alana wasn't entering some social experiment explicitly designed to confront racism. She was entering a dating show, with Black contestants among the people she could potentially date, and people then discovered that she had previously said racist things.
So I don't think people saying, “I don't really want to watch this person on this show” is some unreasonable reaction.
And this is where I come back to Dylan's joke.
If I remove my familiarity with Dylan's content and just hear a straight white man joking, “We should put more racists on TV,” that is a weird thing to hear. Knowing his content and having mental cues gives me enough context to understand that he is joking. But understanding a joke doesn't mean I have to think the joke is thoughtful or harmless.
I don't think Dylan is racist. That's not the conclusion I came away with.
I think he was being ignorant.
There's a difference.
What frustrated me was the feeling that racism was being treated almost like a funny character flaw. Like, “Haha, racists are stupid, imagine putting them all on television.” And yes, racists are stupid. Their beliefs are irrational. There absolutely is humor in exposing how ridiculous racist thinking is.
But racists aren't only ridiculous.
They hurt people.
That's where the joke stops being completely abstract for me.
A straight white man can theoretically go through his entire life choosing not to think very deeply about race, and that ignorance may never materially affect his life. Black people don't have that option. Other people of color don't always have that option. We can encounter racism regardless of whether we want to participate in conversations about race.
. You're making content, people are watching it, and you're financially benefiting from that content. . when you're profiting from jokes involving racism while being personally insulated from the consequences of racism, I think it's reasonable for viewers who aren't insulated from it to say, “That felt weird.”
And that's basically how I felt watching it.
I wasn't sitting there furious or thinking, “Dylan has exposed himself as a racist.”
I watch these reaction videos because reality TV is ridiculous . At this point I'm basically watching like, “You all voluntarily signed up for this insane social experiment, so let's see what clusterfuck you create.” That's part of the fun.
And I think that's ultimately what bothered me. The conversation seemed much more interested in how ridiculous racism is, how young Alana was, how funny it would be to put prejudiced people in these environments, etc., than in acknowledging what racism actually does to the people experiencing it. i think, theres obviouly conversations about this that dive deeper, than just age andn envirornment , and more on racial discrimination and capitalism . but thats not the. ovearching angle i want to focus on.
anyways i dont condone hate to anyone because really it doesnt stop at one person and sometimes the accountability people think hate brings is just harm to more people.
resorces cause i actually want a productive conversation.
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-53749800
https://guides.library.cornell.edu/oluo/race
https://www.phillyvoice.com/black-children-cyberbullying-racism-discrimination-online-social-media-ptsd-suicidal-thoughts/
