pose in cowboy drag

Most of the time, I'm like just about everyone else in at least one way -- I don't much care who occupies the position of "Alabama Agricultural Commissioner." In fact, I didn't even know such a position exists. But then I saw a couple of ads for Dale Peterson, a current GOP candidate for Alabama Ag Commish. Peterson's ads immediately register as very, very "white" to me, and now I'm trying to count the ways.




Among the most obvious appeals to conservative white voters here is the nostalgic evocation of the Independent (White) Cowboy Myth. If you say "cowboy" to most white Americans, they'll immediately think of a hat-wearing, horse-riding white man. And yet, as Mel at BroadSnark explains (in a post on "White America's Existential Identity Crisis"), real cowboys weren't actually all that white, nor all that independent:

There is a certain segment of the American population that really believes in the American foundational myths. They identify with them. They believe that America was built by a handful of white, Christian, men with exceptional morals. Their America is the country that showed the world democracy, saved the Jews in World War II, and tore down the Berlin wall.

These people have always fought changes to their mythology. They have always resented those of us who pushed to complicate those myths with the realities of slavery, Native American genocide, imperial war in the Philippines, invasions of Latin American countries, and secret arms deals.

And we have been so busy fighting them to have our stories and histories included in the American story that we sometimes forget why the myths were invented in the first place.

No myth illustrates the slight of hand behind our national mythology quite like the myth of the cowboy. In this mythology, the cowboy is a white man. He is a crusty frontiersman taming the west and paving the way for civilization. He is the good guy fighting the dangerous Indian. He is free and independent. He is in charge of his own destiny.

Peterson's follow-up ad is even, um . . . better?



As Mel goes on to explain,

Read Richard Slatta’s Cowboys of the Americas and you will get a very different picture. In reality, the first American cowboys were indigenous people trained by the Spanish missionaries. In reality, more than 30% of the cowboys on Texas trail drives were African American, Mexican, or Mexican-American.

And cowboys were not so free.

Cowboys were itinerant workers who, while paid fairly well when they had work, spent much of the year begging for odd jobs. Many did not even own the horse they rode. Frequently, they worked for large cattle companies owned by stockholders from the Northeast and Europe, not for small family operations (a la "Bonanza"). The few times cowboys tried to organize, they were brutally oppressed by ranchers.

I think Dale Peterson (or rather, his handlers) may also be consciously echoing Ronald Reagan's cowboy persona. In turn, Reagan may have been consciously echoing another rough-and-tumble political poser, Teddy Roosevelt. In all three cases, a white male politician evokes a myth that seems even more "white male" than the man himself. And a crucial part of that white myth is the direct exclusion and erasure of non-white people.

In her book-length study of Roosevelt's self-fashionings (Rough Rider in the White House), Sarah Watts explains the political reasons for periodically dusting off and deploying this hoary white-male myth -- it's a recognition of, and pandering to, ordinary white-male American anxieties, anxieties that still exist today:

Roosevelt emerged as a central purveyor of the cowboy-soldier hero model because he more than any man of his age harnessed the tantalizing freedom of cowboys to address the social and psychological needs that arose from deep personal sources of frustration, anxiety, and fear. More than any other he sensed that ordinary men needed a clearly recognizable and easily appropriated hero who enacted themes about the body; the need for extremity, pain, and sacrifice; and the desire to exclude some men and bond with others. In one seamless cowboy-soldier-statesman-hero life, Roosevelt crafted the cowboy ethos consciously and lived it zealously, providing men an image and a fantasy enlisted in service to the race-nation.

In keeping with changing models of masculinity . . . mass-circulation magazines began to feature a Napoleonic "idol of power," a man of action who used iron will and "animal magnetism" to crush his rivals and dominate nature. Biographers of plutocrats and robber barons encouraged readers to envision themselves in a social Darwinist world of ruthless competition where character alone appeared effeminate and sentimentalism dangerous. Earlier notions of manliness had counseled reason over passion; now the hero must unleash his "forcefulness."

Enter a new type of charismatic male personality after 1870, a cowboy-soldier operating in the new venue of the American West on sheer strength of will and physicality. Eastern readers instantly recognized him as more masculine precisely because he met the psychological desires in their imagination, making them into masters of their own fate, propelling them into violent adventure and comradeship, believing them at home in nature, not in the hothouse interiors of office buildings or middle-class homes.

Writers pitched the cowboy ethos against Christian values of mercy, empathy, love, and forgiveness, against domestic responsibility and the job demands that complicated men's lives and dissolved their masculine will. The cowboy was not interested in saving souls or finding spiritual purity or assigning meaning to death. His code of conduct arose as he struggled against the overwhelming wildness of men and beasts and carved out a prairie existence with guns, ropes, and barbed wire. Readers suspended ordinary morality as they fantasized about life at the margins of civilization and sampled forbidden pleasures of taming, busting, subduing, shooting, hanging, and killing.

In addition, and more to the ("swpd") point, the falsified racial identity of this ideal cowboy-soldier effectively erased the fact that demographically disproportionate numbers of "cowboys" were not white.

"Many real cowboys were black ex-slaves,

whereas the Hollywood heroes were always white."

