saturday book rec : the bluest eye

Toni Morrison is widely recognized as one of America’s greatest literary authors. However, because of her race, she is most often labeled a great “African American” author. When was the last time you heard John Updike, or Jane Smiley, or any other pale-faced writer, described as a great “European American” author? Or even as a “white author”?

Racial labels are rarely applied to white American authors, or to other kinds of artists who are white, unless their work is being compared to that of non-white artists. The latter, however, have to drag around their group identities, representing and supposedly speaking for their race wherever they go.

Toni Morrison’s writing has always demonstrated her willingness to take on this burden, which she does by addressing the manifold realities of “her (black) people.” However, categorizing her this way limits recognition of the insightful artistry with which she depicts and examines other subjects. In her first novel, The Bluest Eye, which was published in 1971, the title itself suggests that this story, about African American characters living in Ohio during the 1940s, is really about something else.

Although this novel is one of several that routinely earn Morrison praise for producing “masterpieces of African American literature,” The Bluest Eye really focuses on three other topics: Love and Beauty, and a social force that still determines who most deserves both, American White Supremacy.

The novel’s main characters are a trio of girls—Claudia and Frieda McTeer, part of a relatively secure, middle-class family, and Pecola Breedlove, whose family mostly does the very opposite of what their name implies. As the novel opens, Pecola is staying with the McTeers because her own family unit has been destroyed. That happened when her father, Cholly Breedlove, raped and impregnated her. As she drinks way too much milk from a Shirley Temple cup, Pecola gradually becomes obsessed with acquiring that which the world most evidently loves, blue eyes.

Claudia narrates alternating sections of the novel from an adult perspective, sorting through her childhood memories in an effort to understand how Pecola’s life was ruined. She retells and reveals much else along the way, especially the forces that bore down on the lives of everyone she knew back then. The novel’s other sections, told by an unknown narrator, relate the life stories of various members of the Breedlove family, and also towards the end of the novel, that of a peculiarly clean “dirty old man,” a fraudulent spiritual adviser named Soaphead Church.

Throughout the novel, as in real life, black people are continually faced with the assumptions and demands of a white world. Some of these involve encounters with actual people, as when white furniture movers refuse to take back the Breedlove’s torn couch, or when a white candy store owner displays his contemptuous indifference towards Pecola because she’s black. But like the great Modernist writers she has studied and emulated (she wrote a Masters thesis on Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner), Morrison is more interested in interior landscapes. In The Bluest Eye, she burrows deep into her characters, exploring the insidious ability of white supremacy to ambush the black psyche, ultimately crippling what we now identify as “self-esteem.”

The novel’s primary object of critique is the “thing” that makes some children automatically more valuable than others, more loved because they are considered more beautiful. This “thing” finds its way into the novel’s girls via their parents and the other black adults around them, who coo over white babies on the street but not black ones, and who give their black children white dolls, Shirley Temple drinking cups, and affectionate nicknames based on white movie stars.

One of many painful scenes in the novel describes the failed efforts of Claudia and her sister to befriend a favored, light-skinned classmate, Maureen Peal. All the girls can eventually manage is hatred for each other, and the adult Claudia explains that the cause was something external to them all, something that caused adults to love Maureen more than Claudia and Frieda. Compared to the fair Maureen, Claudia says,

We were lesser. Nicer, brighter, but still lesser . . . . What was the secret? What did we lack? Why was it important? And so what? Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.

And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.

In Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-esteem, bell hooks discusses this same “thing,” which is actually a set of standards for beauty and worth. hooks encapsulates these standards with the term “white supremacist aesthethics,” and she explains well the vexed relationship that Morrison’s novel is all about, that between white standards and black females:

The black female body is the site where white supremacist thinking about beauty and blackness is reinscribed again and again. Dark-skinned black males, thought often portrayed stereotypically, play a number of roles in mass media. They are not always and only villains. They are not always and only depicted as ugly, or less than desirable.

Yet whether the images are those of black girls or black women, the color caste is in place and dictates the standards. The contemporary movie Soul Food depicts images of three black sisters, all of whom are fair skinned with straight hair, all of whom are portrayed as desirable. Their black male partners are different colors—one is dark, one is light, one is brown skinned—but they are all depicted as desirable. The only darker-skinned black female character is the obese brown-skinned mama; she is not portrayed as desirable.

