Booster is not white by American standards of whiteness. As Benjamin Franklin famously said, “the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased.”
So if you ask a Black African, a Tawny Asian, or a Swarthy European, they’d say that Booster is white; but the real whites, the Anglo-Saxon Americans, know that Booster is, in fact, swarthy at best. But he might actually be black if he has even a single great-great-great-great-great-grandparent from Africa due to the one-drop rule. America!
note that even the Irish – the Irish – were not considered “white” in America for a very long time, quite amply demonstrating IMO that the label has little to do with color (and/or albedo).
Psychie
Yeah, I get rather confused when some people I know of latinx descent claim they aren’t white and talk about how they get racially profiled, and I’m like “if I didn’t know your last name I never would have known you were descended from people from mexico/central america/south america” because some of them are paler than ME, I’m not super pale or anything, but nobody has ever mistaken me for anything other than white, even on some occasions where I was kinda tan due to walking everywhere in college, and I as far as I can tell these guys are more or less as dark as I am. Heck, I’ve known people who were of italian and greek descent that were WAY darker in complexion than one girl who was half-black but looked about as white as I am, and those people never complain about getting profiled the way some of these other people do.
I am utterly baffled by racism, not only in how people can still be racist in this day and age, but also in how so much of society reacts to it, people are far more interested in identifying as victims than they are in just living their lives as best they can. Like, yeah if racists actually are causing problems for you that’s a problem that needs to be addressed, but a lot of times I see them walk into a situation with the expectation that there will be conflict due to their heritage (not skin color, because as stated the specific individuals I’m talking about are NOT visibly distinguishable from white people) and low and behold a conflict arises. But naturally if I suggest that the difference in how I and they are treated might be in our respective attitudes (which, again, is based on observations of the individual people in question, not a generalized statement about people I don’t know) I’m victim blaming and/or defending racists.
erinacea
To be fair, they could be “racially profiled” based on their last (or first) name, physical attributes other than skin colour, or being associated with other Latinx people whose ethnicity is more visible.
a lot of times I see them walk into a situation with the expectation that there will be conflict due to their heritage …and low and behold a conflict arises.
… You do realise people will eventually come to expect racism after they have experienced a lot of racism in similar situations throughout their lives?
Taffy
“If you didn’t want people to be racist toward you, maybe you shouldn’t have been subjected to racism beforehand!”
Just a truly baffling take.
stellatedHexahedron
There are attributes other than literal color that are characteristic of race. These variations are slight, and some people are much better at perceiving them than others. It’s possible that many people readily perceive your friends as latine even if you don’t.
thejeff
Witness every time in this comic someone says “but Sal and Walky have the same skin tone”.
danimagoo
I suppose that depends what you mean by white and what you mean by Irish. I am a white American of mostly Irish ancestry. My Irish ancestors came to the US in colonial times, right before the American Revolution. These Irish were predominantly Protestant and predominantly from Ulster (what is today Northern Ireland). Today, we in the US largely call these people Scots-Irish, but that label is a later invention. At the time, these people called themselves Irish, and they were unquestionably considered white. There were a lot of this group to immigrate to the Americas in the mid-18th century. They mostly became farmers in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas. When they later wave of Irish-Catholic immigrants hit, during the potato famine, those new immigrants largely settled in the big cities of New York and Boston, and as happened with many new immigrant groups, were stereotyped and discriminated against. The earlier group of Irish immigrants, many of whom had similar names to the older group, wanted to distinguish themselves and began to say, “Oh, we’re not those Irish. We’re Scots-Irish (or sometimes Presbyterian-Irish).” The newer group of Irish were unquestionably discriminated against. However, there’s not much evidence they weren’t considered “white”. They just weren’t the good whites. I mean, in physical appearance, they weren’t any different than the earlier Scots-Irish.
thejeff
Straight up religious prejudice played a big role in it too. The early US was overwhelmingly Protestant who inherited anti-Catholic prejudice from the European religious conflicts and that get reinforced as it was the religion both of new strange immigrants and of Hispanics from the south and west.