Nat Love, African American cowboy, 1876

(source)

At the same time, the cowboy myth was imagined in opposition to darker, dehumanized Others. Whitened cowboys of yesteryear were lauded in Roosevelt's time for having helped to vanquish Indians, of course. However, as Watts explains, a growing nostalgia for antebellum Southern plantation life, including the racial control it represented, also helped fuel the collective desire for such a virile, specifically white ideal:

Northerners adopted a more sympathetic view of Southern white manhood, one in which Southern elites came to be admired for their racial acumen. Northerners abandoned critical views of slavery for nostalgic reminiscences of plantation life in which white Southern men had effectively managed a racial society, keeping blacks where they belonged and protecting white women's virtue. In the theaters, novels, and traveling shows of the 1890s, popular themes of happy plantation slaves reflected Northern acceptance of the Southern white view of race and the Jim Crow limitations on suffrage, mobility, education, and economic life.

Even if many, though not all, Northerners drew the line at excusing lynching, Silber observes, they nevertheless accepted the idea that Southern white men lynched black "rapists" in the attempt to prove themselves men. Concerns about protecting Southern womanhood reflected Northern men's anxieties about promiscuous sexual behavior and the preservation of women's proper sphere. Finding a common ground of white manliness among former enemies . . . helped Northern whites to "cast African-Americans outside the boundaries of their Anglo-Saxon nation," to romanticize Southern notions of chivalry, and to justify turning Southern race relations over to Southern whites entirely.

Born into a wealthy Eastern family, Teddy Roosevelt was a physically weak and asthmatic child. When he joined the New York state assembly at the age of twenty-three, Roosevelt struck others as "unmanly." As Watts also writes, "newspapers and his fellow assemblymen ridiculed his 'squeaky' voice and dandified clothing, referring to him as 'Jane-Dandy,' 'Punkin-Lily,' and 'our own Oscar Wilde.' . . . Duly insulted, he began to construct a new physical image around appropriately virile Western decorations and settings, foregrounding the bodily attributes of a robust outdoorsman that were becoming new features in the nation's political iconography."

In a move reminsicent of George W. Bush's brush-clearing photo-ops on his own "ranch," the young Roosevelt moved to the Western frontier, in order to "harden" his body, but also to wear a series of conspicuous, meticulously detailed frontier costumes. Like the younger Bush, Roosevelt also bought a ranch, apparently for similar self-staging purposes (it's worth noting that the retired George W. Bush now spends most of his time in a suburban home outside of Dallas; he rarely visits his ranch anymore, and if the New York Times is right, when he does, he spends most of his time there riding a mountain bike instead of a horse).

Teddy Roosevelt posing as a cowboy

(at the age of 27)

As Watts writes of this photo,

In 1885, returning East after a bighorn hunting trip to Montana, Roosevelt had another studio photo made. This time he appeared as a self-consciously overdressed yet recognizable Western cowboy posed as bold and determined, armed and ready for action. "You would be amused to see me," he wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge in 1884, in my "broad sombrero hat, fringed and beaded buckskin shirt, horse hide chaparajos or riding trousers, and cowhide boots, with braided bridle and silver spurs." To his sister Bamie, he boasted, "I now look like a regular cowboy dandy, with all my equipments finished in the most expensive style." Only the fringed buckskin shirt remained from his Leatherstocking outfit.

Buckskin, he said, represented America's "most picturesque and distinctively national dress," attire worn by Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett and by the "reckless, dauntless Indian fighters" who led the "white advance throughout all our Western lands." Buckskin and whiteness notwithstanding, this 1885 image still seems forced, and his attention focused on the costs, accoutrements, and style of cowboy life. He does not even wear his glasses, without which he could see only poorly.

All of which makes me wonder just what kind of man Alabama's Dale Peterson really is, behind the pose of that everlasting, gunslinging, and white cowboy myth. The pose he's striking in cowboy drag just seems so obviously that -- a pose, and a mighty forced one at that.

Nevertheless, claims are now being made that Peterson actually is that cowboy. As Ladd Ehlinger, Jr., the writer/director of Peterson's ads, explains,

“I decided to stick him on a horse, give him a gun, and make it a John Wayne movie. . . . Some jerks are saying, ‘Oh, it makes us look like rednecks!’ Well, maybe in New York you wouldn’t make an ad like that, but this is Alabama, and here, people ride horses and shoot guns.”

When Peterson saw the ad, he “loved it,” Ehlinger says.

“Because I was basically doing a portrait of him,” he explains. “Not a campaign ad, but a portrait.”

To which I can only say . . . O RLY?

travel to other countries in order to "experience the people's pain"

An swpd reader sent the following email, in the hopes of hearing from other readers about what she describes:

My best friend's boyfriend (white) has recently revealed to me that, if he were ever in South Africa, he would want to live in the townships for a week in order to understand what the black South Africans go through, and "to see what $20 would do." He thinks that such an experience would make him a better person. Having to listen to him talk about this stuff made me really uneasy, but I didn't know how to articulate why it made me so uneasy. (Also, the reason he wants to go to South Africa in the first place is because he wants to enjoy the rugby and cricket there.)

