Bluey call all shades of wrong
IT’S PERTINENT THAT EVEN THE WOKE ABC PRODUCERS AND WRITERS WEREN’T AWARE OF THE TERM’S “POTENTIALLY DEROGATORY MEANING”.
ACCORDING to the Urban Dictionary, “ooga booga” is caveman talk for hello, goodbye, and I’m hungry.
It’s also the name of a video game, a poetry collection, and a Launceston futsal team.
Apparently, it’s now also a racist term. Who knew?
Two episodes of the popular kids’ TV show Bluey have been pulled and will be reissued without the words “ooga booga” after a complaint was made to the ABC.
The ABC says it received a viewer complaint stating that two episodes of the show “included a term with racial connotations and a problematic history for Indigenous Australians”.
The broadcaster said it “sincerely apologised to the complainant for any distress caused by the term”.
“The complainant was advised that neither the ABC nor the external producers were aware of the potentially derogatory meaning of the term, which was intended only as irreverent rhyming slang made up by children.”
In other words, the ABC offered a grovelling apology and took immediate action over a term that no one even knew was racist.
It’s ridiculous. Shows containing terms that are not widely understood to be racist, and not used with any raa cial connotations, should not be modified to protect the feelings of a single viewer.
The term in question doesn’t have well-established history as a racist descriptor or saying.
A term like ooga booga is different, say, to a word like coon.
The cheese bearing this name is being rebranded because coon is a well-known derogatory term for black people.
The Macquarie Dictionary defines ooga booga as “a stereotypical rendering of what the speaker regards to be the language of those deemed by them to be African savages”.
But it’s much more commonly used by children as a nonsensical word, ranging from pretend caveman talk to baby talk for snot.
It’s pertinent that even the woke ABC producers and writers weren’t aware of the term’s “potentially derogatory meaning”.
I do not have a problem with popular culture keeping up with changing times.
It’s now generally accepted blackface is racist, and Indigenous and black stories need to be told by people themselves, instead of through white voices.
But there’s a limit, and we should beware of erasing our cultural history to protect the sensitivity of a mere handful of people — or, in this case, one single viewer.