Eric Cartman has long been a racist piece of shit. He’s worn blackface (more than once, if you count Mitch Conner) and pretended to be Chinese. In Season 16 of South Park he fought against interracial relationships. In Season 17, Cartman “stood his ground” against imagined black violence and managed to crash several jetliners in the process. He’s picked on Latino classmates, attempted to foment race wars and sang angry ditties about the minority customers of his once-beloved water park. And that’s before we even get to his virulent anti-semitism.
But a new image from the South Park Season 20 premiere, set for Wednesday at 10 p.m., suggests that Eric Cartman may have turned over a new leaf, at least in respect to one student: South Park Elementary’s Token Black. Check out Cartman’s new shirt:
An obvious play on “Black Lives Matter,” does this suggest that Cartman might have finally dropped his bigotry?
Don’t count on it. Eric Cartman has always stood in for the worst human impulses. His beliefs often match perfectly those of that weird and persistent rump of American political culture: the proudly prejudiced and ignorant. People who Hillary would place in her “basket of deplorables,” for the most part. Or — for those of us not chained to carefully workshopped political language — loud, dumb assholes. Cartman has always stood up for those Americans who believe Obama is the Antichrist (13%) or that black people are less intelligent (22.5%), lazier (26.8%), ruder (31%) and more violent (32.8%) than white people.
Yet, it’s one of the central premises of liberal thought that people can be persuaded; the belief that, slowly, we can get better and more empathetic as a culture. So perhaps we could be seeing a reformed Cartman in Season 20, a young boy who has outgrown in his bigoted and sociopathic attitude, who could hold a candle aloft in the darkness of ignorance and lead us to a new America.
But probably not.
We don’t know much about the plot of the South Park Season 20 premiere (and that first clip doesn’t tell us much), but we can always count on Eric Cartman’s complete moral depravity.
South Park Season 20 premieres Wednesday on Comedy Central.