However, on the flipside, one of my teachers recently told us about why he teaches, and one of the reasons were his experiences with the disparities in standards of living in India. My teacher, an Indian who grew up in the U.S., decided to go to Calcutta as a young adult specifically in order to be "shocked." I felt uncomfortable when I heard this, but I don't know if that's because I had just had the discussion with my friend's boyfriend. I'm still trying to figure out whether a PoC who goes to another country to be "shocked" is in a completely different scenario that a white person who goes to another country to be "shocked." (However, since my teacher here is an Indian going to India, there are of course other nuances.)

Do you think she's right to find either or both of these travelers in search of other people's pain off base?

And have you encountered other travelers (or wannabe travelers) like this? If so, what did you think?


Update: Thanks to commenter Sean for the following related video, "Gap Yah," by a British comedy group, The Unexpected Items:

falsely distinguish between (white) expats and (non-white) immigrants

This is a guest post by Daniel Cubias, who blogs at The Hispanic Fanatic. Cubias also writes a column for the Huffington Post, and he writes of the Hispanic Fanatic, who may or may not be an alter-ego, that he "has an IQ of 380, the strength of twelve men, and can change the seasons just by waving his hand. . . . the Hispanic Fanatic is a Latino male in his late thirties. He lives in California, where he works as a business writer. He was raised in the Midwest, but he has also lived in New York."


The waiter approached our table and recited the specials in a flowery French accent. Because I live in Los Angeles, I assume that every waiter is an actor, especially ones who are speaking with outrageous inflections.

But as it turned out, he was the real deal. Over the course of the dinner, he informed us that former Parisians constituted most of the restaurant’s staff. Evidently, the owner was from France, and he liked to help his fellow countrymen get started in this country.

“So you’re an expatriate,” I said.

“Oui,” he answered.

Now, I’m certainly not going to claim that the French are wildly popular with Americans. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that people in this country were ordering freedom fries.

Strangely enough, I don’t recall anybody asking for a freedom kiss. But I digress.

The point is we can all agree that Europeans, in general, receive kinder greetings here than do people from Latin America. In fact, it’s in the very terms we use.

The French waiter was an expat. It’s a word that evokes a daring and exotic nature, an upscale sensibility. It’s a positive term.

In contrast, we refer to Guatemalans and Colombians and Ecuadorians as immigrants. That word conjures up a lot of connotations, but most of them, alas, are not positive.

What is the reason for this dichotomy?

Certainly, legality has something to do with it. I presume that the French waiter has a work visa. The Mexican busboy, in contrast, may not. But as I’ve written before, the self-righteous screeching over the “illegal” part of the phrase “illegal immigrant” doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It’s a point, yes, but a minor one.

The differentiation, according to one unimpeachable source, “comes down to socioeconomic factors… skilled professionals working in another country are described as expatriates, whereas a manual laborer who has moved to another country to earn more money might be labeled an ‘immigrant.’”

It’s an arbitrary, even unfair, definition. But it’s accurate.

Still, that doesn’t explain the difference fully. For example, we would never call someone a Mexican expatriate, even if she were a successful businessperson like the owner of the French restaurant. She is forever an immigrant.

At its most basic level, the reason that we view Frenchman and German women and British people as expats, rather than as immigrants, is because we like them better. We respect them more.

It’s right there in the language.

It works the other way too. Any American adult who chooses to live abroad is an expatriate (with the possible exception of Peace Corps volunteers). It really doesn’t matter if you bum around Europe for years or head up the international office in Hong Kong. If you’re an American living in a foreign land, you’re an expat. You won’t be called an immigrant unless a native resents your presence, and even then, you’re more likely to be called “gringo,” “yanqui,” or “member of the invading imperialist army.”

There is, of course, a long history of Americans moving abroad to have their art better appreciated, or at least to sleep with people who have more interesting accents. It’s the Lost Generation of Hemingway, and the Beat Generation of Kerouac, and the Brooding Generation of Johnny Depp (he lives in France, you know).

So perhaps I will do my part and live out that dream I have about moving to London. It might be amusing to see the British try to figure out if I’m an American expatriate or a Latino immigrant.

Perhaps I would be both.

think of the americas as empty before white people came

White people in America, and in Canada, have complex feelings and thoughts about the people who occupied the land before them. We long called them "Indians," largely with derision, and then many of us took to calling them Native Americans, thereby at least acknowledging the fact that they were here first.

Nowadays, white people are rarely as openly racist as we once were toward indigenous people. In fact, we have many ways of claiming that much to the contrary, we like, respect, and "honor" them -- from romantically grasping for supposed Native American blood in our ancestry, to decorating our bodies and homes with Native American objects, to claiming that cartoonish sports-team mascots are somehow respectful, instead of insultingly reductive.

When we're not claiming that we admire Native Americans -- or rather, their forefathers and foremothers, since our romanticized conceptions of them are all frozen in some distant, dreamy past, with next to nothing to do with today's actual Native American people -- when we're not claiming to admire them, we pretty much forget about them. Basically, we continue to more or less erase them.

I was reminded of this invidious erasure when I saw this Canadian ad for Hudson's Bay Clothing Company at boy louie's blog; this ad ran before the Olympics on Canadian TV (which is why I, living in the U.S., had never seen it).