These racist, sexist stereotypes are all-pervasive. They set the standards in all mass media. Yet scholars and writers have not created a progressive body of work that examines fully the connection between shaming about the black body and low self-esteem. It continues to be the case that the most brutal stigma of color affects females more than males.

“Internalized racism” has become the standard term for describing the effects of white supremacy on non-white self-esteem, and Morrison’s novel may well be the most effective, moving description of how such standards hold back and even destroy non-white people. The Breedloves feel continuously “ugly” and act accordingly, and the primary reason is little more than their disfavored black skin. Pecola’s mother, Pauline, gradually gathers a sense of herself as despicable, especially by going to the movies and comparing herself to the parade of white beauties; one consequence is her subsequent inability to love her children well.

The broken personality of Pecola’s father, Cholly, is also traced back to encounters with white power. Like hooks, Morrison demonstrates through Cholly’s story that white supremacy affects black men differently, because men are valued more for what they do than for what they are. As hooks puts this difference, “sexism leads men to be judged more by how they perform than by how they appear.” Being interrupted and laughed at by white men while performing one of his foundational acts—his first sexual encounter—becomes for Cholly a literally defining moment for understanding himself, and as a result, for the inability of another Breedlove parent to love effectively.

Pecola’s repeatedly crushing encounters with the many guises of white supremacy bring her to Soaphead Church, a man who says he can give her those blue eyes, if she will consent to giving him something in return. By novel’s end, Claudia’s realizations include the fact that “Love is never any better than the lover,” and that black beauty fails to gain self-affirming recognition because it’s defined so strongly as the opposite, by a blind, omnipresent white eye.

The Bluest Eye was published in 1971, at the height of that particular coalescence of the Civil Rights era known as the black power movement. Although Morrison had her reservations about that movement, her first novel demonstrates her alignment with its aggressive assertion of black self-esteem.

Like Morrison herself, though, The Bluest Eye also deserves credit for artfully depicting the awesome power and reach of white supremacy.

Finally, for a profound and highly influential analysis by this “African American author” of some more specific white behavior and tendencies, I also recommend her brief non-fiction work, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the American Literary Imagination.

Now that James Baldwin is no longer with us, white America has no better, more insightful and loving critic of itself than Toni Morrison.

____

PS--For more on white beauty standards, see this earlier post

white movie friday : watermelon man

The very first thing we must do is reconquer our own minds. The biggest obstacle to the Black revolution in America is our conditional susceptibility to the white man’s program. In short, the fact is that the white man has colonized our minds. We’ve been violated, confused and drained by this colonization and from this brutal, calculated genocide. The most effective and vicious racism has grown, and it is with this starting point in mind and the intention to reverse the process that I went into cinema in the first fucking place.

--Melvin Van Peebles

In 1971, Melvin Van Peebles launched himself into the pantheon of black history and culture with his groundbreaking film, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. In that movie, which Peebles wrote, produced, directed, scored, and even acted in as the central character, insurgent black pride suddenly found cinematic expression. Van Peebles made that film outside of the Hollywood system, which never would have allowed a black protagonist’s heroic actions to consist of beating up cops, inciting race riots, and generally “sticking it to the man.”

Sweet Sweetback has been hailed as the first Blaxploitation film, but others say that it doesn’t fit that genre, since it works explicitly against white power, and also against black stereotypes, instead of exploiting such stereotypes for profit. Released just a year before Sweet Sweetback, Watermelon Man also addresses white power, but Van Peebles made it for Columbia Pictures, and apparently as a result, its satiric bite is somewhat muted.

Watermelon Man does still manage to break genre limitations, by moving from broad comedy to satire to serious social drama. When the studio suggested several well-known white actors for the main character, Van Peebles held out for a black actor instead. He finally got Godfrey Cambridge, who plays white insurance salesman Jeff Gerber, a cheerfully racist and misogynist suburbanite, who wakes up one night to discover that he’s turned black.

When the studio requested a happy ending, in which the protagonist wakes up and realizes that his entire conversion experience has been nothing but a dream, Van Peebles insisted instead on a more serious and socially conscious ending. By doing so, he made his movie resonate sympathetically with broader efforts to fight racial oppression, and the film is now hailed as a milestone in African American cinema for doing so.

What the film still does not get enough credit for, though, is its additional analysis of the era’s common enactments of whiteness.

