Professor Argues SpongeBob Squarepants Promotes "Violent and Racist Colonialism"

Academia is a wondrous field where the most educated among society present challenging ideas to the status quo, oftentimes for the betterment of society. And sometimes it can lead to the absolute batshit-craziest hot takes the world has ever seen. Today, we're here to celebrate the latter, as University of Washington professor Holly M. Barker has argued that SpongeBob Squarepants, the children's cartoon about the titular sponge working at a fast food establishment and getting into hijinks with his various friends, celebrates violent and racist colonialism. You gotta respect it.

Barker's piece, titled "Unsettling SpongeBob and the Legacies of Violence on Bikini Bottom," appeared in The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs recently, and features this brilliant abstract:

Billions of people around the globe are well-acquainted with SpongeBob Squarepants and the antics of the title character and his friends on Bikini Bottom. By the same token, there is an absence of public discourse about the whitewashing of violent American military activities through SpongeBob’s occupation and reclaiming of the bottom of Bikini Atoll’s lagoon.

That's a beautiful pair of sentences. The immediate pivot from "Everybody knows SpongeBob" to "Not everybody knows about how SpongeBob whitewashes the violent American activities in Bikini Atoll" is the work of a gourmet hot take chef.

Barker's piece is attempting to construct an argument that SpongeBob, representing American, hamburger-loving imperialism, has overrun Bikini Bottom, which is itself representative of Bikini Atoll, an area in the Pacific Islands which was a site of nuclear testing during the Cold War, causing the relocation of natives in the area. In Barker's words:

“SpongeBob’s presence on Bikini Bottom continues the violent and racist expulsion of Indigenous peoples from their lands (and in this case their cosmos) that enables U.S. hegemonic powers to extend their military and colonial interests in the postwar era.”

Barker's piece, which is a staggering 24 pages long, takes aim at even the most mundane aspects of SpongeBob, including a deconstructionist take on the show's theme song. Choice quotes include:

"The first act of the song is to have children identify who resides in the pineapple house. The children's response, repeated extensively throughout the song, affirms that the house and Bikini Bottom are the domain of SpongeBob."

"The name 'Bob' represents the everyday man, a common American male, much like a 'Joe,'… our gaze into the world of Bikini Bottom, as well as the surface of Bikini, is thus filtered through the activities of men.”

“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.”

Barker admits that the show's creators likely did not have this symbolism in mind when making SpongeBob, but that makes their inherent colonialist attitudes all the more insidious.

The piece has been mocked across the internet, and Barker has not commented further on the issue. Most seem to agree that the piece's argument is highly strained at best. Personally, I'm not entirely convinced it isn't a brilliant troll designed to send up academia by making a ridiculous argument about a much-beloved children's television show on its 20th anniversary. Nevertheless, Barker's piece is an instant classic in the "Liberal Arts Takes Gone Berserk" genre, which has included Mr. Game and Watch in Smash is racist, Mary Poppins Is Racist, and Marvel's Hip Hop Comics Covers Are Racist.

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