(Transcript)

This ad, full of restlessly moving, and then exercising white people, is entitled "We Were Made for This." I find the ad stirring and well produced, with great cinematography and music and so on. But then, like boy louie, I can't help but wonder who this "we" is: "The 'we' this Bay ad refers to is not the inclusion of all Canadian people, it is the exclusive group of white, European people who came to Canada and conquered it as their own."

It doesn't take long at all for me to see this celebratory, triumphant ad as horribly racist. Although it may include one or two non-white people, its depiction of the relentless march of Euro-Canadian progress mostly just erases indigenous people, as well as other kinds of non-white people who now populate Canada. This erasure occurs in the imagery of mostly white people moving across snowy landscapes, but also in the very first line of narration: "We arrived 340 years ago, to a land of ice, rock, and snow."

A rugged landscape indeed, a real challenge for "us." A perfect, and perfectly blank, canvas for the adventures of an ever-restless (white) people. But of course, this geographical canvas can only be imagined as blank before "our" arrival because its original people have been blithely, arrogantly erased from it.

In terms of race, then, this Canadian "we" is a lot like the American "we" -- all too often, it's an unspoken "white" we.

I'm reminded of, of all things, a famous poem by Robert Frost. When he was a white-haired octogenarian, Frost read this poem from memory, on a blustery winter day (oh, the snowy white irony, yet again!) at President Kennedy's inauguration.*


The Gift Outright

The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

Once again, stirring words, inspirational even, until I get to thinking about who Frost's "we" is. The "colonials" were primarily British, and as they created a country, these people came to identify as "Anglo-Saxons," the "real" or "most" white people in an ever-morphing hierarchy of whiteness. And once again, Frost speaks of "the land" as if it was empty -- still unstoried, artless, unenhanced -- before white people came along to claim it as a gift. Maybe indigenous people are included in that line about "deeds of war"? But even then, they're cordoned off from the real story, the story about "us" and the formation of "our" country, by parentheses.

I've often wondered -- how did Native Americans hear this poem when Frost read it aloud to the nation, in 1961? And how did other non-white people hear it, just as the Civil Rights Movement was gathering steam to truly challenge and fight back against that great white "we"?

And now, after watching this recent Hudson Bay ad, I also wonder, yet again, nearly fifty years after Robert Frost announced, in front of yet another white president, just who "we" were -- when will white people ever stop assuming that in so many different social arenas, they belong at the absolute, triumphant, dead center of things?



* You can watch "the grand old man," Robert Frost, read his poem at Kennedy's inauguration here, at about 36 minutes. Frost had written a long preface to the poem for the occasion; apparently, the sun was so bright that he couldn't read his type-written pages, so he instead recited "The Gift Outright" from memory, changing "such as she would become" at the end to "such as she will become."

enjoy white-guilt redemption fantasies

I was going to join the masses and go see Avatar, and then I was going to write about its glaring white-centricity, but now I don't have to. Instead, I just read, and can highly recommend, an excellent take-down in precisely those terms at (of all places) Gawker.com.

This piece (excerpted below) is by a person with a familiar name, Annalee Newitz. Among her varied publications, Newitz is the co-editor of a foundational Critical Whiteness Studies volume, White Trash: Race and Class in America (she's also the author of many other smart things).

In her review of Avatar, Newitz places it in the context of other white-centered fantasies of racial redemption -- formulaic, big-money spectacles in which "a white guy manages to get himself accepted into a closed society of people of color and eventually becomes its most awesome member." Here are some excerpts from Newitz's analysis, and I highly recommend the whole thing (but not, predictably enough, the comments below it).


"When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like 'Avatar'?"

Critics have called alien epic Avatar a version of Dances With Wolves because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy. Spoilers...

[It's] undeniable that the film -- like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year -- is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it's a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?

Avatar imaginatively revisits the crime scene of white America's foundational act of genocide, in which entire native tribes and civilizations were wiped out by European immigrants to the American continent. In the film, a group of soldiers and scientists have set up shop on the verdant moon Pandora, whose landscapes look like a cross between Northern California's redwood cathedrals and Brazil's tropical rainforest. The moon's inhabitants, the Na'vi, are blue, catlike versions of native people: They wear feathers in their hair, worship nature gods, paint their faces for war, use bows and arrows, and live in tribes. Watching the movie, there is really no mistake that these are alien versions of stereotypical native peoples that we've seen in Hollywood movies for decades.

And Pandora is clearly supposed to be the rich, beautiful land America could still be if white people hadn't paved it over with concrete and strip malls. In Avatar, our white hero Jake Sully (sully - get it?) explains that Earth is basically a war-torn wasteland with no greenery or natural resources left. . . .

These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color -- their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the "alien" cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become "race traitors," and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It's not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it's not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It's a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.

Think of it this way. Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege. . . . 


Read the rest here

go on ghetto tours

[Update (1/17/10) The idea for a "ghetto tour" described below ($65, lunch included) is up and running this weekend, as noted in this New York Times feature story.]



So someone in Los Angeles is now offering "Ghetto Tours"?

Really?

Yes, really -- turns out that "Doonesbury" (circa 1972) was waaaay ahead of its time:

According to the Los Angeles Times,

A group of civic activists, united by faith and a belief that the poor economy in the interior of Los Angeles is a social injustice, is preparing to offer bus tours of some of the grittiest pockets of the city, including decayed public housing, sites of deadly shootouts and streets ravaged by racial unrest.

