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?

embody the fairest of them all

Here's a shot of Friday goodness, an infauxmercial sent in by James Yamanoha (who's half of the HabuNami Media collective). James also said that this short had its world premiere last night at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival; I hear the audience fell into helpless heaps of horrified laughter.

Tagline/Teaser:

Politicians, police officers, and right-wing pundits all agree: White On™ is the best solution to the race problem since Jim Crow! Never sit through another one of those boring “racial sensitivity trainings” ever again! Give them the gift of White On™ and watch your fears boil away!

[Trigger warning for some violent imagery]

White On™ Infomercial from HabuNami Media.

Here's HabuNami Media's blog, Okinawa Notes, and here's more on the LA Asian Pacific Film Festival.

refuse to shut up and listen when people of color explain racism

I've heard a lot of talk about, and analysis of, "internalized racism" and "internalized oppression." The understanding is that a white-dominated society tends to instill in non-white people, especially black people,* an acceptance of racist conceptions of themselves. Recognizing this insidious phenomenon became a primary justification for legal demands in the 1950s that schools and other public spaces be desegregated.

In the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate schools, Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren wrote of black children,

To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone.

I've been thinking about that "feeling of inferiority" lately -- or rather, about its opposite. Surely, I've been thinking, there's something like the opposite of "internalized racism" going on inside of white people. If a de facto white supremacist society continues to instill an unwarranted sense of inferiority in non-white children, then doesn't it also instill an unwarranted sense of superiority in white children?

I think it does. As I consider various white people in this light, I repeatedly see in them an unjustified sense of self-confidence when it comes to racial matters. And if I'm being honest, I also see in them, and in myself, a sense of racial superiority.

Feeling "confident" is different from feeling "superior." The latter requires someone to feel superior towards. Someone that we at the same time consider "inferior."

On the one hand, if we're honest, we can quickly see that a general white suspicion of, for instance, black inferiority is rampant in mainstream society and culture. The more I think about this, the more I'm convinced that these racist suspicions and presumptions of black inferiority are deeply implanted into the psyches and emotions of individual white people as well. They make us question black knowledge and authority. They make us doubt black achievement. They make us quick to assume that when black people point out racism, they're being oversensitive. Or that they're reflexively "playing the race card" (instead of thoughtfully and carefully pointing out racism). Or that they're filing a racial discrimination lawsuit because they're paranoid or (again) oversensitive, or worse yet, because they're out for some quick financial gain (a common white suspicion that overlooks both how much more perceptive black people tend to be about what is and isn't racism, and how reluctant black people usually are to file formal charges of racial discrimination*).

So on the other hand, what also interests me is the common white sense of superiority that bolsters such views. People of color are repeatedly perceived as overly emotional, subjective, and uncontrolled; white people are in turn repeatedly assumed to be rational, objective, and in control of themselves. Or, in a word, superior.

I can't help but think that what is surely a common white sense of superiority begins in childhood.

One of the primary pieces of evidence cited in the Brown vs. Board of Education decision was the doll tests conducted in the 1940s by Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark. These African American psychologists found (in experiments that continue to yield similar results today) that most black children prefer white dolls to black dolls. Society teaches them a racial mathematics of sorts, a series of equations or formulas that basically go like this:

     white = pretty
     black = ugly

     white = good
     black = bad

     white = superior
     black = inferior

But then, as I've been saying here -- don't white children learn these equations too? Of course they do.

So, if the common and deeply damaging absorption of such identity-forming binaries by black and other non-white children has received so much attention (and to be clear, I'm glad that it has), why has the opposite received so little? Why has the common white development of an equally unwarranted sense of superiority received so little attention? Why is that so rarely even recognized in the first place for being what it is -- a problem?

I thought about this common white sense of superiority, and about a sort of relative and unwarranted self-confidence that white people often have, when I saw the following segment of "The View," which Jorge Rivas posted at RaceWire. Vanessa Williams is in this clip, and as Rivas points out, she begins by explaining to three nice white ladies what amounts to the White Knight (or Savior) Syndrome, as exemplified by The Blind Side.


[Sorry if a commercial comes up first in the clip. In case anyone can't view this segment and would like to know what these nice white ladies had to say about racism (and the supposed lack thereof) in the movies, I put the transcript in the comments.]

Barbara Walters quickly takes offense at Williams' critique of the movie and cuts her off; then Walters launches into a defense of the film, and the other nice white ladies chime in loudly with their passionate opinions about what is and isn't right in terms of race. And for three minutes, Vanessa Williams -- who may well have better insights to offer on this topic -- for three whole minutes, the probable superior commentator on race here is left twisting in a mostly stale, white wind.

In other words, it is true that the content of what Walters, Behar, and Hasselbeck are saying here differs, and it's also true that Joy Behar actually goes on to elaborate fairly well on what Williams initially said. However, what I see all three of these women displaying, right in the face of a silenced black person who may well know more about these matters than they do, is an overbearing and unwarranted sense of self-confidence. I think they're enacting, probably without realizing it, not only a common center-staging tendency, but also a common white presumption of superiority.

These three nice white ladies seem to think they know what's what on the topic of racism (in this case, Hollywood racism). Like a lot of white people that I know, when they discuss racism, they apparently feel completely confident in what they're saying -- part of that behavior seems to be an understanding that they're supposed to act confident in what they're saying.

However, these nice white ladies don't seem to realize at all the opportunity that they've lost -- to encourage Vanessa Williams to elaborate on what she began to explain, and to listen to her respectfully. Their not doing so exposes them as typically foolish and arrogant white people.

Or so it seems to me. What do you think of the racial staging in this segment from "The View"?



