Tatsuya Ishida is the talented author/artist behind Sinfest. Sinfest has been around for an extraordinarily long time in webcomic terms - it's one of the first few that started in the pioneering age and went on to be successful. We don't know an awful lot about Ishida - he's pretty quiet about himself, even his artist persona (his blog/newspost updates are even fewer and far between than my own).
But we can look at his work through the years - this was his 5th posted comic:
As far as offensive/racist/punch-down humour goes, it's not egregious - you can see that he's taking the piss out of blaxploitation movies and not particularly glorifying black stereotypes.
But it's still racist. I'd measure this as Not Helpful to society at large - the good (including humour) does not outweigh the bad.
But his more recent work has taken on a decidedly more "preachy" tone (whilst still maintaining "teh funny"):
Perhaps some of the humour I took from this is coming from the reality I can (now) see - it wasn't so long ago I had the young/white/male privilege blues. This comic reflects the kind of bullshit I can literally read on the blogs I frequent (particularly tales of MRA douchebags from FreeThoughtBlogs) every couple of weeks or so (or more often).
Ishida's own journey - communicated entirely through the comics he publishes daily - resonates with me.
Whereever possible, I try to see the unthinking, unseeing, silencing creepiness that goes on in the world for people don't come from my position of privilege. I like to think I already had a reasonably solid foundation of social justice (in part due to my liberal-Catholic upbringing and a mother who adopted generally sensible views), but there's more oppression in the world than just rich over poor.
So I can look back and see my perspectives change (even the perspectives on religion/atheism when I first started this blog) - yay for me.
Here's the rub: I'm going to be a father before the year is over.
It's pretty damn exciting. But I'm terrified of the idea of having a child. Why?
Like all people, my own father had good and bad traits - but one very major drawback to his effectiveness as a father is the fact that for almost my entire life he has usually been absent. Divorce will certainly go some way to explaining that, but even when he was still married to my mother (up until I was around age 4), he wasn't terribly present in our lives. By all accounts, his own dad wasn't exactly father of the year either - apparently he was a Good Man (if your baseline is providing for your family and not doing anything terrible to them), but WWII and the culture of his time left him reasonably fucked up.
I don't plan on being absent in my own kid's life. So that's a start. But not being absent and being a good parental role-model are two different things.
With a daughter, I can see myself sharing the responsibility with her mother - there are things about a girl's life growing up that I can't possibly be expected to know, and I'm cool with learning and playing by ear.
But I feel like I'd have a responsibility to take the lead with a son to make sure he didn't end up like one of those MRA assholes, or a horrible racist, or standing outside an abortion clinic hassling people who really don't need that shit right now or ever (obviously, I wouldn't want a daughter to be like that either. This doesn't have to be a rational fear, it's just the fear I have).
I want to raise a kid who can see the things that I can see now.
Which is fine - the apple doesn't usually fall far from the tree, so I shouldn't be too scared.
But it also got me thinking - what kind of bigotry is still invisible to me? Will there be social justice issues that my kid/s will see and just shake their heads in embarrassment whenever I ignorantly espouse some backward-thinking cause?
It's possible. But I can see plenty today that I can teach them to get them on their way. I used not to want kids, but now I kind of feel obligated to raise someone capable of thinking for themselves, seeing injustice where it is, and giving their old man what-for when he's blinded by his own privilege.
I can only hope.
