Video about online racism

[Ivo]

Hi all,

I saw this video the other day and been wondering about posting it here in the forums.

The video is made in Lithuania but it is in English. Because the decription of the video is not in English I give some info here.

There are some (staged) auditions but presumably the different people coming in were not aware that it is staged or that they were being filmed. There is a black man waiting in the lobby and then another person comes into the lobby to wait as well. The black guy then strikes a conversation (in English) and asks the Lithuanian person if they can translate some comments he got in his facebook page, as he arrived in the country recently and doesn't know the language yet.
The comments are racist and some of them quite strong, and the video films the reactions of the "translators".



It is not related to games, but I found it poignant, maybe it was all staged (by this I mean that one could raise the question of whether the "translators" were also playing a role in the video). I don't think they knew about it beforehand, but I think the reactions are genuine enough either way.

[jp1]

Hi all,

I saw this video the other day and been wondering about posting it here in the forums.

The video is made in Lithuania but it is in English. Because the decription of the video is not in English I give some info here.

There are some (staged) auditions but presumably the different people coming in were not aware that it is staged or that they were being filmed. There is a black man waiting in the lobby and then another person comes into the lobby to wait as well. The black guy then strikes a conversation (in English) and asks the Lithuanian person if they can translate some comments he got in his facebook page, as he arrived in the country recently and doesn't know the language yet.
The comments are racist and some of them quite strong, and the video films the reactions of the "translators".



It is not related to games, but I found it poignant, maybe it was all staged (by this I mean that one could raise the question of whether the "translators" were also playing a role in the video). I don't think they knew about it beforehand, but I think the reactions are genuine enough either way.

It's a very moving video Ivo. Both the symbolism and the real world ramifications of speaking the hate and making it real are quite difficult to watch. Sometimes it is a sad world we live in, but you can feel real emotion from most of these translators and the empathy is palpable. The human condition is to love, this is why hate is most often hidden through anonymity in my opinion. There is inherent shame in exercising hate, it's a tragedy that those who choose to live this way can't recognize it for themselves.

The video does a good job of driving the point home through the use of emotion, the harsh words were not included for shock value, rather to be used as a vehicle to drive the emotion of those who were forced to speak them. In this they took a horribly ugly thing and showed you something beautiful. Thanks for sharing.

[Hobie-wan]

Reminds me of this one.

[Ivo]

Also an interesting video Hobie, thanks.

Although I was still uncomfortable that about half the kids said something along the lines of "No, because of [gender]". Not quite the right reason in my opinion (but better than the alternative), and the video was going for that anyway by setting the situation up asymmetrically.

Would also be interesting to see a gender reversed version, and the 2 same-gendered experiments to see how much gender disparity is already there at those ages (7 to 11 it seemed) - I suspect the 2 male version would have a large percentage of boys not wanting to caress the other boy, although I still think none of the 3 new permutations would actually have the slap occur.

[Hobie-wan]

Oh I agree. It should be "Why should I do X to this person I don't even know?" regardless of gender, but the reactions had the same sort of "wait, really?" air about them.