* As some commenters pointed out, this post is too reliant on an insidious black/white racial binary -- it perpetuates that binary. I was led to that reliance by the whiteness-and-blackness of "The View" segment, and of the doll experiments, and I can now see that this post should have been more inclusive of experiences of people of color excluded by that binary. I've edited some parts of the post accordingly, but I think it still doesn't go far enough in addressing racism against other minorities. I apologize for that, and I appreciate reminders on this point from Commie Bastard and R.

** In a series of recent experiments, psychology professor Karen Ruggiero of the University of Texas at Austin and her colleagues demonstrated that stigmatized people attribute their failure to discrimination only when they are certain of that discrimination. People may often avoid making such charges because they fear they have no control over the outcomes, which can be negative and include high costs, financial and emotional.

African Americans may also be reluctant to file suits because they know it will be difficult to prove discrimination. (source)

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

whiten their names

I have never felt any ethnic connection between the Greeks and me, other than how hairy I am.

-- Georgios Panayioutous

(a.k.a., George Michael)

    Alan Alda = Allphonso D'Abruzzo Jr

    Woody Allen = Allen Konigsberg

    Jennifer Aniston = Jennifer Joanna Aniston
       (her father, John Aniston, was originally Yannis Anastassakis)

    Fred Astaire = Frederick Austerlitz

    Lauren Bacall = Betty Joan Perske

    Anne Bancroft = Anna Maria Louisa Italiano

    Pat Benatar = Patricia Mae Andrzejewski

    Tony Bennett = Anthony Dominick Benedetto

    Jack Benny = Benjamin Kubelsky

    Milton Berle = Milton Berlinger

    Irving Berlin= Israel Baline

    Robert Blake = Michael Gubitosi

    Jon Bon Jovi = John Francis Bongiovi

    Ernest Borgnine = Ermes Effrom Borgnino

    Marlon Brando = Marlon Junior Brandeau

    Albert Brooks = Albert Einstein

    Mel Brooks = Mel Kaminsky

    George Burns = Nathan Birnbaum

    Nicolas Cage = Nicolas Coppola

    Cyd Charisse = Tula Ellice Finklea

    Andrew Dice Clay = Andrew Clay Silverstein

    Alice Cooper = Vincent Damon Furnier

    David Copperfield = David Seth Kotkin

    Elvis Costello = Declan MacManus

    Joan Crawford = Lucille Fay LeSueur

    David Crosby = David Van Cortlandt

    Tom Cruise = Thomas Mapother IV

    Tony Curtis = Bernard Schwartz

    Doris Day = Doris von Kappelhoff

    John Denver = Henry John Deutschendort Jr

    Angie Dickinson = Angeline Brown

    Kirk Douglas = Issur Danielovitch Demsky

    Bob Dylan = Robert Allen Zimmerman

    Linda Evans = Linda Evanstad

    Sally Field = Sally Mahoney

    W.C. Fields = William Claude Dukenfield

    John Ford = Sean Aloysius O’Fearna

    Great Garbo = Great Lovisa Gustafson

    James Garner = James Scott Bumgarner

    Kathie Lee Gifford = Kathryn Lee Epstein

    Cary Grant = Archibald Alexander Leach

    Joel Grey = Joel Katz

    Buck Henry = Henry Zuckerman

    Barbara Hershey = Barbara Herzstein

    Hulk Hogan = Terry Gene Bollea

    Judy Holliday = Judith Tuvim

    Harry Houdini = Erik Weisz

    Rock Hudson = Roy Harold Scherer Jr.

    Vanilla Ice = Robert Van Winkle

    Jenny Jones = Janina Stranski

    Ashley Judd = Ashley Tyler Ciminella

    Danny Kaye = David Daniel Kaminski

    Larry King = Lawrence Harvey Zeiger

    Ben Kingsley = Krishna Banji

    Cheryl Ladd = Cheryl Jean Stoppelmoor

    Michael Landon = Eugene Orowitz

    Ralph Lauren = Ralph Lifshitz

    Jerry Lewis = Joseph Levitch

    Sophia Loren = Sofia Villani Scicolone

    Peter Lorre = Laszio Lowenstein

    Madonna = Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone

    Karl Malden = Mladen Sekulovic

    Barry Manilow = Barry Alan Pincus

    Dean Martin = Dino Paul Crocetti

    Walter Matthau = Walter Matuschanskayasky Matthow

    Freddie Mercury = Farookh Bulsara

    Lorne Michaels = Lorne Michael Lipowitz

    Helen Mirren = Ilynea Lydia Mironoff

    Demi Moore = Demetria Guynes

    Chuck Norris = Carlos Ray Norris

    Jack Palance = Volodymyr Palahniuk

    Colonel Tom Parker = Andreas Cornelius van Kuijk

    Les Paul = Lester Polfuss

    Bernadette Peters = Bernadette lazzara

    Emo Philips = Phil Soltane

    Iggy Pop = James Newell Osterberg

    Natalie Portman = Natalie Hershlag

    Stefanie Powers = Stefania Zofya Federkiewicz

    Kelly Preston = Kelly Kamalelehua Palzis

    Joey Ramone = Jeffry Ross Hyman

    Tony Randall = Leonard Rosenberg

    Ginger Rogers = Virginia Katherine McMath

    Joan Rivers = Joan Alexandra Molinsky

    Edward G. Robinson = Emmanuel Goldenberg

    Wynona Ryder = Wynona Horowitz

    Jane Seymour = Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Frankenberg

    Charlie Sheen = Carlos Estevez

    Martin Sheen = Ramón Estévez

    (Emilio Estevez = Emilio Estevez)

    Gene Simmons = Chaim Witz

    Anna Nicole Smith = VIckIe Lynn Hogan

    Robert Stack = Robert Modini

    Cat Stevens (later, Yusuf Islam) = Stephen Demetre Georgiou

    Jon Stewart = Jonathan Leibowitz

    Jennifer Tilly = Jennifer Chan

    Danny Thomas = Muzyad Yakhoob

    Ritchie Valens = Ricardo Valenzuela

    Frankie Valli = Francis Castelluccio

    Jesse Ventura = James George Janos

    Raquel Welch = Raquel Tejada

    Nathaniel West = Nathaniel Wallenstein

    Gene Wilder = Jerome Silberman

    Natalie Wood = Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko

claim they know more about something "black" than black people themselves do

This guest post (which also appears here) is by Renee, who blogs at Womanist Musings. Renee lives in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, and she writes about herself, "I am a committed humanist. I believe in the value of people over commodities. I believe in the human right to food, clothing, shelter, and education. I am pacifist, anti-racist, WOC. My truth may not be your truth, but I intend to speak it nonetheless."


