Analysis Of 'Shopping At J-Mart With The Williams'

The author of “Shopping at J-Mart with the Williams”, Lindsay Coleman, discusses race, ethnicity, and belonging in South Park. She talks about how South Park joins the “long tradition of decidedly impolite, racially charged comedy” (Coleman 131) through rhetoric. Coleman goes on to give specific examples of racially based actions in different episodes to show the commonality of this rhetoric in South Park. She explains how typical black stereotypes are portrayed in some episodes to help highlight South Park’s use of racial comedy. She also explores the role reversal of race through “social condition” (Coleman 131). In America, most people associate wealth with white men/women, but in South Park, the black men and women are the wealthy people.

Coleman’s main claim is that slurs “are shown to function both as social insulators and as catalysts for neurosis for those on either side of the ethnic or religious divide” (Coleman 131). Coleman is trying to illustrate how South Park uses racial or religious slurs to illustrate societies division through stereotypes. South Park’s use of derogatory and racial comments in its episodes helps illustrate Coleman’s idea of social division. Two major sublcaims of social division depicted in this article are through race and economical standing. Coleman starts by explaining how in “Cartman’s Silly Hate Crime 2000”, Cartman throws a rock at Token, who is black, for repeating words of Kyle and Stan, who are white. Token’s skin color “defines Cartman’s malicious … hate crime” (Coleman 132), as Cartman had no reason to throw a rock at Token and not at Kyle and Stan. This example relates to the racial subclaim since African Americans have a history of being beaten for no reason. Another example of race creating a social divide is in “Here Comes the Neighborhood” where Token provokes “a black migration to South Park” (Coleman 136), changing the “normative category for the town” (Coleman 136).