It's "hey look at these stereotypes! Aren't they funny! They're funny because they're supposed to be accurate depictions of people who are different from us white folks!"
Uh...where does the movie even imply that?
Did you ever stop to think that maybe the movie, maybe Bay, is simply celebrating the approach to their work these two have VS the average transformer? Maybe he likes that element of ghetto/black culture.
Did I say you were supposed to feel racist? Just using racial stereotypes for yuks instead of using them to point out something satirically or using them to make social commentary IS racist. Duh.
Careful with the "duh".
It's "racial", but I don't believe it's "racist".
Because I was taught, in my semester long college course on diversity, much of which was spent on race and ethnicity and whatnot, that racism requires some sort of belief that one group is better than the other, or that one group is inferior.
Or, as Wikipedia puts it:
"Racism is the belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race"
And...
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, racism is a belief or ideology that all members of each racial group possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially to distinguish it as being either superior or inferior to another racial group or racial groups. The Merriam-Webster's Dictionary defines racism as a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular racial group, and that it is also the prejudice based on such a belief. The Macquarie Dictionary defines racism as: "the belief that human races have distinctive characteristics which determine their respective cultures, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule or dominate others."
Hmm.
Notice that even when they talk about specific characters, they throw that whole "superior" thing in there.
There's also something about discriminating based on race that tends to be inherent in most instances of racism, and I don't see that here either. The Twins are an accepted and apparently valuable parts of the Autobots defense. In other words, their characteristics are not portrayed as limited.
Yeah, and jive talkin' has always been a way to negatively stereotype white people, right?
1. I don't think they were talking jive. Jive is mostly nonsensical to most people, as it's essentially speaking in code, and I understood The Twins perfectly.
2. You keep saying "negative". Jive talking tends to be looked on as a weird, albeit somewhat interesting element of conversation these days. And again...the movie doesn't present it as negative. It presents it as interesting, exciting, and fun.
Just because white dudes do it doesn't mean that jive talkin' is no longer a negative stereotype associated with black people.
What's your point? Are you simply unable to think about this concept in context, or must you rely on what you THINK might be happening because of what some people feel about jive (which again, is not even in this movie, near as I can tell)?
In the era of vaudeville the performers would portray black people as bumbling simpletons who loved to dance and sing "Camptown Races". But I guess if they just had robots do that stuff it wouldn't be racist, right?
Ok, so since The Twins aren't singing Camptown Races, this clearly isn't racist.
I kid, I kid.
The reason the vaudeville stuff is so racist is not because the characters sing songs like Camptown Races, etc, it's because the characters who did those things were looked on as lesser people in these performances, as if their only existence was to entertain those who were better than them, because they were not capable of anything else.
There's no value judgement made on the Twins but your own here. The movie doesn't tell you how to feel or react. Since everything else is so MTV, I suspect Bay knows how much of his intended audience will react: favorably. Notice that in the movie, no one's laughing at their stupidity or their inability to read, or any of that, they're simply accepting their style of conversation for the most part.
Surely The Fallen is meant to remind you of a big, imposing kingpin of the African American persuasion, but otherwise, in terms of language and dialogue, he's just as stereotypical as any other villain we've been introduced to, so his cultural influence is very limited. Still, one could argue that this could be racist as well, but then again, how often is the villain of the movie a big powerful, evil Black man?