After a VIP preview last weekend, L.A. Gang Tours expects to open to the public in January, giving tourists a look at the cradle of the nation's gang culture -- the birthplace of many of the city's gangs, including Crips and Bloods, Florencia 13 and 18th Street.

Before going on to explain why I think this is a problem, I think that description of "L.A. Gang Tours" merits one more "Doonsebury":






Seriously now, what kind of white people will go on these ghetto tours? What or whom will they be looking for, and how close do they really want to get to that? Why do they want to get so close (but not, you know, too close)?

I can't imagine that any more than a very small percentage of people will go on these tours with anything other than a prurient, voyeuristic desire to see and photograph what amounts, for them, to animals strewn across the Serengeti.

Okay, maybe I shouldn't be so quick to doubt this effort. According to the Times, some apparent community leaders are involved, and the profits are marked for explicit community improvements:

"This is ground zero for a lot of the bad in this city. It could be ground zero for a lot of the good too," said Alfred Lomas, a former Florencia member who has become a leading gang intervention worker in South Los Angeles and is spearheading the tours. "This is true community empowerment."

The nonprofit group plans to offer two-hour tours at an initial cost of $65 per adult, with profits funneled back into the community through jobs, "franchised" tours in new areas and micro-loans to inner-city entrepreneurs. Early routes will focus largely on South L.A., with forays through Watts and Florence-Firestone. . . .

The L.A. tour comes after months of planning, and is offered in a spirit of education and public service. Lomas, who will lead tours at first, plans to talk about important chapters in the development of the city's core, such as how racist housing restrictions shaped ethnic enclaves and the formation of gangs.

Well, I suppose it could be an education, for some. But still, how could the organizers ward off gawking, pseudo-ethnographic thrill-seekers? Maybe they think including such people will be okay, since their money will go to good causes? Maybe.

Nevertheless, some aspects of this story suggest that a lot of ghetto tourists are going to have their stereotypes about inner-cities, and about their non-white residents, confirmed rather than challenged:

Other aspects may raise eyebrows. Selling shirts painted on the spot by a graffiti "tagger" is one thing. But one backer said he also hopes to stage dance-offs between locals; tourists would pick a winner and fork over a cash prize. It wasn't long ago that organizers decided against a plan to have kids shoot tourists with water pistols, followed by the sale of T-shirts that read: "I Got Shot in South-Central."

Yes, those aspects did raise my eyebrows. And my anti-racism hackles, too. Others in the areas to be toured seem to agree. Francisco Ortega, a field staffer with the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission, told the Times that the tours "could come across like a zoo or something. . . . You're being carted about: 'Look at that cholo over there!' It could be perceived as demeaning for the people who are living in these conditions. I don't know how they're going to manage those perceptions."

City Councilwoman Jan Perry seems to have even stronger reservations. "It's not right to put people on display," she said.

Apparently this is an expensive operation, with several big-time investors involved. In fact, money is a suspiciously big concern here. According to the Times, one of the investors, Terry Jensen,

believes the tours could generate $1 million in profit in the first year, and that it would compete for customers with operators of celebrity-home tours in Hollywood.

"I think this will be a destination tour," Jensen said. "I think people will come to Los Angeles to take this tour."

Amidst Jensen's rosy promises that some of the profits will be used to send a local "tagger" to art school, he acknowledges the risks of hauling busloads of tourists through gang territory:

"We all know that the day somebody gets hurt, it's over," he said. "We're counting on the fact that the gangs aren't going to mess in their own beds."

Yes, we all know what bed-messers those Crips and Bloods and such can be.

"Driver, stop the bus! No wait, step on it -- my Harold just got a cap busted in his ass!"

I shouldn't joke about this effort to . . . rejuvenate areas devastated by racism? Make some money from jungle-crawling adventurers? Well, maybe it's both, but the whole effort does seem ripe for satiric derision.

As I said, a potential problem here, which seems like a big one, is that a lot of people who don't live in a neglected urban setting will probably emerge from such a tour with their misconceptions and stereotypes firmly in place, rather than displaced, or even challenged. They'll be lighter in the wallet, but they'll have had a brush with "danger," too, in a place they already associate with "the jungle," and with people who resemble in their imaginations the inhuman and frightening residents of a jungle. These are the kinds of atavistic stereotypes that long ago drove white people away from cities; they also continue to account in large part for levels of residential segregation that in many places are higher than they were during the Jim Crow era.

Another problem, from what I can tell, is that residents of the touring areas were not consulted in any significant way about being put on display like this for gawking tourists. It seems that the people approached from the area were primarily those associated with gangs, and the main motivation there was to ensure that bullets aren't flying when the buses are cruising through. (At one point in the Times story, a negotiator for the project tells a local leader with gang connections, "I'm not saying you have to stop shooting each other. . . . Just allow me a certain time in the day. . . . Just let the bus go through.")

So hey, folks, adventure tourism just got better, for those Americans who can afford it. And, it's become less time consuming! Who needs to go to Africa for a Safari, when you can get up within snapshot distance of wild things right here in the U.S. of A.?

Oops, there goes my satiric reflex again. This idea of "ghetto tours" makes it really hard to resist.



