Friday, May 1, 2015

Prager "University" and Racist "Educational" Videos

I recently ran across a video from Prager "University," of which I have never heard--it's actually just a conservative think-tank founded by Dennis Prager, which has tacked the word "University" to his name. The title of the 5-minute video is "Don't Judge Blacks Differently," filed under the "Political Science" section of the "University." Production is a combination of a still-shot of the single speaker, and primitive South Park style animation. It's a fairly typical conservative approach to race--i.e., the "color-blind" approach, that if we ignore race then the problem isn't really there, and it's academics who are the "real racists." However, while claiming to be academic, being affiliated with a "university," the video not only fails to present any kind of evidence-based claims, the theories that it uses to present its ideology is contradicted by decades of sociological and economic research.

Because of the farcical nature of the video, I created a spoof of the video, using the same video, but overlaying it with the built-in Microsoft text-to-speech voice of Anna using the software Balabolka. The text-to-speech isn't always as clear as I had hoped, and I am considering adding in a sub-titled track. But that would be a lot of work, so maybe I will, maybe I won't...

I don't have a title for the remade video, but here it is on Youtube:

Prager Spoof Video of "Don't Judge Blacks Differently"