SomethingGlitter
I mean that’s also how they identified themselves in Ireland (Scots-Irish or just Scots even though they’ve been there for centuries). My grandparents generation still do. I’ve no idea what they first called themselves in America but given how careful the Anglo and Scots Irish were to distinguish themselves from the Catholic Irish I find it unlikely they just went by Irish. I’ve always heard Scots-Irish in America as an Appalachian thing indicating a mix of ancestry from both countries, there’s been some talking at cross purposes because of it because I thought they meant what you did at first.
From my understanding, “hate crime” did not refer to Walky’s suspicions but to Mike actually disguising himself as Booster. Not the case with Sal unless Amazi-girl had darker complexion than her (might need confirmation from someone more versed in the American racial code of ethics).
No, but some people like to pretend we do, the issue is those same people never agree on what the code actually IS. It’s actually pretty hilarious to watch the arguments happen if one ignores how sad it is that it’s happening in the world we live in.
The REAL code is just try not to be a dick and remember to treat people like people at all times. But that has nothing to do with race so obviously it has to be more complicated than that.
remember to treat people like people at all times.
Omg, i can’t believe you found the solution to racism and no one is even listening to you /s
someone
Yes, the trick is to make a lot of fuss about racial issues so as to distract from class issues. The desired result is to have poor whites fighting against poor blacks while the 0.01% laugh in their gated communities.
Wait are you literally saying all of antiracism is a ploy by the 0.01% to divide the working class???
Dude. No.
Does capitalism try to co-opt antiracism, and sometimes succeed? Sure. Do we need more offensive class struggle? Definitely. Are you connecting dots completely at random, unwittingly propagating batshit conspiracy theories that throw antiracism under the bus?? …Maybe not, could be you’re just a troll tbh
Nova
I don’t have the energy to deal with this guy and Psychie’s “racism only happens to you if you believe in it” bullshit, so thank you a BUNCH for shouldering this burden today.
You’re doing great and I am so grateful you got here first so I didn’t have to take on their tired old talking points.
I mean, someone’s not really wrong about the trick, but it’s not antiracism that’s the ploy, it’s racism. Owners use racism to divide the working classes and to get poor whites to back rich whites.
someone
Yes, that. A lot of effort is spent on making sure people remain divided. That’s largely done by inciting racism. These ideologies are actively promoted, cf. the rise of the so-called “alt right”.
There’s a lot of money involved in this.
Taffy
Wouldn’t be Christmas without a completely clueless remark about inequality.
That is also my understanding. White people putting putting on makeup to look Black is a really bad thing to do both because of the history of minstrel entertainment in the US and other countries and because it’s just not cool to treat a race as a costume. (There’s similar histories for Asian, Native American, and Hispanic imitation, particularly in early Hollywood.). Booster is Hispanic and Mike is not, and while Mike was a jerk he wasn’t a racist.
Would that be a hate crime or just sorta frowned upon? I guess I never considered Booster not just being a tanned white person. Like if Mike was disguised as jacob or even walky, then maybe but I guess I’m curious now.
Yeah, white people darkening their skin for that kind of thing is pretty charged. I’ve got a lot of friends in cosplay, and unfortunately often, people have to be told to please not fake-bake to cosplay Katara, Korra, etc, like it’s a major no-no.
So, geishas whitening their skin is a hate crime? Just how fucked up is this world?
shanunu
Geisha don’t whiten their skin to look white. But people do darken their skin to look other races. You could make an argument that geisha whitening their skin to accomplish some standard of beauty is colorist (I don’t know if it is, I have no idea why they do it), it isn’t racist. Geisha aren’t trying to look like white people. People are always saying skin color is not a costume, but people who face less difficulty because of their skin color don’t really see how harmful it is to color their skin darker just for a day or two to look “authentic”.
