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Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? Absorbent and yellow and porous is he?

Apparently, a racist who glorifies colonialism.

 

Yes folks, a professor at the University of Washington has published a report saying SpongeBob Squarepants and his friends continue “the violent and racist expulsion of Indigenous peoples from their lands (and in this case their cosmos) that enables U.S. hegemonic powers to extend their military and colonial interests in the postwar era.”

 

Wait, what?

 

Let’s go through this again. The cheery cartoon sea sponge who flips “crabby patties” for a job and lives in a pineapple in the undersea town of “Bikini Bottom” is really not safe for children to watch after all.

According to the Independent, Professor Holly M Barker believes SpongeBob’s hometown is a reference to the real-life Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Australia and Hawaii.

We always thought “Bikini Bottom” was an amusing reference to the lower half of a two-piece swimsuit, along with the Old English term for valley floor. But, no.

 

In 1946, the 167 indigenous residents of Bikini Atoll were relocated to other nearby islands so the U.S. military could use the area for nuclear testing. After being relocated, it was reported the Bikini inhabitants were left without adequate food or water to prevent them from starvation.

Professor Barker believes that, as an American character taking up residence in a place that natives had no choice but to leave (never mind that it’s a made-up cartoon place) SpongeBob is showing his privilege (his yellow privilege presumably) of “not caring about the detonation of nuclear bombs.”

Barker also takes issue with the “cultural appropriation of Pacific culture” in the cartoon show, with Hawaiian-style shirts, the sounds of a steel guitar and homes in the shapes of pineapples, tikis and Easter Island heads, perpetuating regional stereotypes.

As a result, Barker says children have “become acculturated to an ideology that includes the U.S. character SpongeBob residing on another people’s homeland.”

“We should be uncomfortable with a hamburger-loving American community’s occupation of Bikini’s lagoon and the ways that it erodes every aspect of sovereignty.”

 

But. He’s a sponge. A cartoon sponge.

 

Lest you think this professor’s worry about Pacific cultural appropriation is a bit too out there, may we remind you that the Student Bar Association of the University of South Dakota School of Law earlier this year renamed its “Hawaiian Day”-themed party as “Beach Day.”

Association members were further advised that leis would no longer be handed out because “using items of cultural significance might be viewed as inappropriate.”

The College Fix reported, “After the association announced the change on Facebook, one reader criticized it as the opposite of inclusive: “Aside from Hawaii being the least politically correct state in the union, they hand out leis to *everyone,* regardless of race. You realize, they are used specifically for inclusiveness, not as a way to rigidly define their culture in contrast to all others. But I guess this is the kind of absurd behavior we embrace now.”

 

SpongeBob used to seem like the most innocuous cartoon character in history without a malicious bone in his body – well, with no bones in his body.

But times have changed. Now we have people sensitive about EVERYthing. But if you’re sensitive about every little thing, you diminish the importance of the BIG things too.

 

We have a lot of problems in our world today, a lot of injustice, and a lot of wrongs we should make right.

Not sure shutting down a cartoon sponge is one of them.

 

 

 

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