[My thanks to swpd reader JJC for a tip about this story. For another, smaller-scale ghetto tour in Chicago, see this 2007 USA Today story. Also, via Racialicious, a post at Gothamist on tourists in NYC flocking to the site of Amadou Diallo's death.]

go on racially trouble-free vacations

It's vacation time for me, so I'll be posting lightly for the next week or so, and with more excellent and gracious guest posters than usual.

As I travel, I will not be taking a break from thinking about and trying to counteract whiteness -- my own, and maybe other forms of it around me. My racial status follows me everywhere, but unlike many non-white people, I can forget that most of the time, if I want to. I can forget that as I'm out fishing somewhere, that somewhere is a place that my ancestors basically stole from other people, and that the theft was in part justified by an unwarranted belief in racial superiority.

I'll also be taken differently by others just because I'm white. When I vacation in The Great American Outdoors, almost all of the people I encounter doing the same thing out there, or working for those doing the same thing out there, are white. That won't even occur to most of us, but it will occur to me.

I'll also be welcome everywhere I go, in part because I'm white, and I'll feel I have a right to go anywhere I like, for the same reason. It won't occur to most of my fellow white vacationers that many non-white people would feel less than welcome in many of the places I'll be going, but that will occur to me.

As I'm fishing, it's not likely that I'll encounter any problems brought about by my being white. Since I'm not black, the lack of anxiety I feel about traveling probably stems from racially trouble-free experiences that go all the way back to childhood travels with my parents. Because I'm white, I have no memories of travel that compare to those recorded a long time ago by Countee Cullen, in his poem "Incident":

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.

Were I of, say, a traveling angler of Asian descent, I might have other things to worry about, such as roving gangs of white teenagers, who hope to find some fun in what they call "nipper-tipping":

Everyone in the area calls it the Blue Bridge. Formally called Mossington Bridge, it is a sturdy, small structure that leads to leafy and lavish Jackson's Point.

It's around these ostensibly bucolic parts that Torontonians -- Asians in particular -- have in recent years been driving up in droves to catch perch, rock bass or the occasional pike on Lake Simcoe's south shore. The angling here is best in the late evenings.

But the area around the Blue Bridge is one of those inevitable late-night magnets of teenage trouble that exist in almost any small town.

The long pier became the flashpoint of violence recently. Following three previous assaults involving Asians and anglers on a federally owned pier near the bridge, a confrontation last month left one young man in coma, another seriously injured and another in jail.

In reports that followed these events, an example of local vernacular emerged, a term teens in the area use to describe how they sneak up on Asian visitors, push them into the water and destroy their gear.

They call it "nipper-tipping" -- an amalgam of the Second World War-era epithet for a Japanese person and the practice of tipping over sleeping cows.

Outside a grim-looking tattoo parlour in the area, I asked a bunch of teenagers if any of them had ever heard of the phrase in question. One youth, who said the practice was for idiots, added he had seen it done to a white man.

Yet the impact of the "N" word has overshadowed the reality of the situation-- what residents say is a sense of lawlessness in the face of a day-tripping boom and bigoted, self-styled vigilantism.

In the past week, Mayor Robert Grossi, who represents the 42,000 residents in the area -- including the towns of Keswick, Sutton and Pefferlaw -- has been conveying his embarrassment to ethnic groups.

Still, he explained, racism is everywhere. "You can drill down into any community and find the same thing."

Though Mr. Grossi has been in serial-apology mode since the Sept. 16 attacks, there is evidence that not everyone in the town is so repentant.

Last week, swastikas, anti-Semitic and homophobic graffiti were spray-painted on houses and cars on a modest Keswick street. This week, just down the road at the Sutton District High School, a swastika was found on a wall and scrubbed off.

"It's seen as an isolated, singular act of mischief," said Ross Virgo, a spokesman for the York Regional District School Board. . . .

It may well be a great place to live, but there have been some, of late, who have found it not such a great place to visit.

Chinese Torontonians have been taking to local call-in shows, claiming that they have been victimized by Georginians.

One caller claimed he was threatened at gunpoint.

"What happens is locals see out-of-towners carrying coolers and coolers of rock bass, and they think it's coming from 'their' lake and that there are quotas," said Victor Wong, executive director of the Chinese Canadian National Council, who said there are no quotas.

"We really need a dialogue between the communities, and we're going to do that."

Maybe I should count my blessings because I don't have to worry about things like "nipper-tipping," nor other forms of harassment faced by non-white people in The Great American Outdoors.

I'll also be able to relax, if I want to, about the racism buried within the small, racially isolated, and largely white communities that I'll be passing through. Whiteness nurtured in relative isolation tends to be xenophobic in its own particular ways.

But then, I really can't relax about that anymore. As I've explained before, all-white places creep me out now. I know too much about how they got that way, and what kinds of racial attitudes fester in racially isolated places, and how non-white visitors could well be treated differently than myself.

At the same time, I'll be aware that merely being "aware" of these things isn't doing anyone but me all that much good. I'll most likely be riding the wave of my white, male, middle-class American privilege into a smooth, fun vacation, but couldn't I do another kind of vacation, one that somehow more actively counteracts such privilege?