Sirksome
It was mostly an aesthetic thing. White color is a pretty sought after symbol of beauty or purity across the world. It wasn’t to imitate white people but to mimic the appearance of smooth porcelain and flawlessness as well as youth. I’m far from an expert on this though.
Lan
That’s just a form of colorism tbh. It’s the very idea that lighter/fairer skin is more desirable/beautiful/pure etc. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with whiteness or European imperialism (although that has played a MAJOR role in it), but a cultural disdain for darker skin tones.
Lan
To your point, though, I can’t speak to the art of Geisha and its motives, but the association of white with purity and beauty frequently manifests as colorism
Sirksome
I don’t really have an answer for it. Let me know when someone can logically explain racism or colorism origins. You’d have to explain why humans associate emotions and ideas with colors to begin with.
TheCatCameBack
Humans associate colors differently depending on the culture. Whiter skin was valued as a beauty standard in Asia because it denoted a woman who spent less time in the sun (I.e. wealthy, not a field laborer), similarly, tanned skin became popular on white people for a time in the US because only the wealthy could afford vacations to sunny places, and so tanning beds became popular. Colorism is real and pervasive, and the association of white with purity/beauty varies depending on the culture. It’s been made more wide-spread by colonialism and racism though- as white people had stolen, plundered, and genocides all the wealth for themselves, and white skin again became a sign of wealth.
StClair
I’d have to check, but don’t (didn’t) geisha literally go for white, like chalk (or the Joker), not Caucasian peachy-tan?
Azhrei Vep
yup, they definitely went the clown-makeup route, not the cultural appropriation route.
And throwing my two cents into why the color white seems so highly regarded in so many places: I always assumed it was because it was so frickin’ hard to maintain anything’s whiteness. You need good cleaners or paints or bleaches, and you need them applied regularly. And that stuff’s bound to get expensive.
Psychie
To be fair (pun intended), so did Europeans for a few centuries there, but especially the 18th, and for rather similar reasons.
SeanR
And also fat. Don’t forget fat, by today’s standards, anyway.
SvenTS
Not really comparable since oshiroi was a makeup technique around highlighting and enhancing visibility not an attempt at appearing or pretending to be Caucasian.
Sirksome
That wouldn’t be a hate crime. Many cultures have a history of using makeup or altering their skin tone for numerous cultural reasons. It depends entirely on the context and history of the practice.
Geishas aren’t trying to look like a white person. It’s not the same.
Romanticide
The makeup Geishas were is based on centuries old court makeup that was meant for the face to be recognizable with very limited light as of course electricity was not yet invented and people saw the emperor, the shogun or whoever important on interiors for the most part.
It was a thing way before those persons even saw a white person.
What about darkening your skin the *old fashioned* way? AKA, spend a week in the beach toasting yourself.
wwwhhattt
That’s called tanning, and the purpose is not to present yourself as a member of a different ethnic group, but to show that you can afford to go somewhere with good sunlight and do nothing for a week.
“Hate crime” isn’t really the right term for it, since it’s not breaking any laws (unless we’re talking about enrolling in university under false pretenses or stealing someone’s identity but nvm) and it’s not (necessarily) fueled by malice towards a marginalized group. “Insensitive,” “appropriative,” “(potentially) harmful,” and “in poor taste” are all more accurate ways to describe it. However, I think the joke itself – as developed by the readers – is largely harmless, but I can’t speak for others and I’m not in a position to make an executive declaration on that beyond my own opinion
Yeah, it was just a joke since hate crimes typically involve bodily harm (think of that one university case where a girl was poisoning her black roommate). However, since it is a university it would be more than frowned down upon since it would violate the anti-discrimination policies that most if not all schools have, and “Mike” would almost surely be expelled.
thejeff
Not necessarily. Those get the press, but a lot of hate-criming is more stuff that would be little more than petty vandalism if it wasn’t for the hate – leaving nooses, painting slogans or swastikas.