Roger Ebert Proves Good Hair Was Made For White People


When I heard that Chris Rock was making a documentary about Black hair, I tried to keep an open mind.  The fact that he claimed that he was making it for his daughter, was enough to make me hope that he would put aside the misogyny that he has shown in the past. Unfortunately after viewing the film, it was clear that Rock had missed the mark in several ways. 

Rock created a movie that satisfied the voyeurism of Whiteness on the issue of Black hair. It even allowed Roger Ebert, a White man, to play the role of expert. Don’t Black women have enough to put up with, without White men believing they know everything about our beauty rituals? Whiteness never seems to miss the opportunity to inform us about ourselves.

Yes, Ebert knows all about relaxers because he read about them on Wikipedia.

Rock shows a hair-raising demonstration of an aluminum Coke can literally being eaten up in a bath of sodium hydroxide. It may help to recall that another name for sodium hydroxide is "lye." God forbid a woman should put that on her head! What Rock doesn't mention is that few women do. If he had peeked in Wikipedia, he would have learned (emphasis mine): "Because of the high incidence and intensity of chemical burns, chemical relaxer manufacturers have now switched to other alkaline chemicals." Modern relaxers can also burn if left on too long, but they won't eat up your Coke cans.

Don’t you just love that he went to the most reliable source to learn about chemical relaxers. Why do Black hairdressers even go for training when they can turn to Wikipedia to learn everything they need to know to do their jobs? Of course, he takes care to remind us that it can still burn, thus establishing his expertise on the matter. Wow is anyone else impressed? MMM but wait he has even more to share.

The use of the word "natural hair" is, in any event, misleading. Take a stroll down the hair products aisle of a drugstore or look at the stock price of Supercuts. Few people of any race wear completely natural hair. If they did, we would be a nation of Unibombers.

This is the kind of nonsense you get when Whiteness decides that it is expert on everything. Clearly Ebert does not understand the importance of natural Black hair, but ignorance alone is not enough to stop him from running off at the mouth. When a White person dyes their hair a different color, what does it say to the world? How many people even know if the person they are talking to is a “natural” blonde or brunette? I guarantee you that if you are talking to a woman whose hair has been fried by a relaxer, you know it immediately. Whiteness does not openly acknowledge it because it speaks of conformity. It speaks of an internalization of White beauty standards.

Try and walk around for a day or two with an Afro, dreads or a twist out. People will line up to tell you that you look unkempt. Natural hair is considered radical by Whiteness because it speaks of an independent spirit and heaven forbid Black people walk around with the belief that they/we are actually worth something. Natural blonde, red, or brunette mean nothing socially. We don’t see this as political because Whiteness is the norm. Black bodies are politicized precisely because we live in a culture that is determined to decide worth based in the constructed class of race. There is only one race, but Whiteness needs differentiation to maintain its superiority. And this is specifically why Blackness is eroticized, constructed as exotic and marginalized at every turn.

Just when you think the well of greatness has run dry, Ebert finishes with this:

. . . with some black men in a barbershop that gets into areas that are rarely spoken about. The movie has a good feeling, but why do I know more about this subject than Chris Rock does? Smile.

Yes, you did read that correctly, Ebert just professed to have more knowledge about Black hair than a Black man. Will the arrogance never come to an end? You can tell that the man has never even been inside a Black barbershop because he has declared the conversations that Rock filmed to be a rarity. Barbershops and beauty salons have always been the hub of conversations in the Black community. On a typical day you can participate in conversations about race, gender, politics, history, sports etc., but I guess all of that was just play acting until it got authenticated by Roger Ebert. Maybe he thinks we just grunt at each other when no camera is around.

Whiteness as expert allows it to control the discourse. With this power it can decide what is important and which bodies are affirmed and on what time frame. Ebert may have just seen himself as reviewing a movie, but this was a documentary that was completely outside of his experience. No trip to Wikipedia or long term relationships with Black people will equip a White person to engage in a judgment call on African American culture. It is an exercise in privilege to think otherwise. Let’s just face facts, Whites have to actively be taught about Blackness and anti-racism, whereas, from birth, a Black child has to fight just to be seen as human. The only “natural” thing that Ebert is equipped to talk about, is his own unacknowledged privilege.

still ask that old camouflaging question, "but what about the children?"

Update: video of Keith Bardwell being interviewed added below


Yesterday's news from Louisiana -- about the denial of a marriage license to an interracial couple -- reminds me of a scenario that I've encountered several times in real life, and also many times in movies and TV shows (but I can't remember any particular example of the latter -- can you?).

A black and white couple want to get married, but the parents and others object. Especially the white parents. But of course, they won't admit to the racism that's motivating their objection. Maybe not even to themselves.

So instead of saying something like, "I just don't want you marrying someone who's black," they often say instead, "But, but . . . what about the children? They'll have so much trouble, feeling, you know, accepted and all."

I'm guessing that by now, most readers of this blog have already heard about Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace for Tangipahoa Parish's 8th Ward, in Louisiania. Bardwell is entrusted by the people of his parish with the official task of issuing marriage licenses; when Beth Humphrey (who's white) and Terence McKay (who's black) approached him for one, he refused. And, of course, like just about every other white person these days who commits an act of blatant racism, Bardwell said he's not a racist -- he has higher concerns in mind:

I'm not a racist. I do ceremonies for black couples right here in my house. My main concern is for the children.

