french-cuffs replied to your post: So we’re still doing the Martin Freeman/Lucy Liu…

I first learned about the comment in the racism tag. I think it was the specific (and poorly chosen) use of the word ‘dog’ that gets some people.

Okay, that I can totally understand.  From that angle, it is wince-inducing, isn’t it?  Yeah, and I can see not letting him off the hook for that, then, joking or not.  There are some things where “Oh, I didn’t think of that” doesn’t cut it.

 s0mmerspr0ssen replied to your post: So we’re still doing the Martin Freeman/Lucy Liu…

Okay, wow, can I just have a … link to whatever is going on here?

Martin Freeman did an interview (here it is on Ivy Blossom’s Tumblr) and some people got angry over his comments about Lucy Liu.  The backlash I saw yesterday mostly centered around the “Is he being serious or not?” line, which seemed fairly ridiculous to me. But as french-cuffs points out, now some people are calling him on the racism angle.  I notice now that afrogeekgoddess has a reblog that makes a good point.

Now that’s something worth paying attention to, especially since I doubt he was even thinking about it from that angle.  Freeman can be snippy and snarky and dickish in interviews, but I’ve never seen him deliberately target anybody in a hurtful way.  But racism isn’t about whether we as white people are trying to be assholes, is it?  It’s about whether other people are being hurt by things we say or do.  So, yeah, object lesson in thinking about what you say before it comes out of your mouth.