Ethan and Booster just kind of shooting the shit like this is interesting to me.
On the complexion topic, I’ll be honest, I really have no idea what ethnicity Booster is, but I will concur that I don’t think Mike would have done something racist for a lark. Not his brand of assholery.
I really really thought Mike’s death was supposed to be ambiguous so that he could return at some point. But, Willis sez on the cast page that Mike is dead so he must be dead. You can’t get more official than that.
164 thoughts on “Thrilled”
Ana Chronistic
MIKE was a hate crime
…
inal
idkmerryshitscram
Cholma
He did it all for the nickles.
King Daniel
Gotta love those green woodpeckers ?
Doctor_Who
Mike was no common asshole. Dude had a brand to maintain, you don’t dilute quality assholery with plebeian racism like a common Twitter Troll.
Bicycle Bill
Even evil has its standards.
(enjoy your trip through the rabbit hole)
Wack'd
TV Tropes, on the other hand, does not.
Stephen Bierce
God Rest Ye Merry A$$#0l3men…
William Leonard Reese Jr.
At this point Willis is intentionally teasing us by keeping us away from the Joyce/Joe/Dorathy fight spotlight.
Though I must admit that I don’t understand what Ethan means by complexion.
Aren’t/Weren’t both Mike and Booster white?
Casi
with the name Booster Sanchez, i’m assuming booster is of a latin american persuasion
William Leonard Reese Jr.
I honestly hadn’t even thought about that.
Mostly because I had forgotten that Booster had a last name.
Nono
It was literally in the last strip.
William Leonard Reese Jr.
I think that entire time my eyes just glazed over the first panel yesterday.
SeanR
I really want his last name to be something like “Rhod”.
Sirksome
Well the last name Sanchez now implies some possible Spanish origin.
JepMZ
I assume he meant his Filipino Asian akin
someone
Booster is not white by American standards of whiteness. As Benjamin Franklin famously said, “the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased.”
So if you ask a Black African, a Tawny Asian, or a Swarthy European, they’d say that Booster is white; but the real whites, the Anglo-Saxon Americans, know that Booster is, in fact, swarthy at best. But he might actually be black if he has even a single great-great-great-great-great-grandparent from Africa due to the one-drop rule. America!
StClair
note that even the Irish – the Irish – were not considered “white” in America for a very long time, quite amply demonstrating IMO that the label has little to do with color (and/or albedo).
Psychie
Yeah, I get rather confused when some people I know of latinx descent claim they aren’t white and talk about how they get racially profiled, and I’m like “if I didn’t know your last name I never would have known you were descended from people from mexico/central america/south america” because some of them are paler than ME, I’m not super pale or anything, but nobody has ever mistaken me for anything other than white, even on some occasions where I was kinda tan due to walking everywhere in college, and I as far as I can tell these guys are more or less as dark as I am. Heck, I’ve known people who were of italian and greek descent that were WAY darker in complexion than one girl who was half-black but looked about as white as I am, and those people never complain about getting profiled the way some of these other people do.
I am utterly baffled by racism, not only in how people can still be racist in this day and age, but also in how so much of society reacts to it, people are far more interested in identifying as victims than they are in just living their lives as best they can. Like, yeah if racists actually are causing problems for you that’s a problem that needs to be addressed, but a lot of times I see them walk into a situation with the expectation that there will be conflict due to their heritage (not skin color, because as stated the specific individuals I’m talking about are NOT visibly distinguishable from white people) and low and behold a conflict arises. But naturally if I suggest that the difference in how I and they are treated might be in our respective attitudes (which, again, is based on observations of the individual people in question, not a generalized statement about people I don’t know) I’m victim blaming and/or defending racists.
erinacea
To be fair, they could be “racially profiled” based on their last (or first) name, physical attributes other than skin colour, or being associated with other Latinx people whose ethnicity is more visible.
milu
a lot of times I see them walk into a situation with the expectation that there will be conflict due to their heritage …and low and behold a conflict arises.
