An anthropology professor attacked the cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants, writing in an academic journal that the show whitewashes “violent American military activities.”
Holly Barker, an anthropology professor at the University of Washington, opined that the animated television show minimizes the loss of the Bikini Atoll, an actual place in the Marshall Islands, to the Marshallese people, because it glosses over America’s use of the atoll to test nuclear weapons.
“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,” she wrote in the The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs.
“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,” Barker wrote. “SpongeBob Squarepants and his friends play a role in normalizing the settler colonial takings of indigenous lands while erasing the ancestral Bikinian people from their nonfictional homeland.”
Barker also accused the show’s Hawaiian shirt-clad characters of cultural appropriation.
“Despite being a presented as a nonsensical and harmless cartoon, SpongeBob shapes global perceptions of the actual place called Bikini,” she said, adding that the creators didn’t understand that “Bikini Bottom and Bikini Atoll were not theirs for the taking.”
SpongeBob SquarePants, which first aired on Nickelodeon in 1999, is the fifth-longest running American animated series. Its creator, Stephen Hillenburg, died last year at 57.
Earlier this year, an American beer company faced pushback from some Pacific Islanders for naming one of its brews “Bikini Atoll.”
Bikini Atoll and other surrounding islands remain uninhabitable because of decades-old lingering radiation. There are elevated rates of cancer among some of the Marshall Islands.
