Last night @colbertlateshow in the segment called Meanwhile, did a Trail of Tears joke. Worse yet, the “joke” was Ruby Tuesday having a “Trail of Beers” promotion. Because if you are mocking Native genocide, why not add salt to wound with racist stereotypes of alcoholism huh?
Here is the clip where @colbertlateshow mocks the Trail of Tears with “Trail of Beers”:
No other genocide is used as a punchline this way & shouldn’t be. Beyond that, for the analogy to even work, people WW would have to know Trail of Tears & recognize it as off-limits. In 2019, Trump has used it as a Warren joke & last year Bojana Novakovic mocked it on video.
Actress Bojana Novakovic claimed she mocked Trail of Tears because she didn’t know what it was. The U.S. has never acknowledged Trail of Tears or other policies as genocide. The Medals of Honor given to soldiers who participated in the Wounded Massacre have never been revoked.
At least one of the British soldiers that participated in Bloody Sunday killings is being prosecuted. Meanwhile, all of the Medals of Honor given to U.S. soldiers for massacring unarmed Lakota women & children still stand, unrevoked. That’s why it is a failed analogy.
The Trail of Tears was not just one event on one day either, like Bloody Sunday was. The most known might be the Cherokee Trail of Tears, but Indian Removal was U.S. federal policy. Many tribes went through their own versions of the Trail of Tears, which is why it is genocide!
Links:
Trump jokes about “Trail of Tears”: nytimes.com/2019/02/10/us/…
Actress Bojana Novakovic mocks Trail of Tears claiming she doesn’t know what it is: newsmaven.io/indiancountryt…
Trump jokes about “Trail of Tears”: nytimes.com/2019/02/10/us/…
Actress Bojana Novakovic mocks Trail of Tears claiming she doesn’t know what it is: newsmaven.io/indiancountryt…
Read this, then comment because a lot of your so-called analysis, isn’t even honest analysis.
Ask yourself this, if any massacre could have been used as the stand in for the joke for it to work, why use Native genocide as the punchline, as opposed to any other massacre that included white people?
It’s not funny when Native genocide is not even in the past, it is ongoing in Federal Indian policy that breaks treaties so we go without proper healthcare, it continues in environmental racism in poisoning our water, it continues with our missing & murdered Indigenous women.
“Mocking and profiting off historical trauma” is two steps from Death on the Cycle of Genocide. (Graphic by the amazing @xodanix3, Credit her.) Because joking about genocide leads to more genocide? Imagine that.
Everybody in my replies refuses to interrogate the reason Natives were chosen as the joke target. It’s because settler societies work by being desensitized to Native death & celebrate it (as @xodanix3 tweets on.) We also lack large population, you know, because of the genocide.