The movie opens in a lightly comic mode, with a whitefaced Cambridge playing Jeff Gerber, a suburban husband frantically working out and tanning himself in his basement, while his wife Althea (played by Estelle Parsons) and their two pubescent children, Janice and Burton, eat breakfast upstairs. After crediting his imaginary boxing partner, Muhammad Ali, with being “a credit to [his] race,” and then stretching out his naked white body under an elaborate sun lamp, Gerber joins his family in the kitchen. Not in their TV viewing, though, since he doesn’t like what’s pouring out of the television—news coverage of race riots.

When Althea says that white people should show “greater interest and understanding” in black struggle, Gerber won’t hear of it. Soon he’s out the door and performing his morning ritual, a footrace with a bus. He runs alongside it while the passengers shout for its black driver to hurry, hoping the bus will beat him to a later stop. Gerber arrives first, apparently as usual, and as he boards the bus, pays his cheaper fare, and demands a round of applause, we realize that he’s a loudmouthed dickhead.

As is usually the case with whiteness, whatever it is that’s white about this guy becomes more apparent in the presence of non-whiteness. Before going to work, he stops at a diner, where he jokes with the black man behind the counter by flinging racist comments at him. As he then boards a skyscraper’s elevator with other white passengers, he puts his cocked hand to the black operator’s head, announces a hijacking, and demands to be taken to Harlem. Gerber’s racism seems to bounce off these black targets, and the white folks around him shrink back in alarm.

His ultra-sexist masculinity also becomes more apparent in the presence of its opposite. As he strolls through the insurance office where he works as a salesman, he declares the women working there “sluts! Sluts! All of you are sluts!”

Oddly enough, in this satiric portrait of white masculinity, Van Peebles has Gerber project characteristics that normally register as black—athletic physicality, brash self-confidence, and hypersexuality. The difference from Hollywood's innumerable depictions of such qualities in black men is that when Gerber arrives home after a long day, these characteristics dissipate like air from a balloon.

When Gerber’s bored, pent-up wife asks for sex, he expresses no interest, then retreats for more exercise to the basement. Tellingly, a mirror there has the word “pretty” written across it. In all of his encounters, Gerber has shown himself to be totally self-absorbed, seeking out ego-boosting reflections of himself wherever he goes. As opposed to the stereotypical notion of inherent black masculinity, Gerber’s sexualized physicality does not spring from biological needs or urges, but rather as a needy response to the outside world.

This narcissism, and the persistent need to bolster it, have been widely identified as characteristics that are encouraged by whiteness; they’re also characteristics that are exacerbated by masculinity.

That night, after again refusing his wife’s pleas for sex, Gerber awakens in the middle of the night and heads for the toilet. When he turns on the light, he screams at the sight of his suddenly blackened self in the mirror. Van Peebles uses a series of colored filters to add a joke to Gerber’s horror (he’s become “colored”), and then Gerber speaks directly to the camera, as if he’s speaking to himself in the bathroom mirror.

The real horror here for Gerber, the white male narcissist, aside from a fulfillment of what is for him a racist nightmare, is that his constructed, performed, and rigorously maintained sense of himself is shattered. He cannot simply continue to see himself as Jeff Gerber, a man who happens to have a strange skin problem, because his identity is based so much on how he sees himself reflected in others. If they're going to see a black man instead of white one, the former Jeff Gerber will no long exist.

After pleading with his God for help, Gerber slips back into bed, hoping it’s all been a nightmare. Alas, the next morning finds him desperately scrubbing himself in the shower, and Althea bursting in and shouting, “Jeff, there’s a Negro in the bathroom!” Gerber then calls in sick and takes a taxi to his town’s “colored section,” where he empties some drugstore shelves of hair relaxers and bleaching creams.

Van Peebles’ interest in whiteness, or rather in specific and varied enactments of whiteness, extends beyond Jeff to the other Gerbers. When Jeff seeks sexual attention from Althea as a form of reassurance that someone still values him, she's no longer interested, and in fact, clearly repelled. As Gerber points out, her white “liberal” sympathy for blackness is thus exposed, as the sort that prefers to keep actual black people at arm’s length.

