SpongeBob SquarePants accused of being 'racist' and 'violent'

SpongeBob SquarePants has been accused of normalising "violence" and "racism" by an academic. A US professor in a paper titled: 'Unsettling SpongeBob and the Legacies of Violence on Bikini Bottom', wrote that the yellow sea sponge, living in a pineapple under the sea, has colonialised Bikini Botton. 

The professor further claimed that SpongeBob SquarePants is "whitewashing" the "violent American military activities" against the natives on the Pacific islands. 

The article read, "The cartoon desensitizes viewers to the violence of settler colonialism, normalizes and erases the displacement of the Bikinian people from their ancestral land, and whitewashes US military rampages on the islands in the history and narratives of Bikini."

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The professor also finds a flaw in the theme song of the cartoon calling it full of "nautical nonsense." Further claiming that because of this children have "become acculturated to an ideology that includes the U.S. character SpongeBob residing on another people’s homeland." The professor's attempt received considerable attention.

Here's what Twitterati had to say:

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According to an international report, the professor added that SpongeBob SquarePants can cause children to "become culturally acculturated to an ideology that includes the US character SpongeBob residing on another people's homeland." "We should be uncomfortable with a hamburger-loving American community's occupation of Bikini's lagoon and the ways that it erodes every aspect of sovereignty," he added.  

The academic paper on SpongeBob SquarePants was published in a journal called The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal Of Island Affairs, and is designed to publish pieces on "social, economic, political, ecological and cultural topics".

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