Do any of you know of a better vacation for privileged people? for those among them who'd rather do something other than ride the wave comprised of their various privileges? I have family reasons for taking a fishing trip, but for future possibilities, I'd like to hear about options that are better in this sense.

And what about you? If you've done any vacationing this summer, was race a factor?

Actually, what I should ask is, how race is a factor. Because in anyone's vacationing experience, especially in the United States, it very likely is one.


UPDATE (8/23/09): Another maddening example of something that I don't have to worry about during my summer vacations: "76-Year Old MD Man Beaten While He Fished":

Three white men shouting racial slurs beat a 76-year-old black man while he was fishing in a river early Tuesday, said Baltimore police, who were investigating the attack as a hate crime.

The assailants also stole the man's sport-utility vehicle, said Anthony Guglielmi, a police spokesman. Police caught up with the vehicle and arrested 28-year-old Calvin E. Lockner.

Late Tuesday, police said Lockner was charged with hate crime, attempted murder, first-degree assault and carjacking. During his interview with detectives, Lockner "admitted he does not like African-American people," Guglielmi said.

travel to exotic locations, meet adorable children, and shoot them

This is a guest post written for swpd by bookpenporch, who describes herself as a writer and graduate student based in the U.S. Midwest. She reads, writes and thinks about growing up in the rural U.S. South, and about race in literature and public discourse.


At my undergraduate institution in the U.S., 60% of the students “study abroad.” I was among this 60%, studying history in Prague and Shakespeare at Oxford. At some point, consciously or unconsciously, I did many of the things that make people in Europe annoyed with U.S. American college students: I made too much noise in my residential apartment building, refused to attempt more than a few words in the national language, and ate pizza and McDs instead of potato dumplings and blood sausages. I wasn’t the worst, though, and I knew that the less noise I made, the more I would learn, and the more respectful I would be of the people around me who happened to live in a popular tourist spot for privileged U.S. students.

Some of my college friends went to countries and cities in impoverished regions of the world on their international trips. Some had grants, some had Daddy’s Amex, some were conducting research, some were with NGOs, church missions groups, medically-focused non-profits, but almost all had a need for an interesting grad school essay or job interview topic.

And, like me, all of them returned to the U.S. with hundreds of pictures to post on Facebook. My pictures were of the ridiculously beautiful architecture in Prague and Oxford. Cultural appropriation, check. I was taking such photos from a position of privilege, but the friends and classmates I mentioned above came back with pictures that somehow grated on me much more than my 50 shots of the Charles Bridge.

You see, these pictures -- and there are hundreds of them on Facebook, and elsewhere on the net -- feature adorable children. Real children. Children that bear no relation to the owner of said picture. Children looking lost or reluctantly smiling at the beaming white person that, so this white person would like to imagine, Saved Them From The Jungles/Deserts of Africa/the Caribbean/South America/Southeast Asia. You know, for a week. And then left for a day of lounging on the country’s beautiful coast, and then for a cushioned airplane seat, and then for a comfortable desk in an air-conditioned home, where they uploaded the pictures of the poor, poor children whose lives they changed forever in just one day/week/month.

And it’s not just college students. I know many working adults who do this, too.

Wait a minute, you might say, that’s harsh. They were probably delivering medical supplies, building a school, delivering mosquito nets. Surely these photos are not evidence of a thinly veiled excuse for an “exotic” (ooh, there’s that word) vacation; this is philanthropy, global community service, not a tourism trend!

Don’t worry, I know that nonprofits sometimes perform wonders. My own husband is a medical professional engaged in public health research. Good people with good intentions often do good things for others. Got it.

But I sometimes want to say to such travelers, try to turn the tables for a moment. Imagine that a stranger that does not speak your language walks into your community and starts taking pictures of and with your cousins, the kids you babysit, and your own little ones. Also, imagine that this stranger is well dressed and the kids in your neighborhood do not have shoes. And then imagine that these pictures of your children will be posted online for everyone to see, but you don't have the internet. Nor a camera for that matter.

Then, imagine that these strangers taking pictures would feel some sense of nobility, of self-worth, of an earned knowledge about your community and life, just by owning and displaying said pictures.

To most if not all white folks reading this, and maybe even to most U.S. Americans, this reversed scenario is almost impossible to fathom, and even brings to mind the number for the local Neighborhood Watch and NBC’s “To Catch a Predator.”

Speaking of white folks, how many times have you seen a picture of a person of color with his/her arms around destitute white children in Eastern Europe? Hugging white kids at a free clinic in rural Kentucky? A white person holding a cute Parisian child she saw on the street during her business trip to the City of Love? If these pictures are out there, I haven’t seen them.

Why, faithful readers of this excellent blog, do white folks travel to exotic locations, meet adorable children, and shoot them? Is this trend, in fact, another example of the stuff white people do? I’ll offer a few reasons why I think it is, but I’m mostly interested in what you think.

Here are my thoughts:

Appropriation and exploitation -- As a white person living in the U.S., it is not only my privilege but my feel-good habit/hobby/vacation option to swoop into a country about which I know nothing, drop a few boxes of shoes, take pictures with children while their parents/aunts/cousins/grandparents watch, and to in the process somehow claim these children as my own. I vicariously experience their suffering, capture it in a still frame, and somehow feel more alive in my neoliberal, disconnected, consumerist living experience. I, the almighty white woman, have been to Africa and nursed her children out of the throes of malnutrition and disease. Her children are my children. Madonna, meet Malawi.