… You do realise people will eventually come to expect racism after they have experienced a lot of racism in similar situations throughout their lives?
Taffy
“If you didn’t want people to be racist toward you, maybe you shouldn’t have been subjected to racism beforehand!”
Just a truly baffling take.
stellatedHexahedron
There are attributes other than literal color that are characteristic of race. These variations are slight, and some people are much better at perceiving them than others. It’s possible that many people readily perceive your friends as latine even if you don’t.
thejeff
Witness every time in this comic someone says “but Sal and Walky have the same skin tone”.
danimagoo
I suppose that depends what you mean by white and what you mean by Irish. I am a white American of mostly Irish ancestry. My Irish ancestors came to the US in colonial times, right before the American Revolution. These Irish were predominantly Protestant and predominantly from Ulster (what is today Northern Ireland). Today, we in the US largely call these people Scots-Irish, but that label is a later invention. At the time, these people called themselves Irish, and they were unquestionably considered white. There were a lot of this group to immigrate to the Americas in the mid-18th century. They mostly became farmers in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas. When they later wave of Irish-Catholic immigrants hit, during the potato famine, those new immigrants largely settled in the big cities of New York and Boston, and as happened with many new immigrant groups, were stereotyped and discriminated against. The earlier group of Irish immigrants, many of whom had similar names to the older group, wanted to distinguish themselves and began to say, “Oh, we’re not those Irish. We’re Scots-Irish (or sometimes Presbyterian-Irish).” The newer group of Irish were unquestionably discriminated against. However, there’s not much evidence they weren’t considered “white”. They just weren’t the good whites. I mean, in physical appearance, they weren’t any different than the earlier Scots-Irish.
thejeff
Straight up religious prejudice played a big role in it too. The early US was overwhelmingly Protestant who inherited anti-Catholic prejudice from the European religious conflicts and that get reinforced as it was the religion both of new strange immigrants and of Hispanics from the south and west.
SomethingGlitter
I mean that’s also how they identified themselves in Ireland (Scots-Irish or just Scots even though they’ve been there for centuries). My grandparents generation still do. I’ve no idea what they first called themselves in America but given how careful the Anglo and Scots Irish were to distinguish themselves from the Catholic Irish I find it unlikely they just went by Irish. I’ve always heard Scots-Irish in America as an Appalachian thing indicating a mix of ancestry from both countries, there’s been some talking at cross purposes because of it because I thought they meant what you did at first.
Nova
Booster’s pronouns are THEY/THEM not HE/HIM <3 thanks.
Mark
Booster is probably slightly brown, unlike Mike who was white — that is to say, slightly brown.
BBCC
Booster’s last name is Sanchez and combined with the skin tone and this comment, I’m taking it as confirmation Booster is not, in fact, white.
Sirksome
Wait….have all Booster is Mike in disguise comments been hate crimes?! Have all Sal is Amazi-girl comments also been hate crimes?!…Uh oh!
Clif
Regardless, the strip is hilarious if you can read it pretending Booster is Mike.
APW
From my understanding, “hate crime” did not refer to Walky’s suspicions but to Mike actually disguising himself as Booster. Not the case with Sal unless Amazi-girl had darker complexion than her (might need confirmation from someone more versed in the American racial code of ethics).
Morleuca
We have a racial code of ethics?
Psychie
No, but some people like to pretend we do, the issue is those same people never agree on what the code actually IS. It’s actually pretty hilarious to watch the arguments happen if one ignores how sad it is that it’s happening in the world we live in.
The REAL code is just try not to be a dick and remember to treat people like people at all times. But that has nothing to do with race so obviously it has to be more complicated than that.
milu
remember to treat people like people at all times.