Bardwell has thought about these things, you see -- long. And hard. (And deep. Repeatedly, in and out, in and out -- I hope you catch the um, thrust, of what I think he's also thinking about.)

Bardwell said he asks everyone who calls about marriage if they are a mixed race couple. If they are, he does not marry them, he said.

Bardwell said he has discussed the topic with blacks and whites, along with witnessing some interracial marriages. He came to the conclusion that most of black society does not readily accept offspring of such relationships, and neither does white society, he said.

"There is a problem with both groups accepting a child from such a marriage," Bardwell said. "I think those children suffer and I won't help put them through it."

Well, how thoroughly magnanimous of you, Justice Bardwell. Not to mention, intrusively paternalistic.

Speaking of Bardwell's house, which I'm sure is just overrun with joyous hordes of black and white children carousing together, he also had this to say:

I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.

Ah yes, black friends too, piles of them. Right there, in his bathroom!

Bardwell's incredibly retrograde actions, and his obviously diversionary concern for the children, have already lit up the Internet -- seems like every blog and news site I read is excited about it. My favorite response so far comes from blackgirlinmaine:

[All] the news accounts I have read about Bardwell state that he is not a racist, hell he even lets Negroes use his toilet. Nice to know should I ever darken his doorstep with a hot case of the runs, he will let a sista use his can . . . mighty nice of him. I wonder if I could drink from his cups too?

Mighty white of him too, I'd say.

And to think that Bardwell could express such doubts about the future acceptance of the children produced by interracial unions right when the preeminent counterexample, President Barack Obama, was addressing a town hall meeting in the same state, Louisiana. Oh, the sad, bitter ironies wrought by blinkered white oblivion!

I think it's easy enough to mock and dismiss Bardwell's Jim Crow-era sentiments (and actions -- he says he's turned away other interracial couples as well), as those of a mere, isolated individual. But then, as I wrote above, isn't his camouflaging concern for the children of such unions -- a concern that probably masks his more genuine distaste for what happens in the private lives of such couples, and for the supposed dangers of "race-mixing" -- aren't all those "concerns" still fairly common? Maybe the ongoing familiarity of Bardwell's diversionary attention to hypothetical children is one reason his actions still strike a collective nerve.

Anyway, I think someone should sit Keith Bardwell down in front of a TV and watch an old movie with him. In fact, I'm pretty tempted to watch it again myself, and to make it my weekend movie rec. Here's a brief review of that movie by Jonathan Kim, posted at YouTube right after Obama's inauguration:




[For anyone who can't watch the review, here's the movie you should watch. My thanks to the many swpd readers who sent me alarmed and aghast emails about this racist travesty.]

UPDATE: Keith Bardwell explains himself, and adds that he doesn't "see what the problem is," now that the couple in question has married with someone else's help:

labor day movie rec : salt of the earth

FlintPublic, who posted the 1954 film Salt of the Earth in sections on YouTube, writes that its dramatization of an actual labor strike during the 1950s was

produced, written and directed by victims of the Hollywood blacklist. Unable to make films in Hollywood, they looked for worthy social issues to put on screen independently. This film never would have been made in Hollywood at the time, so it is ironic that it was the anti-communist backlash that brought about the conditions for it to be made. In many ways it was a film ahead of its time. Mainstream culture did not pick up on its civil rights and feminist themes for at least a decade.




You can watch and/or legally download the entire film for free at the Internet Archive.

At filmjourney.org, Doug Cummings calls Salt of the Earth "a movie the FBI and the Hollywood industry did everything they could to destroy."

Cummings also writes,

Based on a true story about a 1950-’52 strike by zinc miners in Silver City, New Mexico, the film is a rousing depiction of a community of Mexican-American workers and their efforts to demand equal rights with other (white) miners. It was financed by Local 890, the union depicted in the story, and made by one of the “Hollywood Ten” filmmakers, director Herbert J. Biberman, as well as other blacklistees: producer Paul Jarrico, composer Sol Kaplan, and writer Michael Wilson . . .

Detailed in James J. Lorence’s 1999 book, The Suppression of Salt of the Earth: How Hollywood, Big Labor, and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in Cold War America (as well as Biberman’s own published account), industry string-pullers such as Howard Hughes banned laboratories from processing any of Salt’s footage or offering post-production services of any kind–initial editing was done secretly in a temporary setup in the bathroom of the still-extant Rialto Theatre in South Pasadena. (One of the several editors who abandoned the project was reportedly planted by the FBI.)

The FBI also deported the film’s star, Rosaura Revueltas, midway through filming (insert footage was subsequently and illegally shot in Mexico, where political pressure succeeded in banning the film’s production there as well) and after the movie managed to be completed, the industry’s projectionists’ union refused to screen it. After a handful of theatrical engagements in New York (where it was critically well-received), the film was promptly shelved until its “rediscovery” many years later. But in a twist of history (or was it?), the Library of Congress’ Film Registry celebrated the movie forty years later through its 1992 inclusion with the most “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant [American] films.”

The filmmakers intended the movie for a mass audience, so it’s quite accessible filmmaking, wearing its emotions and values on its sleeve. In fact, seeing it today could easily provoke bewilderment from viewers familiar with the film’s tortured history: why on earth would such a seemingly straightforward and melodramatic picture be treated with such vehement opposition? Recognizing this disparity reveals the astonishing extent to which anti-communist hysteria prevailed at the time.

