{"id":99,"date":"2014-05-09T11:42:28","date_gmt":"2014-05-09T15:42:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/?p=99"},"modified":"2021-09-22T23:27:06","modified_gmt":"2021-09-23T03:27:06","slug":"back-of-the-bus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/2014\/05\/09\/back-of-the-bus\/","title":{"rendered":"Back of the Bus."},"content":{"rendered":"

This video blew up Facebook and other social networking platforms this week:<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=rsH5VHRaT6M<\/p>\n

If you can\u2019t or don\u2019t want to watch and listen right now, it depicts a white man boarding a Brooklyn bus occupied mostly by African-Americans. He approaches a black woman and asks for her seat, suggesting she decamp to the back of the bus.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course the rest of the commuters go ballistic, and in the shouting match that follows, the man makes many racist comments, and suggests that the country will improve if Donald Sterling becomes President in 2016.<\/p>\n

As of this writing, the video (originally posted to Facebook by Zaida Pugh) has been shared 135,946 times on Facebook. I perused the shares, and many of them are accompanied by text along the lines of \u201cThis is still a racist nation!\u201d or \u201cIn 2014 this happens?!\u201d The outrage is bright and visceral.<\/p>\n

Other news sites and blogs have also shared the video. this one<\/a>, for example. It\u2019s also been shared by YouTube channels like this one<\/a>.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve probably guessed where I\u2019m going with this. It\u2019s fake. The whole thing was staged. Zaida Pugh is an aspiring actress, and the incident on the bus is the latest in a series of pranks she has produced for her YouTube channel<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what she says there at her \u201cAbout<\/a>\u201d tab:<\/p>\n

Hey everyone’ welcome to Msmuffin’s channel..if you like to watch comedy pranks, you’ve came to the right darn channel ;p..I hope you enjoy my videos. If you like my videos..I would appreciate it if you subscribe and share my videos.. If you have questions or interests be sure to contact meh..I wish the best to you all and stay strong ..and oh do me a big fav keep a smile on them beautiful faces, life’s too short to be stressing ;)..stay tooned you guys have a great day<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And if you\u2019re still not convinced, here\u2019s an interview<\/a>\u00a0with Ms. Pugh from earlier this year. It was written before the bus video was released, but she discusses some of her earlier pranks and her sense of humor.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to fault people for not \u201cgetting\u201d that this was a prank. People like to feel good about themselves, and they do feel good when they can call out overt racism like this appears to be. The prank also feeds a background cynicism that many people have about the world, especially within Internet culture. They\u2019re easily convinced that the world is as bad a place as they suspect it to be.<\/p>\n

Still, there are a few clues that should have tipped people off. First: yes, racism still exists in the United States of 2014. There\u2019s ample statistical evidence of this. African-Americans have worse luck with the criminal justice system than whites<\/a>, for one example. Stop and frisk laws and racial profiling have led to harassment for most nonwhite minorities in the U.S. And who can deny that the Trayvon Martin incident would have turned out very differently if Mr. Martin hadn\u2019t been black?<\/p>\n

However, here\u2019s the thing: most American racists are aware that racism is unpopular. Simply in the interest of self-preservation, a racist man is not going to get onto a bus populated by the people he dislikes, ignore several empty seats, and then ask one of those people to move for his sake. If he did, it\u2019s his sanity we\u2019d question more than his tolerance.<\/p>\n

Second, a white man on a bus asking a black woman to move is an iconic scenario, obviously harking back to Rosa Parks in Montgomery. Its specificity (again, remembering there were many empty seats on the bus) makes it unlikely to be real. If a man grabbed a microphone away from an honoree at an awards show, you\u2019d be suspicious, even if it were captured by cellphone in a way that seemed candid. The same goes for this.<\/p>\n

Many websites and YouTube channels these days seem determined to have their fictional content accepted as true. I\u2019ll explore this more deeply in a later post. For now, be wary of, but entertained by, Zaida Pugh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This video blew up Facebook and other social networking platforms this week: https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=rsH5VHRaT6M If you can\u2019t or don\u2019t want to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,16],"tags":[38],"class_list":["post-99","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conspiracies","category-scams","tag-pranks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":232,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions\/232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}