Omg, i can’t believe you found the solution to racism and no one is even listening to you /s
someone
Yes, the trick is to make a lot of fuss about racial issues so as to distract from class issues. The desired result is to have poor whites fighting against poor blacks while the 0.01% laugh in their gated communities.
milu
Wait are you literally saying all of antiracism is a ploy by the 0.01% to divide the working class???
Dude. No.
Does capitalism try to co-opt antiracism, and sometimes succeed? Sure. Do we need more offensive class struggle? Definitely. Are you connecting dots completely at random, unwittingly propagating batshit conspiracy theories that throw antiracism under the bus?? …Maybe not, could be you’re just a troll tbh
Nova
I don’t have the energy to deal with this guy and Psychie’s “racism only happens to you if you believe in it” bullshit, so thank you a BUNCH for shouldering this burden today.
You’re doing great and I am so grateful you got here first so I didn’t have to take on their tired old talking points.
milu
Aww thank you. Take care <3
thejeff
I mean, someone’s not really wrong about the trick, but it’s not antiracism that’s the ploy, it’s racism. Owners use racism to divide the working classes and to get poor whites to back rich whites.
someone
Yes, that. A lot of effort is spent on making sure people remain divided. That’s largely done by inciting racism. These ideologies are actively promoted, cf. the rise of the so-called “alt right”.
There’s a lot of money involved in this.
Taffy
Wouldn’t be Christmas without a completely clueless remark about inequality.
Nicoleandmaggie
That is also my understanding. White people putting putting on makeup to look Black is a really bad thing to do both because of the history of minstrel entertainment in the US and other countries and because it’s just not cool to treat a race as a costume. (There’s similar histories for Asian, Native American, and Hispanic imitation, particularly in early Hollywood.). Booster is Hispanic and Mike is not, and while Mike was a jerk he wasn’t a racist.
The Wellerman
Happy Holidays, Happy Saturnalia, Merry Christmas to you all!!!!
I’m totes available if you wanna chat BTW, keeping it simple this year:)
Yotomoe
Would that be a hate crime or just sorta frowned upon? I guess I never considered Booster not just being a tanned white person. Like if Mike was disguised as jacob or even walky, then maybe but I guess I’m curious now.
DailyBrad
Yeah, white people darkening their skin for that kind of thing is pretty charged. I’ve got a lot of friends in cosplay, and unfortunately often, people have to be told to please not fake-bake to cosplay Katara, Korra, etc, like it’s a major no-no.
The Wellerman
That’s actually a thing people do?!?! WTF?!?!
ktbear
So, geishas whitening their skin is a hate crime? Just how fucked up is this world?
shanunu
Geisha don’t whiten their skin to look white. But people do darken their skin to look other races. You could make an argument that geisha whitening their skin to accomplish some standard of beauty is colorist (I don’t know if it is, I have no idea why they do it), it isn’t racist. Geisha aren’t trying to look like white people. People are always saying skin color is not a costume, but people who face less difficulty because of their skin color don’t really see how harmful it is to color their skin darker just for a day or two to look “authentic”.
Sirksome
It was mostly an aesthetic thing. White color is a pretty sought after symbol of beauty or purity across the world. It wasn’t to imitate white people but to mimic the appearance of smooth porcelain and flawlessness as well as youth. I’m far from an expert on this though.
Lan
That’s just a form of colorism tbh. It’s the very idea that lighter/fairer skin is more desirable/beautiful/pure etc. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with whiteness or European imperialism (although that has played a MAJOR role in it), but a cultural disdain for darker skin tones.
Lan
To your point, though, I can’t speak to the art of Geisha and its motives, but the association of white with purity and beauty frequently manifests as colorism
Sirksome
I don’t really have an answer for it. Let me know when someone can logically explain racism or colorism origins. You’d have to explain why humans associate emotions and ideas with colors to begin with.
