sunisup:

Sometimes I hear people say that racism/sexism/etc in culture isn’t important or worth criticizing.  ”Oh it’s just a book,” they say.  ”It’s just a crappy TV show.”  ”It’s just a commercial.”

This argument always baffles me.  It’s like if you put poison into a fish-tank and then say “Oh well I didn’t poison the fish, I just poisoned the water.”  The fish lives in the water, dumbass; it’s completely submerged in and surrounded by the water.  I’m pretty sure that poisoned water is going to affect the fish.

Similarly, we all live constantly immersed in this miasma of information that we call “culture.”  People are not born prejudiced.  We don’t emerge from the womb knowing that all black men are scary thugs, that all Latinas are spicy sexpots, that all Indians are violent savages, that all women are weepy and frail, that all gay men are depraved pedophiles, and that all people in wheelchairs are objects of pity.  We learn these things, usually starting at a very young age, and we often learn them from our culture — the books we read, the movies we watch, and the constant barrage of advertising that we don’t really pay attention to but which still manages to seep into our brains, and which shapes the way we think about the world, for better or for worse.

If you want to save the fish, you need to purify the water.