Naturally we here at the ZRC are in favor of Zombies protesting publicly, and even offer qualified support to the Living who wish to dress up as Zombies and protest in public.

However, when Living people slap on makeup and shamble around to intentionally mime the worst and ugliest stereotypes about the Differently Animated, that’s wrong. It’s also what we in the movement call ‘Greenface’.

Here’s an unfortunate example:

So, what in the world do zombies have to do with the protests against Wall Street?

It’s simple, really: The protesters are portraying the financial fat cats as money-eating, corporate zombies. Here’s one protester explaining the clever representation:

The zombie is a metaphor and symbol of corporate greed … Let’s just do our best to embody zombie-ism … get into the whole ‘Uggghhh, moneeeey!’ thing, you know?

This is highly offensive, not to mention perplexing; Zombies aren’t exactly known for their profligate ways, expensive dress and Gilded Age mentality. In fact, Zombie hordes tend to be extremely egalitarian gatherings, both in real life and in fiction.

So what, precisely, are these people on about?

I really have no idea, but strongly suspect this is another case of lazy mental shorthand, ‘Bad things = Zombie’, fostered and encouraged by our irresponsible Mainstream press.

Instead of shameful and quite frankly embarrassing examples of casual Living Supremacism like these protesters demonstrated, we need more highly visible, peaceful and Zombie Friendly protests, much like the Madison Zombie Walk we had in the spring which the ZRC documented at the time on the blog.

For now we’ll have to stay hard at work educating would-be Zombie marchers about the plight of the Differently Animated, and the need to be respectful of Zombies and Zombie Culture. It’s what we do.

Tags: Anti-Zombie Public Event, Don't Use the Zed Word, Greenface, Journamalism, Mainstream Media

This entry was posted by John Sears on Tuesday, October 4th, 2011 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.