TheCatCameBack
Humans associate colors differently depending on the culture. Whiter skin was valued as a beauty standard in Asia because it denoted a woman who spent less time in the sun (I.e. wealthy, not a field laborer), similarly, tanned skin became popular on white people for a time in the US because only the wealthy could afford vacations to sunny places, and so tanning beds became popular. Colorism is real and pervasive, and the association of white with purity/beauty varies depending on the culture. It’s been made more wide-spread by colonialism and racism though- as white people had stolen, plundered, and genocides all the wealth for themselves, and white skin again became a sign of wealth.
StClair
I’d have to check, but don’t (didn’t) geisha literally go for white, like chalk (or the Joker), not Caucasian peachy-tan?
Azhrei Vep
yup, they definitely went the clown-makeup route, not the cultural appropriation route.
And throwing my two cents into why the color white seems so highly regarded in so many places: I always assumed it was because it was so frickin’ hard to maintain anything’s whiteness. You need good cleaners or paints or bleaches, and you need them applied regularly. And that stuff’s bound to get expensive.
Psychie
To be fair (pun intended), so did Europeans for a few centuries there, but especially the 18th, and for rather similar reasons.
SeanR
And also fat. Don’t forget fat, by today’s standards, anyway.
SvenTS
Not really comparable since oshiroi was a makeup technique around highlighting and enhancing visibility not an attempt at appearing or pretending to be Caucasian.
Sirksome
That wouldn’t be a hate crime. Many cultures have a history of using makeup or altering their skin tone for numerous cultural reasons. It depends entirely on the context and history of the practice.
The Wellerman
THANK YOU. and happy holidays!
GoingOnABearHunt
Geishas aren’t trying to look like a white person. It’s not the same.
Romanticide
The makeup Geishas were is based on centuries old court makeup that was meant for the face to be recognizable with very limited light as of course electricity was not yet invented and people saw the emperor, the shogun or whoever important on interiors for the most part.
It was a thing way before those persons even saw a white person.
Mr D phone posting
What about darkening your skin the *old fashioned* way? AKA, spend a week in the beach toasting yourself.
wwwhhattt
That’s called tanning, and the purpose is not to present yourself as a member of a different ethnic group, but to show that you can afford to go somewhere with good sunlight and do nothing for a week.
Lan
“Hate crime” isn’t really the right term for it, since it’s not breaking any laws (unless we’re talking about enrolling in university under false pretenses or stealing someone’s identity but nvm) and it’s not (necessarily) fueled by malice towards a marginalized group. “Insensitive,” “appropriative,” “(potentially) harmful,” and “in poor taste” are all more accurate ways to describe it. However, I think the joke itself – as developed by the readers – is largely harmless, but I can’t speak for others and I’m not in a position to make an executive declaration on that beyond my own opinion
bleepbloop
Yeah, it was just a joke since hate crimes typically involve bodily harm (think of that one university case where a girl was poisoning her black roommate). However, since it is a university it would be more than frowned down upon since it would violate the anti-discrimination policies that most if not all schools have, and “Mike” would almost surely be expelled.
thejeff
Not necessarily. Those get the press, but a lot of hate-criming is more stuff that would be little more than petty vandalism if it wasn’t for the hate – leaving nooses, painting slogans or swastikas.
Hoboturtle
Oh wait. I thought Booster was just tan. Turns out they aren’t white.
DailyBrad
Ethan and Booster just kind of shooting the shit like this is interesting to me.
On the complexion topic, I’ll be honest, I really have no idea what ethnicity Booster is, but I will concur that I don’t think Mike would have done something racist for a lark. Not his brand of assholery.
DailyBrad
Ohhh, I forgot we knew Booster’s last name, yeah, makes total sense.
Marvelman
I really really thought Mike’s death was supposed to be ambiguous so that he could return at some point. But, Willis sez on the cast page that Mike is dead so he must be dead. You can’t get more official than that.
Carla's #2 Fan
Yeah, but I don’t think Walky has access to that page.
Thag Simmons