The Gerber children are soon highlighted as well, in a remarkable, and equally revealing moment. In this broad, often slapstick satire, viewers might expect Van Peebles to depict these white kids as nasty, spoiled brats. Instead, they are consistently good-natured and curious. This choice of characterization allows for another point about whiteness to emerge.

As the parents discuss how they’re ever going to tell the kids about their father’s monstrous conversion, Janice and Burton suddenly appear in a doorway. Faced with telling them the hard truth, Gerber wrings his hands and painfully mutters, “Hi. I’m your father.”

Instead of being shocked, or failing to recognize their father immediately, the children come to him while saying, “Sure, hi dad.”

“Don’t you have anything to say to me?” Gerber asks.

“Your face is dirty,” Erin says.

“Sure is a heck of a tan you got, dad,” Burton adds matter of factly. “You look like a colored man.”

As Gerber looks somewhat chastened by their utter lack of reaction in racial terms, a point gets made about whiteness--that it consists of a set of learned, performed responses to the world. The children are not yet old enough to have absorbed and learned to enact their era’s white adult fear and repulsion when confronted with blackness.

Gerber seeks medical help, suspecting that his condition is the result of too much tanning, and too much soy sauce in a homemade lotion recipe. His doctor eventually reveals, though, that it can only be the result of black ancestors. Gradually, the tone of the movie shifts, as Althea sends the kids away and then leaves herself, their white neighbors insist on buying their house, and Gerber loses his job and sets up his own insurance office.

I won’t give away the end of the movie, but I will say that Van Peebles’ insistence on his own ending, rather than the studio’s, aligns his film with the black power agenda of its day. Like some of his other films, particularly Sweet Sweetback, Watermelon Man contributes to Van Peebles’ reputation as a bold, rebellious fighter for black justice.

As I’ve been saying, though, he also deserves credit for turning the racial lens around, analyzing and exposing some of the ways of white folks, and of some white men in particular--as a self-involved, narcissistic, life-denying performance.




(The trailer for Watermelon Man doesn't seem to be available online, so here's one for a documentary about the film's maker, Melvin Van Peebles.)

How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It)

From this documentary's promotional site:

“My politics is to win,” Van Peebles declares at the beginning of How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It), a documentary that explores the life and work of this maverick, modern-day Renaissance man. Whether making guerrilla-style films, flying Air Force sorties over the Pacific (ferrying the atom bomb, no less), studying astronomy in Amsterdam, writing novels in self-taught French, composing music (by means of a self-devised notation system), writing musical stage plays (for which he received nine Tony nominations), recording seminal rap albums or trading options on Wall Street, Van Peebles has blazed his own path, making a mark in each endeavor he’s pursued.

Finally, if you're wondering what Blaxploitation cinema is, here's a taste. This is a compilation of trailers for four Blaxploitation films: Black Belt Jones (1974), Cleopatra Jones (1973), Ebony, Ivory, and Jade (1979), and (the unfortunately titled) Monkey Hu$tle (1976). Again, the two Van Peebles films above do not fit seem to fit this genre, because they address white supremacy and they avoid pandering to common white fantasies about blackness.

teach their children to act white

Martin Mull
"Actress" (2002)

In 1949, Lillian Smith published Killers of the Dream, a memoir about growing up as a white Southerner during the early 20th century. Given the setting of her childhood, it’s no surprise that her memories include a lot of abusive acts against black people at the hands of white people.

What makes her memoir especially insightful, and far ahead of its time, is her understanding that race is an act, and that performing one’s appointed racial role means following a script. Also, by concentrating on her childhood with intensity and passion through a different act, that of writing, Smith came to see that the racial roles people are expected to follow distort the humanity of both white and non-white people:

I began to understand, slowly at first but more clearly as the years passed, that the warped, distorted frame we have put around every Negro child from birth is around every white child also. Each is on a different side of the frame but each is pinioned there. And I knew that what cruelly shapes and cripples the personality of one is as cruelly shaping and crippling the personality of the other.

I began to see that though we may, as we acquire new knowledge, live through new experiences, examine old memories, gain the strength to tear that frame from us, yet we are stunted and warped and in our lifetime cannot grow straight again any more than can a tree, put in a steel-like twisting frame when young, grow tall and straight when the frame is taken away at maturity.

Although Smith had recently published Strange Fruit, an extremely popular novel, her memoir generated little interest. One likely reason is that it says things about white people that they, as a group, were not ready to hear. Things that are still by and large true, but that white people as a group are probably still not ready to hear.

