Originally Posted by
gurkle
This is all true (and not that long ago, being Italian-American would have gotten Alito the same kind of questions Sotomayor got; now his identity group has become "white"). Everyone's biased. But what's also false is the idea that something is offensive or artistically unnecessary because a member of a group objects to it, or even several members.
Let's say there's a World War II story where the American soldiers use the word "Jap" constantly. And let's say a Japanese-American reader can't enjoy the book because of this. If I start lecturing this person that she shouldn't be offended, I'm being a jerk. Because I don't understand the pain it brings to hear that word, or the fact that in the WWII context, it was used to dehumanize Japanese-Americans.
But when the conversation shifts from whether the reader is right to be offended to whether the word is artistically necessary - then it's a different issue. Because obviously that is the way soldiers talked back then, and any nicer word would be a lie. And it wouldn't even necessarily make it better: Gone With the Wind, the movie, eliminated all uses of the n-word, but all it did was make the Old South seem even more sanitized.
Now, the artistic necessity argument isn't as clear-cut with Airboy. The scene itself can be criticized for being kind of an old comedy cliche, and maybe the book would be better off without it, but it's still arguably true that the characters' attitudes are the attitudes many people have in real life. And a lot of the criticism has ignored this and gone straight to attacking the book for using that word, even though that's the word real-life jerks use all the time.
Also while I agree that creators should be mindful of their audience, part of the point of these online attacks is that they may not represent the audience at all. Artists tend to think that if their material is bad or offensive, the audience will reject it - so a stand-up comedian judges material by whether the audience laughs, not by what bloggers think. There are advantages and disadvantages to this approach, but I think we're too quick to assume online that a room full of people, or thousands of comic buyers, are so unenlightened or hateful that they don't understand the nuances. Blackface jokes, after all, have been considered corny and old-fashioned since the '30s at least - audiences often reject racist material before they even reject racism.