The movie focuses on Ramon (Juan Chacon, a real-life union leader) and Esperanza (Reveultas) Quintero, a young married couple who illustrate the human side of racial inequality as well as gender tensions. As the company and local police put the heat on the male strikers, their wives volunteer to march the picket line in their places, creating a reversal of traditional gender roles: the women stage the rallies and spend time in jail while the men stay at home, wash dishes, and take care of the children. In many ways, the film is a progressive statement for the ’50s as several of the men begin whining about their domestic chores. (The film’s distributor, Organa, offers this QuickTime scene, which illustrates the growing friction between the conservative Ramon and the progressive Esperanza.)

The film’s style is social realist, with a mixture of professional and non-professional actors. The troublesome sheriff is played by blacklistee Will Greer, who many associate with his later portrayal of the grandpa in the television show, The Waltons. The underground nature of its production guarantees some rough technical edges (the sound suffers the most, with fluxuations in quality throughout) but also places it alongside the postwar masterpieces of Italian neorealism, even if Salt is more clearly rooted in Classical Hollywood style with its strong narrative, three-point lighting, and continuity editing. It’s not a film renowned for its aesthetics – adequately wrought though they are – but a movie valued for its political stance and historical significance. More than the typical Miramax/Tarantino extravaganzas, it’s films like this that establish the historical precedent and importance of truly independent American filmmaking.


[Read the rest of Cummings' review here]

help out disadvantaged black youth

Here's something to look forward to, or not -- a movie coming out this fall, about a promising young black man taken in by a nice, conservative white family.

Looks like Hollywood's White Savior industry is branching out.




The Blind Side reminds me of Dedicated Teacher movies, especially the ones that depict a goodhearted white teacher wading into some urban decay and becoming an even better person. This happens when the white person convinces some dark kids that there's a whole world of opportunity just waiting for them out there, if they'd only realize that they're not really condemned to life in the ghetto. (For me, the classic of that white genre is the Michelle Pfeiffer vehicle Dangerous Minds.)

Here's a description of The Blind Side that appears at imdb.com, a description that I assume was supplied by the studio that made this movie. Notice the submerged racial assumptions at work here:

A disadvantaged teenager is taken in by a conservative family who see tremendous promise in the young man. Despite certain obstacles, the attention and inspiration he receives helps him mature into an athletically and academically successful NFL prospect.

Hollywood usually panders to its targeted audiences by regurgitating money-making characters and situations. If some of these are racist, well, what the hell, they still make money, eh?
Or so the thinking seems to go. Or, maybe these moviemakers really don't realize that so many of their products are racist?

This is the kind of movie that brings tears to a lot of white eyes. But what do those tears really mean? What is it, really, that brings them on?

Does this movie look appealing to you?


h/t: swpd reader KM

white movie friday : transformers: revenge of the fallen

This is a guest post by Gary Collins, a white male, 25 years old, who lives in Brooklyn, New York City and produces short films for The Department of Public Subversion.

Michael Bay presents . . .
The New Face of Black America

“If God made us in His image, who do you think made them?"

In the new Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the single black (human) male of the cast, USAF Master Sergeant Epps (Tyrese Gibson) utters that line by way of introducing the movie's towering title characters. It's a question that's perhaps more interesting than intended, given how unapologetically racist some of these new transformer personalities are. As for who made them, I blame the surrealistic but unwittingly white-minded director, Michael Bay, who presents throughout the movie a sort of minstrel laser light show.

Back in the summer of 2007 I decided that I would not be lured back for a second helping after my disappointment, as a fan and as a sentient human life form, over the first Transformers film.

Early reviews of the second installment promised more blacked-up robots, and after reading them I suddenly felt a responsibility to participate in the conversation. After all, discussion is a healthy step toward accountability. The reviews referenced the unnecessary racializing of superior alien beings traveling time and space to knuckle up on Earth. People talking about race is a good thing, but then, this is just a story about a space robot smackdown, right?

On opening day, a friend and I stood in a line stretching out of the theatre to the sidewalk in downtown New York City. Inside, an enthusiastic crowd of couples, families, and fanboys filled cinema four.

Throughout the show, the audience in the theatre was clearly satisfied, and I too was not above appreciating the entertainment objective of the filmmakers. My friend and I cheered along as Optimus Prime, the benevolent leader of the human-embracing Autobots, fought the good fight to save mankind from the Evil (capital E!) Decepticons.

But then, darkness (as it were) descended -- we became outnumbered in our section by laughs when the ridiculous twin Autobots, Mudflap and Skids, periodically rolled into the spotlight.

Think Jar Jar Bots. Remember the crows from Dumbo. Think Amos 'n’ Andy Meet R2D2 'n' C3PO. Picture an 11 foot, 1.2 metric ton, anthropomorphized Chevrolet with googly eyes, a protruding gold tooth, and an ape-like strut, spitting out "ghetto" slang. Now picture two of them, talkin’ that jive. By which I mean they 'gun on' one another, insulting their mutual inadequacy, their shared ignorance; it’s the incessant chattering of the monkey mind. The inflection is insulting to anyone with even a basic understanding of what a racist stereotype is. The attempt at humor is uncomfortable and not in any way suggestive of an enlightened wit on the part of its creators. These absurdly ghettoized characters add nothing to the story, except to provide some light moments between the 'splosions.




Director Michael Bay has defended Mudflap and Skids, claiming they "make the story more accessible to kids."

Yes, that’s right, he's coming for your kids. Did I mention that Tom Kenny provides the voice for Skids, the robot with a single gold tooth? He's Sponge Bob Squarepants.

A black couple in their early thirties to my left chuckled when the twins protest a human's suggestion that they even know how to read. Super-advanced alien robots with impossible amounts of moving parts and processing power. . . but they don't know how to read. Not that they can't, not that they're incapable, but they simply have not yet taken the opportunity to download that application. Because, you see, they're black-ish, which I guess means that when it comes to some important things, like say, reading, they’re too lazy to get that going for themselves. They talk black, they walk black, and they're even on CP Time -- they show up late for apocalyptic battles.