One of her most insightful points about white identity is a rather simple one, which still applies today:

White people aren’t born white. They’re raised to be white.

Times have changed since the days of American Apartheid, when Smith was writing. And yet, children born into white families still receive an array of directives regarding who they supposedly are in terms of race.

Racial lessons for children are less direct now, but they still learn that there are correct and incorrect forms of white behavior. As they mature, most of these children gradually gather what amounts to a list of rules and understandings for suitably white thoughts, feelings, and behavior.

Having undergone this racial training myself, and having since worked to perceive and understand it, I can see that the world around most budding white citizens continues to instill in them the following rules and understandings:

1. You are different from other children. Even though your initial impressions in pre-school, at the park, or on the playground behind your apartment building, tell you that other kids are just kids like you, some of them are not just like you.

2. You go to a school populated mostly by other white kids. If you don’t attend such a school, you’re an unusual white kid. There’s nothing wrong with going to a school that’s mostly white—it’s normal.

3. You are not to ask why you’re surrounded mostly by other white kids, nor why your neighborhood or town is so very white. You are also not to ask how things got that way. Adults do not have answers to these questions, and they quickly change the subject if you ask them.

4. You are an individual who is responsible for your own actions and accomplishments; your own racial membership is not a factor in your life. Nobody tells you that your race has anything to do with who and what you are, nor with what you achieve (nevertheless, as you might learn later in life, it does). The rules for white conduct are not explicitly stated as such, and you instead learn what you supposedly are as a white person by learning what other people supposedly are. The characteristics displayed by people who are presented to you as “black,” “Indian,” “Mexican,” and so on, define what you are by defining what you are not.

5. At the same time, your race does matter, and you should be proud of it. It was people like you who “revolted” against England and then “settled” the land, people like you who “built this country” into “a nation of immigrants.” And it’s people like you whose faces almost always occupy the various center stages placed in front of you, where lights shine on them as the makers of history, the captains of industry, the writers of books, the doctors of medicine, the inventors of inventions, the scientists of science, the psychologists of psychology, the movie stars of movies, the TV stars of TV shows. These are brilliant individuals, not “white people.” On the other hand, when a non-white person makes a rare appearance on these stages, he or she is carefully described as a black inventor, a Mexican labor organizer, a Japanese internment camp resident, a Chinese railroad builder, and so on.

6. The race of your parents does not matter. Never mind the fact that they’re both white, and that all or most of their friends and acquaintances are too. Do not wonder, nor ask, what their being white has to do with the ways they think, act, talk, or feel. They’re just individuals—“mom” and “dad.”

6. You will not venture into mostly non-white areas. If anyone explains why you should not do this, they will not explain that it’s because non-white people live there. Instead, they will explain in a caring way that such places are “dangerous.”

7. When you have feelings or thoughts about racial issues that counter what you’ve been told, you will keep them to yourself. As a result, you will feel things like shame and guilt for having such inappropriate, yet persistent, feelings. You will learn to split yourself inside, with one side that feels such things, and another side that has learned that you shouldn’t feel such things.

8. Because people like you are the normal, smart, safe, and celebrated people, you will feel that much more confident in yourself. You will also feel superior to other people. Later in life, if you have taken advantage of both your own abilties and the extra wind at your back that is your whiteness, and have thus attained a level of “success” in life, you will question the success of your non-white peers. One reason will be your learned sense of superiority towards them.


These rules and understandings about proper ways of acting white reach young citizens through many channels—teachers, parents, textbooks, movies, TV shows, music, friends, and so on. The white citizen’s internalization of these rules and standards results in ritualized, habitual, and more or less automatic responses to the world.

If white parents do not want to raise their children to perform such a racially appropriate role in life, they have to work hard at preventing such messages from landing inside them and taking root. And if white people who are raised this way want to overcome their white actor's training, they have to make a conscious, daily effort to deprogram themselves.

dance at whites only parties

"whites only party"
by the dears

we ain't here to steal your women
well, at least that wasn't the plan
there's that closet smell
makes you think you've
been inside there too long
you're almost mystical
and i'm impossible
we need a miracle
a miracle

don't say i'm paranoid
it's more like just annoyed
maybe a bit destroyed
a bit destroyed
and there's nowhere else for us to run
and our time has sure as hell become
and life has just begun
it's just begun

The Dears seem to be singing here about the days of segregation.

