Beige is the new green

When examining complex topics, such as those of diaspora and immigration, sometimes I think it is important to take a comedic look at the issues. Media that satire serious issues sometimes make it easier to critically examine the true motivations of these satires. In class this week we discussed the pseudo-academic “beige theory” which assumes that in the future all people will be one colour, beige. There are many problems associated with this idea, such as the notion that race is a tangible ‘thing’ that can be destroyed. It fails to acknowledge the social, historical and cultural constructions of race. During our conversation I could not help but think of the South Park episode entitled “Goobacks” (2004) (season 8, episode 6), in which people from the future travel back in time (to our present), looking for jobs. The people who arrive in South Park are all beige, as are all the people in the future. They speak a language that is a combination of all the old earth languages. They maintain their future culture, which is a mix of all the old cultures. They even establish neighbourhoods such as “little future”, which resembles neighbourhoods such as “little Italy”. In Kraidy’s (2005) article the notion that hybridity is universal and culturally specific demonstrates the fact that all cultures draw on each other and have similar elements but the elements each culture expropriates and uses within their own cultural hybrid is specific. The future people of South Park demonstrate this idea; they are a hybrid of all of Earth’s old cultures, but this is culturally specific to their group.

I think this is an interesting commentary about current aspects of global cultural hybridity and immigration and diaspora in general. Once they come to the present, they cannot travel back to the future, but the money they make will go to help support their families. However, so many people from the future come to the present that the people in South Park start to complain about loosing their jobs to this cheaper labour source. Near the end of the episode, the town realizes that making the world a better place in the present will make the future a better place for everyone. Of course, being the town of South Park, no one really learns anything from the experience, which again is an interesting commentary on North American society, but that is another topic. Clearly this is a comment about contemporary concerns surrounding immigration and diaspora, where people from around the globe travel/migrate according to where they can gain employment. What is also interesting is the way people try to cling to the (now) imaginary boarders between the present and future. This episode clearly follows a “new world boarder” with a transnational, hybrid culture.

While we may not all be beige in some distant future, this episode of South Park is an interesting analogy to look at the global hybridity of language and culture. In a world that is every more diverse, as boarder disappear (but remain every protected), and where the transnational flow of people is an excepted norm, it will be interesting to see how the future global society will appear.