Mudflap and Skids mostly lope around behind the more important characters, mumbling constantly with unsubtle, "ass-bitch-shi-mutha" interjections.

Reno Wilson, the voice of Mudflap, suggests in his own interpretation of the characters, "It's an alien who uploaded information from the Internet and put together the conglomeration and formed this cadence, [this] way of speaking and body language that was accumulated... and that's what came out. If he had uploaded country music, he would have come out like that."

Wilson added, rather improbably, that he never imagined viewers might consider the twins to be objectionable racial caricatures. Nevertheless, Michael Bay unpacked his action figures and built some straight up hood rats. The result is a steady stream of ignorant, bickering, hateful epithets, puked out onto the audience in the name of comedy.

And black minstrelsy isn't the only sort on display; there's a heavy load of brownface too. The twins take particular issue with the human protagonist's roommate and unhappy sidekick, Leo Spitz (Ramon Rodriguez), the film's representative Latino and Conspiracy Theorist. The Latino family in our section, two generations deep, roared as Skids suggests, in a moment of frustration, "Hey! Let's bust a cap in [Leo's] butt!" And the collective audience of the entire theatre released a wall of audible approval later in the story when Leo admits, ashamed, "I think I'm having a nervous breakdown. . ." In response Mudflap suggests, "That's cause you're a pussy!" and then, to Skids, reaches out for the unspoken bond of a knuckle five.

Following in an American cinematic tradition that just won't die, these two black characters are left for dead. Mudflap and Skids are simply tossed off after their usefulness has been consumed, much like the Mandingo Autobot Jazz of the first Transformers installment, a breakdancing black gangster robot, and subsequently the first to be ripped apart. It's suggested that they're merely unconscious with battle fatigue, but the storytellers give no definitive explanation. "Who cares?" the message seems to be, "they're just the black comic relief.”

Nevertheless, I couldn't help but notice that the packed, multicultural, multiracial opening-day audience seemed to enjoy the entire spectacle very much, spilling out of the theatre with an energetic buzz. Aside from the surprise my friend and I shared, there didn't seem to be any murmuring or confusion, no sort of indignant "did you catch that?!" that another friend of mine reported experiencing throughout the film when he saw it two weeks later at the same crowded theatre.

I was left to wonder, had I experienced a sort of opening-day audience solidarity? Had we seen it all before, too often, to expect better, and instead thoughtlessly appreciated what’s really a terribly pandering movie? Or worse, is it what we knowingly came and paid and gave our time to absorb, digest, and take home with us, in our brains, in our kids?

For me the answer is, "Certainly." It was what I had read about and what I was expecting. I still can’t really believe just how far they pushed these ideas without the studio, Paramount, putting a stop to it.

Most of the frame is dedicated to the relentless spectacle unfolding, really beating down on the audience with sensory over-stimulation. As viewers go along for the roller-coaster ride, they should keep in mind then that the storytellers garnish this beast with homophobic, racist, misogynistic, militaristic content, portrayed as comedic entertainment to benefit you, the audience.

They expect you to appreciate it, to laugh at it, in those moments when you come up for air. Especially if you're white.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Trailer)

make class-project videos on racism

One of the ways I try to check the pulse of today's racism is by cruising around on YouTube. I don't know yet just how YouTube fits into and represents "our culture" (whatever that is), but its search function does cough up all sorts of trends and phenomena that I didn't know existed.

One example that's existed for a long time now, and that's also made its way to YouTube, is the class-project video. I remember making one in high school, for a course called "Mass Media." Thrust together randomly with three people I didn't know, I proposed that we address "world hunger." We ended up patching together crude juxtapositions of starving-African-children photos with the footage we'd shot on a rainy afternoon -- extreme closeups of each other's mouths as we gorged ourselves at McDonald's.

Although the ostensible topic of that video was the same as its unimaginative title -- "World Hunger" -- our project probably had an unintentional subtext on "whiteness," given that we were all white, and that we all lived in the unstated-but-purposefully "white" suburbs. Since thinking about that video still makes me feel kind of nauseous, I'll leave it to you to imagine any racial, racist, or racish* subtext it may have had.

I wish I could show you that long-lost classic, "World Hunger," but alas, the videotaped copies we made for each other are probably long gone. Anyway, I have a much better one to send you off on your wonderful weekend with.

The following anti-racism class project was made by students at Oak Park High School, in Winnipeg, Canada, for Mr. Pearase's Digital Film class. I know all of that not from YouTube, but rather from another blog that posted this video, boingboing. That's where Mr. Pearase sent a link to the video, along with an introduction. The comment thread there is great, because some of the students who made the video jumped in, along with Mr. Pearase.




Do you remember making group-project videos in high school, or in college?

Can you recommend any other especially effective ones that are available online?

The best one I've seen so far is one I've posted before, Kiri Smith's award-winning "A Girl Like Me." It's about racism, the insidious power of "whiteness," and what it takes for some people to resist it. (I should also mention Phillip Wang's excellent and hilarious "Yellow Fever," which seems like it might've been a class project, but I'm not sure about that.)






*h/t to myblackfriendsays for the word "racish," a term I hereby deem most worthy of high circulation.

spice up blandly white entertainment with bizarre asian characters

Ken Jeong in The Hangover

Who went to see The Hangover this weekend? Show of hands please . . .

Okay, so, what did you think of that weird Asian guy?

I just paid cash money to see this movie, so I can tell you a bit about it, including the unaccountably weird Asian guy. I thought that overall it was pretty funny, and for those of you who haven't seen it, I don't think I'm spoiling anything if I say the following.

The Hangover is about four American men (all white guys) who go to Vegas for a sort of stag night, since once of them is about to get married. They rent a super-expensive hotel suite and wake up to the sight of a live tiger, a chicken, and a totally trashed suite. One of the four, Doug, is missing.

