Many say South Park was the worst recent cultural influence since it spread cynicism and the "lols take a joke" style justification for 4chan esque bigotry. I disagree. I think the worst influence has been the continuation of the Magical Negro tradition...
...I think contemporary incarnations of the genre, films like The Help or Green Book, ruined bourgeois white liberals as political reasoners (but one edgy take I have is that I actually think Song of the South is a good film, so I don't totally hate the genre)...
... in that they have very greatly encouraged this image of black people (and that's just salient to me for personal reasons, I am sure there are other incarnations of this with other non-white ethnic groups) as people who, like, basically just perfectly embody their politics...
... in this genre black people are bourgeois white liberals but more authentic, effortlessly never problematic, wisely intoning and literally embodying everything they already want to think about the world...
... this image of black people disempowers most of us (who of course will never actually be like that) but *does* empower a small grifter class who sell that back to whites as they explain how raising taxes would actually be racist on MSNBC or shout at them over dinner, etc...
(e.g. @DrJasonJohnson flew too close to the sun here but that just means we can all acknowledge it - see how this basically posh sounding man changes his intonation when he says "love them some Bernie Sanders"; he's trying to activate the MN archtype! )
... and it thereby hurts real black people twice over, one because bourgeois white liberals are a disproportionately influential group they shape norms for the rest of us and so encourage our worst grifters, and two it entrenches them in an actually self-serving politics...
... So yeah, that's my take. Never mind South Park and its cynicism, if you want critique of stuff internal to the culture of the people actually launching these critiques, look instead to the neo Magical Negro films, and how they shape US bourgeois white liberals' politics.