Back in the day, that is, when whites forcefully cordoned off or outright excluded non-whites from such things as parties, dances, graduation ceremonies, drinking fountains, swimming pools, country clubs, movie theaters, restaurants, schools, weddings, funerals, sporting events, restrooms, neighborhoods, jails, front-door entrances and exits, cemeteries, political offices, bus seats, train seats and train cars, gas stations, houses, apartments, barbershops, churches, locker rooms, hotels, motels, parks, stores, child-adoption rights, military units, bowling alleys, pool halls, bars, mental hospitals and other health-care facilities, interracial relationships, liquor stores, sidewalks, land ownership, workplaces, sports teams, reparations, musical groups, libraries, postal services, orphanages and other child-care facilities, textbooks, government services, and public telephones,

and also from such activities as

voting, accusing white people of lying, using white people's first names, offering to shake hands with a white person, kissing or hugging each other in public, staying in any of thousands of entire towns after dark (and often during the daytime too), commenting upon the appearance of a white female, cursing or laughing derisively at a white person, being in white neighborhoods without a specific reason, recreating with white people (including such activities as boating and playing checkers or dominoes), claiming or demonstrating superior knowledge or intelligence to those of any white person, suggesting that a white person is inferior in any way (even to other white persons), and defending oneself or one's friends or family members from an array of white forms of physical, mental, emotional, and sexual attack.

Between the end of the Civil War and the end of the Civil Rights Movement, white people really, really did not want to be around non-white people, especially black ones. In the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, they also severely restricted the activities of non-white people.

But white folks aren't like that anymore.

Right?




[I compiled the above lists from several printed and online sources--if you think of more examples, please let me know in the comments, or by email ( unmakingmacon@gmail.com ) and I will add yours to this post. Among the more useful sites for details on what the era of American Apartheid was like is Ferris State University's online Jim Crow Museum.]

dismiss the idea of reparations

Last October, over 70 volunteers across America took part in the first National Day of Panhandling for Reparations. Their task that day was to stand on sidewalks and street corners, asking white pedestrians for donations to compensate for the enslavement of black people.

The event's national organizer, damali ayo, reported that white folks in one city, Wooster, Ohio, opened wide their hearts and wallets, contributing a grand total of $22. The Wooster volunteers donated it to the families of the Jena Six.

A newspaper reporter covering the day's events in Portland, Oregon wrote:

Frances Miller's early attempts at starting a conversation Wednesday were a little rough.

"Hey, sister, are you a descendant of slaves?" she called out to a woman who looked African American, scoring a glare.

Miller sat on Northeast 15th Avenue at Broadway -- a volunteer in the National Day of Panhandling for Reparations. She and others across the country asked white passers-by to pay reparations for enslaving black people, and then they gave money to black passers-by. Each got a receipt.

Many people walking by reacted with confusion, amusement, annoyance, offense. But for the people who stopped, the results were profound.

"Artists take the lead on social issues," said Portland-based performance artist damali ayo, who masterminded the event. "This is the way I'm taking the lead on a social issue. Taking it to the streets. Also to get the job done -- getting those reparations paid out."

While most white Americans are willing to admit that slavery was wrong, they have a lot of trouble understanding why in the world today's African Americans should be paid anything, financially or otherwise, for racist inequalities suffered by their ancestors.

A commenter at eBaum's World expresses a common white reaction to this issue: "What the hell! Reparations for something that happened hundreds of years ago? Nobody alive today in America has ever been a slave, so why the fuck should they get reparations?"

Today's white Americans often say such things, because they have little understanding of how the past lives in the present. Why would they, really, when their own ancestors committed a fundamental denial of their own pasts, a bleaching out of their family histories and national origins, which they cashed in so they and their descendants could reap the perks of membership the White Club?

In his book A Different Mirror, historian Ronald Takaki explains something from the past that most African Americans remember and understand as currently significant, but that most white Americans have never heard of.

This is the broken promise summed in the concept of "4o acres and a mule":

After the Civil War, the federal occupation of the South as well as the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment liberated some four million blacks. But what were the hopes and dreams of these newly freed people?