In these photographs, children are exploited to build social capital. It is so last year, so K-mart middle America to take a vacation; real liberals wouldn’t do that. I can’t help but think of the commercials for Sasha Cohen’s new movie, Bruno, in which he adopts an African baby because Angelina and Madonna have one, and in which he also states, “I’m really into issues. Darfur’s a big one. So what’s next, what’s Dar-five?” Your “experience” in South America can become just another item to check off the bucket list, a line on your resume, fodder for a great graduate school application.

Assuagement of our dear friend, White Guilt -- Sometimes I think this phenomenon is another one of those things we white folks do to feel better about our privilege, a visual reminder that, though we might not be able to do much about the fact that we like our Nikes and we like them cheap, we can sleep in the only concrete room in a village for a week, drop a few boxes of malaria meds, and call it even. And even come home with invaluable souvenirs to remind us of just how much those sweet little children looked up to us! I have four cars while a billion people (most of whom don’t happen to be white) on the planet are starving, but I went on a missions trip, and look how happy I made this malnutritioned little boy!

All of the above reminds me of the quote that macon borrowed about a year ago for a rather similar post, from bell hooks’ essay “Eating the Other”:

The desire to make contact with those bodies deemed Other, with no apparent will to dominate, assuages the guilt of the past, and even takes the form of a defiant gesture where one denies accountability and historical connection. Most importantly, it establishes a contemporary narrative where the suffering imposed by structures of domination on those designated Other is deflected by an emphasis on seduction and longing where the desire is not to make the Other over in one’s image but to become the Other.

And yet, in these photographs one doesn’t just become the Other; s/he becomes in a sense the source of the Other, the womb from which the life of the Other springs, the nurturer, protector, guardian and savior of the Other. A white woman holding a Honduran child like she conceived, birthed, and nursed him assuages white guilt. It also exploits the Other by reestablishing the hierarchy in which white people are the source of all that is good in life, including both the poor, suffering, adorable Other-child, and the aid that will end his/her suffering.

Maybe that’s a stretch; more likely, it’s not.

What do you think?

take big risks with animals

(Nezua's imaginando)

Maybe sticking your head into the mouth of a killer whale isn't an especially "white" thing, but it sure does seem like one to me.

From Siegfried & Roy to Steve Irwin to the guy who tried to control Pinky the cat, every time I see or hear about someone doing something crazy dangerous with an animal, it's a white person.

Usually when I point out a common white tendency here, I try to explain what's particularly white about it, how being classified as "white" can influence a person to do this or that thing.

However, I'm a little mystified about whether taking unnecessary risks with animals really is an especially "white" thing, and if so, just why those who do it are overwhelmingly white.

Maybe it's a remnant from the days when white people went around conquering the earth? (Not that they don't still do that.) After all, that usually included conquering any new place's animals too.

Shut up, silly creature. We're white people. When we arrive
someplace we've never been, then we "discover" that
place . . . It's always been like this and always will . . .
This planet belongs to us now!
(larger image)

I was reminded of what seems to me like a particularly white enthusiasm -- "extreme" adventure involving animals -- when I saw this commercial for a new show, "Untamed & Uncut," on a network largely devoted to such doings, Animal Planet.

It's no surprise to me that, as far as I can tell, everyone depicted here in extreme proximity to a dangerous animal is white.

Coincidence?

I wonder. . .

I also wonder about the viewing demographic for these kinds of shows.

Mostly white?

I'm guessing so.

seek "adventure"

Is there something especially white about the pursuit of adventure? Could it be that being white makes people feel more entitled to go wherever they like, using whatever kind of risky, crazy-ass ways of propelling their bodies around they can afford to buy? As if the world really is their oyster?

Consider, for instance, Yves Rossy, the "Jet Man" who recently flirted with death in a flight over the English Channel. Is it any surprise at all that he's a white guy?

LONDON, England -- Swiss adventurer Yves Rossy successfully crossed the English Channel using his homemade jet-propelled wing Friday, the first man to perform the feat.

Rossy leapt from a plane more than 8,800 feet or a mile and a half from the ground, before firing up his jets.

He made the 22-mile trip from Calais in France to Dover in England in a little under 15 minutes.

He began the Friday flight just before 1207 GMT; by 12:15 GMT, Rossy was above British soil and looped over onlookers before opening his parachute, with his wings still strapped to his back.

He touched down in a field near the famous white cliffs of Dover.

"It's not so safe to fly across water if you can't see," Rossy told National Geographic Channel in a live television interview Thursday. "I don't have any instruments, and I need to be able to see the landing site."

The trip across the Channel is meant to trace the route of French aviator Louis Bleriot, the first person to cross the narrow body of water in an airplane 99 years ago.

The "white cliffs of Dover"! Sometimes satire just writes itself.

In the brief clip below, comedian Steve Harvey contributes some additional thoughts on white adventure-seekers.

Here's hoping that in between the bouts of worrying about money -- your money, America's money, the world's money -- here's hoping you can still find ways to have a "wonderful weekend."

Update: Comedian Paul Mooney has a lot more to say on this topic (NSFW).