The three remaining guys head out and eventually find their lost car. As they moan and groan through their hangovers, missing teeth and so on, they continue to wonder where Doug could've gone, until they hear someone pounding and yelling in the trunk.

"Doug!" they all shout, but when they open the trunk, out leaps a naked Asian man! He has a tire iron in his hands, and some weird, Kung Fu-like noises are coming out of his mouth. He quickly flattens the three white guys with some jujitsu or karate or something, then runs off into the distance.

None of the guys can remember who this Asian man might've been in the wilderness of the night before. The weird Asian guy shows up later (I won't give away how and why), and he acts even more weird.

Mr. Chow (played by Ken Jeong -- you might remember him as a quirky doctor in Knocked Up) soon demonstrates that he's cruel, arrogant, and probably gay, which is also supposed to be funny; as reaction shots of the white guys help us see, Mr. Chow is just headscratchingly off the wall. Mr. Chow laughs repeatedly at one of the white guys, taunting him as "the fat one." This laughter is clearly supposed to be extra-humiliating and emasculating, given its source -- a man who's not only bizarre, short and gay, but also Asian (the sexualized racism here is further cemented at one point, when he grabs his crotch and invites the white guys to do something with "my little Chinese balls!").

So, I'm wondering, just what the hell is Mr. Chow doing in this movie? I mean, what purpose does it serve to make the one Asian character so weird? No one else in the movie is this flatout bizarre, not even Mike Tyson, who shows up in a cameo.

I think that for one thing, this movie is made for a target audience that's assumed to be white. Mr. Chow seems meant to serve as a bit of spice for the blandly white characters at the movie's center. As usual, the few, stereotypical minor roles for black actors also serve this purpose, including a street-talkin' black drug dealer and a large, bossy, black female cop (who shouts "Not up in here!" and so on). However, while these black roles are stereotypical, they're not also over-the-top, just-plain weird, like the role of Mr. Chow.

I'm reminded of the unaccountably weird Asian characters in a KFC ad that I posted about recently. In both that commercial and this movie, the mood is supposed to be bouncy and funny, and that mood is meant to be somehow enhanced by these zany, cartoonish Asian men.

Is this zany-Asian-character thing a trend in corporate entertainment? Maybe it's just an old standby. In either case, I don't like it.

As a good, happy citizen-consumer, I'm supposed to brush aside any negative, "PC" feelings brought on by such dehumanizing, racist portrayals, and just yuck it up along with the other white people. But I just can't do that anymore.

Because of Mr. Chow, I left this movie with a bad taste in my mouth.

And finally, on top of that, why couldn't they make at least one of the four lead roles a non-white guy? Would that be so implausible?



In case you're interested and haven't seen a trailer for The Hangover yet, here ya go (there's also a "restricted" version, with more glimpses of Mr. Chow, here).

hang back like boo radley during discussions of race

Boo Radley
He's a ninja
(played in the 1962 film by Robert Duvall,
in his first Hollywood role)

Boo Radley should get more recognition than he normally does as a white anti-racist hero. Comparing Boo to a ninja might be a stretch, but he did overcome his reluctance to join the battle against racism. He even saved two young lives in the process.

To the white readers of this site -- are you like Boo Radley?

To refresh your memory, Arthur "Boo" Radley is the ghostly character in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird who hangs back, shut up in his house, avoiding most of the story's racial drama. His neighbors -- young Scout and Jem Finch -- are afraid of him, even though he leaves them gifts and seems to be watching over them.

Scout and Jem spend most of the time watching and admiring instead their father, Atticus, as he wages a quixotic battle against the rabid dog of small-town Southern racism. He especially does so by defending Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white woman.

Lawyer Finch clearly proves Robinson's innocence in a spellbinding trial, but nevertheless loses the case, and Robinson is then shot and killed while trying to escape from jail.

Later, Scout and Jem are returning home one night from a Halloween event. Suddenly, they're attacked by the father of the woman who falsely cried rape, but Boo Radley emerges from the shadows to save the day! Or rather, the night.

Brought into the light of the Finch home, Boo turns out to be okay after all. And on top of that, a hero -- a successful combatant in the ongoing fight against the scourge of virulent racism.

Are you a lurker, like Boo?

Who are you?

This blog gets a anywhere from 800 to 2000 page-views per day now, and that must be a lot of both white and non-white people. Some white folks do comment here regularly, but I know a lot of other Boo Radleys are out there -- some of you comment sometimes, but a lot of you don't. Which is understandable, since most white people are reluctant to discuss matters of race.

Whether you're white or not, do you hang back on this blog, reluctant to dip your toes into the discussion?

Yesterday, Chris Diaz (aka, cdwriteme), made a plea here in a comment, calling for the white Boos to come out from the shadows:

HELLO, WHITE PEOPLE!!! Where are you? If you can't face up to issues of race online with a generally friendly audience how can you expect to be a force for good in real life?

If the things that effect us people of color affected you, silence would not be an option. Are you here to help us, yourselves, and our world, or aren't you?


Whether you're white or not, please do come out and say "how do," and a bit of anything else, in the comments section for this post.

Maybe, something about who you are? And what you get from this blog? What you'd like to get from it, or like to see on it?

It might even encourage you to comment again, and join the fight.

Be like Boo!

(sorry about the music;
clips of this movie aren't easy to find online)

send their children to all-white proms

[Since it's high school prom season, I thought I'd repost the piece below (which I first posted here), about the ongoing "tradition" of white proms. This is also an update of sorts--The New York Times published a report a few days ago on another example of this tradition of segregation, in Montgomery County, Georgia.

I'm wondering now, how common are these segregated proms, in the Southern U.S., or elsewhere?

In a slideshow that accompanies the Times story, a white mother explains in a voiceover, "This community and this school system is fine like it is. This is the way that they have done it ever since the school system has been opened and they started having proms. So, it's worked for them thisaway. Why change something that has worked? It's not broken. The kids are fine with it."