What blacks wanted most of all, more than education and voting rights, was economic power, and they viewed landownership as the basis of economic power. Their demand for land, they argued, was reasonable and just. For one thing, they had paid for it through their military participation in the war: 186,000 blacks, most of them recruited or conscripted in the slave states, had served in the Union Army, and one-third of them were listed as missing or dead.

Blacks as soldiers had helped to bring the war to an end, and they felt they were entitled to some land.

Some Radical Republicans including Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, and George W. Julian understood the need to grant land to the freed slaves. They argued that emancipation had to be accompanied by land confiscation from the planter class and land distribution to the newly freed blacks. The perpetuation of the large estates [on which slaves had formerly worked] would mean the development of a semifeudal system based on the cheap labor of exploited and powerless blacks.

But Congress was only willing to grant them civil and political rights through the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments. The lawmakers rejected legislation for land distribution—known as the “40 Acres and a Mule” bill. Land should not be given to the freedmen, the New York Times argued, because they had to be taught the lessons of hard work, patience, and frugality. Editors of The Nation protested that land confiscation and distribution would violate the principle of property rights.

During the war, however, forty thousand blacks had been granted land by military order. In 1864, after General Sherman completed his march to the sea, black leaders told him: “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor.”

In response, General Sherman issued Special Field Order Number 15, which set aside large sections of South Carolina and Georgia for distribution to black people. They were given “possessory titles” to forty-acre lots, and the blacks believed they owned the land. But after the planters were pardoned by President Andrew Johnson, they began to reclaim the lands and force their former slaves to work for them.

The black landowners resisted. Some of them declared they were prepared to defend their property with guns.

Federal troops quickly crushed the resistance: seizing the lands, they tore up the freedman’s title papers and restored the land to the planter class.

Thus ended the possibility of real freedom.

No longer slaves, they became wage-earners or sharecroppers, working the land of their former masters in exchange for a part of the crop. Forced to buy goods from the planter’s store, they were trapped in a vicious economic cycle, making barely enough to pay off their debts.


Let's pause for some art.

In the form of a poem, Sekou Sundiata (who died last year) makes an argument for racial compensation:

"Reparations"

As barricuda22 says in the comments at YouTube about Sundiata's poem, "Please understand it is not $ he's speaking about."

The unpaid debt to black America takes many forms. How could the less tangible ones be paid back?

Money is a tangible debt, though again, it's a debt that most white folks have a hard time seeing.

It takes money to make money. In general terms, a group that's been technically free but effectively shunned for over a century, and has only recently acquired anything near equitable access, still has a lot of catching up to do. And in general terms also, a group with members legally (and artificially) classified as “white,” and thus able to own land and work for over a century at higher paying jobs, and then able to hand their wealth down to their children, who then handed it down to theirs, who then handed it down to today's--that group is still far, far ahead.

As several recent sociological studies have shown, the black/white wealth gap--a racialized difference between average amounts of accumulated assets--remains enormous. And despite what white people see as a gradual dwindling of the significance of race, that wealth gap is increasing, not decreasing.

In their 1997 book, Black Wealth / White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality, Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro were the first to clarify the reality and significance of this gap. In a recent discussion of a new, tenth-anniversary edition of this book, one of the book's authors summarizes some of the study's results:

According to Oliver, wealth creates opportunity, and whether or not parents can achieve the American dream of home ownership, a car, and a mutual fund is one of the best predictors of whether their children will do the same.

"Right now, almost 80 percent of black kids begin their adult lives with no assets whatsoever," said Oliver. "That's not the case for white kids. If they don't have financial resources in hand, they have access to them through their families. Most black kids don't have that available to them."

According to some researchers, as much as 80 percent of the wealth people accumulate over the course of their lifetimes actually begins as a gift from a relative, he added. That gift can come in the form of a down payment on a first home, a college education, or an inheritance from a parent or grandparent.

"If you look at lack of wealth, you find it among all sectors of the population," Oliver continued, "but even disadvantaged whites can generate more wealth and pass it on from generation to generation than disadvantaged African Americans."

While the racial disparity in income, as opposed to wealth, has narrowed considerably, the historical and ongoing significance of accumulated, generationally transferrable wealth remains invisible to most white Americans. They usually can't see this more significant gap because their training into whiteness has delude them into thinking that history doesn't matter. Into failing to see that if the whiteness of some people hasn't kept them from being poor, that doesn't mean that racism is over.

