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Is there anything good in Hexbear?
(lemmy.one)
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this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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Are you not aware that the confused Unga Bunga meme is based on a caricature of an Australian Aborigine, or do you not understand why the caricature is racist?
That photo is from a film about neanderthals. The phrase "unga bunga" has its earliest known usage in a Bugs Bunny short mocking Aborigines, but it's a generic enough phrase that I'm not sure you can write off the entire phrase as racist against Aborigines: any nonsense word could be used in its place and I'm not sure anyone creating or sharing the meme has actually watched that Bugs Bunny clip from 1950. It's just a nonsense phrase used to indicate low intelligence or nonsense. Given that the photo is of a neanderthal, I think anyone seeing the meme will understand that it's supposed to mean "a caveman would be confused by this" and not about any particular group of modern or indigenous humans. Most usages of the meme imply that the poster themselves is the confused one, so I don't think a racist would find it very funny to post something like that.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/confused-unga-bunga
Given that the words "unga" and "bunga" have existed in print since at least 1700 AD, I'm not sure we can point to that one Bugs cartoon as the definitive and only definition of that particular nonsense phrase. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=unga%2C+bunga&year_start=1500&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3
I promise you plenty of indigenous Australians have had to tolerate this phrase and the associated ableism for that entire time, and it is still used against them now.
The association of 'primitive' cultures and low intelligence is a huge continuing problem, including dehumanisation in the form of calling people different species' names.
I grew up watching those cartoons, and we definitely used it in an anti-aborigonal way for quite some time after it was pulled. Into the 90s at at least, probably mid-00s.
I'm glad to hear it's losing that history.
According to knowyourmeme the dude in the meme is a neanderthal character from a movie.
"Unga bunga" was originally used in a cartoon in 1950 with a caricature of an Aboriginal Australian, and it's completely reasonable for someone to not know that. I didn't until you prompted me to go and research the meme.
The phrase seems to be nonsense babble - there's no way to deduce the Aboriginal Australian racism link from the movie image or caption, you have to actually research the backstory.
In what sense is it based on an Australian Aborigine? The movie it's from is explicit that the character is a Neanderthal.