Statement of Intent:

I'm not really sure if it comes across in the final product, but I spent a lot of time thinking about this piece. It's easy to make political artwork, but to make something that delivers a message in a way that isn't preachy or exceedingly blunt is hard as hell. That's what I was going for with Blonky.com, and I'm not entirely sure if it works, but I'm not sure I ever really could be, since the central idea behind it changed a lot for me over the course of it's creation.

The initial inspiration for the whole idea of a "Blonky" comes from the fact that I've always hated the term wigger. Now, there no doubt are white people, particularly teenagers, who latch on to an exaggerated form of black culture and look bufoonish as a result, but I've seen the term get thrown around way too casually, oftentimes just applied to white kids who had black friends or listened to hip-hop music. Plus, a wigger is by definition a white nigger, so when you say "Johny is being a wigger", you're saying "Johny is acting like a nigger". So, wigger just comes around to being a modern, PC equivalent of nigger-lover.

However, I've never heard a white kid say "Josh is acting too white", in reference to a black person, because "acting white" is, in many people's eyes, simply the norm. You can't "act white", because everybody does, or at least should, act that way. To "act black", or niggerish, is a deviation from normalcy, and therefore any white kid engaging in such actions is reprimanded by their peers, since they should know better. So, I wanted to kind of reverse the viewpoint and sort of jokingly analyze black people who "act white", and treat it as something odd and irregular. It's not something that's never been done before, since black people being labeled as "sell-outs" by other blacks is something that's happened for a long time, but for a predominately white audience (i.e. the internet), it's something that isn't talked about very often.

But, as I went along in the assignment, I also began to focus it a bit on the way that black people do oftentimes have to compromise themselves in order to appeal to people of different ethnicities. A white person can go their entire life, through grade school, through college and into the workplace, and never have to legitimately deal with a person of another ethnicity. For black people, the exact opposite is true, because just about regardless of where you come from, you will eventually have to have a white teacher or boss or something, even if you never make any white friends. So as a result, black people kind of have to give up a bit of their own cultural heritage so as to fit more comfortably into culture at large. Either that or they're seen as hostile and get the "angry black" label attached to them. Again, it's not something that I imagine most white people really think about, since they don't have to deal with it.

And the last thing that I had in my head when doing this assignment was to make my humor thoroughly uncomfortable to audiences of all colors. Not purely for shock value or anything, but I've noticed that the internet is home to a lot of stuff that's downright racist, even though it would claim itself to be purely humorous or satirical. I wanted the writing for this site to be similar, in that even though you can tell that a lot of the stuff is joking, the subject matter is still touchy enough that it makes people uncomfortable to laugh at it out loud, at least when they're around other people. The annonymity of the net is likely why so much of this kind of humor is out there. I had to draw upon my inner racist to write a lot of this stuff, but I don't think that it's burried all that deeply in most of us, so it was no real strain.

In the end, I don't think people will enjoy this site all that much, simply because it deals with such a touchy subject matter in such a blunt way. But, I hope that people, even those who find some of the stuff offensive, take the time to think about the world and how people other than themselves experience it. It's just natural for people to view the world in a vaccum and only see how things effect them, but I think it's worth the time to realize that what may be "normal" for you is a real stretch or a compromise in beliefs for someone else. I'm not entirely sure my piece is succesful in doing that, but I at least feel as though I was able to make some kind of point without having to explicitely spell it out.