Actually, as the Times article points out, many of the kids, both black and white, are not fine with it.

In another voiceover, Kera Nobles, a black student at the school says, "My high school has been a great one, except for one night that I only share with people that's my same race, and that would be prom night. Yes, it is hurtful, because you just think about how, I go to school with you every day, I sit beside you in class, we take the exact same notes, we use the same kind of paper, the same kind of pencil. I mean, I sit beside you at graduation, but I can't go to prom with you one night?"]



In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered racial integration of all schools, including all their events. In 1970, the one high school in Charleston, Mississippi finally allowed blacks to attend, but white parents refused to allow black students to attend the school Graduation Dance.* Thus began a tradition of separate, parent-organized White Proms and Black Proms, a tradition that lasted until, incredibly enough, 2008.

This story is told in a movie that I'm looking forward to, Prom Night in Mississippi. Directed by a Canadian, Paul Saltzman, it covers Morgan Freeman's successful effort to end this racist tradition, by offering to pay for an integrated prom. Or rather, his successful effort to almost end it. Although last year's integrated prom at Charleston High School was a success, a group of white parents still held a separate prom for some white students.

And what are white parents' justifications for allowing their children to attend school with black students, but not the prom?

Saltzman, the film's director, provides this answer: "When I was doing the research and asking people 'What was the problem in having the prom together?' what whites usually said is, 'You know, blacks are into drugs; they're into violence' and on and on and on."

Chasidy Buckley, a black student who attended the integrated prom, provided a similar answer: "A lot of the white parents were concerned about safety. They were afraid that fights were going to break out, but the prom went smoothly. It was great; nobody got hurt or anything."

A rich irony is that while the integrated prom went smoothly, a fight broke out at the whites-only prom.

While unfounded fears of violence fueled white parents' fears, it seems clear that there's another, more covert reason that some don't want their children dancing and partying with black kids--their heads are filled with stereotypical images of black hypersexuality.

Many parents fear drinking and fighting at such events, but they also fear heightened possibilities for sexual contact. And, as one white student notes in the clip from Prom Night in Mississippi below, that includes sexy dancing, especially "grinding."

White kids often grind when they're dancing too, but black and white kids grinding together? "Heavens no," many white parents think, "not my daughter!"

I remember talking once to a young white woman from another deep Southern state about her dating experiences in high school. She said she'd only dated white boys, "because like my mother always warned me, everyone knows that black boys are only after that one, single thing."

"Oh really? And what's that?" I asked, thinking that if it was the one thing I thought she meant, a lot of white boys are pretty much only after that one thing too.

"Sex," she said. "Especially with a white girl!"

"Oh come on," I said. "Do you realize what you're saying?"

"Right," she answered, "I know it sounds racist, but my mother was right. I proved it."

"You're kidding. How?"

"Well, there was this one time that a black boy sat next to me in the cafeteria. And guess what? He asked me out on a date!"

"Um, okay. So? Hasn't a white guy ever asked you out on a date?"

"Sure lots of times." She furrowed her brow in thought. "But it's different, you know? Because like, I'm white. So, it's easier for white guys to ask me out."

"You mean, it shouldn't have been that easy for that black guy to ask for a date?"

"Right. But he did ask, right away like that. So it was obvious, if he was going to ask so soon, even though it was harder to ask, then all he wanted was sex."

"Needless to say, you didn't give it to him. I mean, you didn't agree to a date."

"Of course not. I knew what he was after. My mom was right. I'll never date a black guy."

Now, this was about ten years ago. I hope that attitudes among today's younger white Americans have changed, and that their parents are also less delusional about supposedly predatory black sexuality, and the supposedly heightened threat from black kids of drug use and violence.

Fortunately, that such a generational change is happening appears to be one point of this intriguing new film, Prom Night in Mississippi. From what I can tell, it still lacks a distributor; if so, I hope it finds one, and soon.**





*According to CNN, "Federal courts forced schools in Charleston, Mississippi, to desegregate in 1970, but no judge ordered the high school proms to merge."

**The film will appear on HBO in July.

[h/t to Jessica Yee, who wrote at Racialicious about white oblivion in Canada, where she attended the opening of a photo exhibit based on this film]

spice up blandly white entertainment with humorous characters of color

I've written before about how a lot of white entertainment (that which appeals to largely white audiences by centering on white characters) uses minor black characters. I wrote in that post about how those minor characters are often there solely to help the central characters, and the audience, get in touch with their emotional and/or spiritual sides.

But I haven't written yet about another way such characters add spice to blandly white entertainment--as comic relief. These characters tend to appear as humorous, racially distinct sidekicks.

Although Disney's Mulan is not technically a "white" movie in this sense (since the central character is Chinese), the character voiced by Eddie Murphy--a tiny dragon named Mushu--nevertheless fulfills this kind of comic, racially marked function. I remember wondering when I saw this movie back in the day, "Why the hell did they insert this markedly black American character into a movie about ancient China?"




Mulan was released in 1998, and we might hope that movies are better now--that entertainment made for kids offer less of this "whites at the center and darker folks pulled in from the margins when we need some laughs" kind of thing.

But alas--it looks like another dose of (white) "family entertainment" that's coming down the pike takes this thing to a whole new level of crass stupidity.

In Tommy and the Cool Mule, a whole bunch of white folks get their hijinks going, all with the help of a mule that's "cool" because it talks like a stereotypically "black" man.

Tommy and the Cool Mule looks so terrible that I have trouble believing it's real. But the Internet Movie Database says it is, and that it's set for release on May 26. The following trailer says that the mule's voice is provided by . . . Ice-T?!

What do you think--Is this movie another nasty case of Magical Negroism? And does this look like a movie that you'll soon be enjoying with some young ones?