The current fact of white poverty means instead that some white ancestors failed to accumulate and cash in their white poker chips, which most other whites accumulated by more effectively playing the race card. Whites have many race cards; this one is a Joker, and it takes the form of a centuries-long system of preferential treatment, a system that could and should have a name-- "Affirmative Action for White Folks."

In Integration or Separation: A Strategy for Racial Equality, political scientist Roy Brooks illustrates the historical blindness of the white eye by elaborating on the aptness of the card-playing metaphor:

Two persons--one white and the other black--are playing a game of poker. The game has been in progress for some 300 years.

One player--the white one--has been cheating during much of this time, but now announces: ‘"from this day forward, there will be a new game with new players and no more cheating.'"

Hopeful but suspicious, the black player responds, "that's great. I've been waiting to hear you say that for 300 years. Let me ask you, what are you going to do with all those poker chips that you have stacked up on your side of the table all these years?"

"Well," said the white player, somewhat bewildered by the question, "they are going to stay right here, of course."

"That's unfair,' snaps the black player. ‘The new white player will benefit from your past cheating. Where's the equality in that?"

"But you can't realistically expect me to redistribute the poker chips along racial lines when we are trying to move away from considerations of race and when the future offers no guarantees to anyone," insists the white player.

"And surely,' he continues, "redistributing the poker chips would punish individuals for something they did not do. Punish me, not the innocents!"

Emotionally exhausted, the black player answers, "but the innocents will reap a racial windfall."


Isn't the real question here, why in the world would America not pay reparations? Or maybe, this is the right question--exactly why is it that America hasn't already paid reparations?

act all humble and stuff

So whattaya know, "Stuff White People Do" was awarded an “E” by One Tenacious Baby Mama. Not that I, uh, think I deserve it or anything . . . but, thanks, Darkdaughta!

Part of the deal with this award is that you gotta pay it forward with your own award. To ten others, that is. "Stuff White People Do" is one of ten worthies listed at Darkdaughta's blog (and she's one of the ten excellencies at Automatic Preference), so now it's my turn to come up with a deca-blog.

I didn't include a lot of more established places that I visit regularly (like Racilicious, Too Sense, or Racewire, or for that matter, Angry Asian Man, Angryindian, or Angry Black Bitch), because they're already rolling in well-deserved awards.

I wish I could acknowledge more sites here that focus on whiteness critically (and humorously--though not just humorously), but that's a rare thing. If anyone knows of others of this sort that I'm missing here, please do tell.

And feel free of course to check these sites, make them regular habits, add them to your blogrolls if you're so inclined, and all that and more.

Another Ten Esteemed Worthies

(in alphabetical order of fairness)

Anonymiss

Baudrillard's Bastard

Beyond White Guilt

A Black White Man

Dependable Renegade

Double Consciousness

I Blame the Patriarchy

Resist Racism

Restructure!

Season of the Bitch

dance sweetly

(I got inspired,

macon d)


dancing white people

thanks to what they’ve
come to think of themselves
and of others

it’s actually true:
most white people can’t dance

at least not very well

but when they get up and move
against the life-long
contra-distinctive training
that tells them it’s other people
who embody The Body
and thus can move those bodies well

and that it’s white people
who embody The Brain
and thus can’t move their bodies well

then when white people dance
it can be a sweet thing to see

but such waltzing is not easy

any time a caged white bird
sings through its body the audacious hope
that its fettered existence isn’t permanent
and that it too has a dream

the audience response is
not without laughter

but amidst the catcalls
at the pratfalls
and the tight white lips
and the creaky jerky hips

the better laughter expresses
not derision and condemnation
but appreciation and admiration

so dance white people
shake off your money-makers
proclaim your emancipation

rock your white houses
until their doors pop open
and your spirits find their light

saturday book rec : angry black white boy

UPDATE (10/29/08): Angry Black White Boy is now a play--it's been adapted for a run in San Francisco by Dan Wolf, "an extraordinary actor, playwright, MC and rapper behind the live hip-hop group Felonious." Here's a feature article on Wolf and on the play (and here's another), which runs from October 27 to November 16 at at the San Francisco Intersection for the Arts.

Adam Mansbach’s 2005 novel, Angry Black White Boy (Or, The Miscegenation of Macon Detornay) is an extremely rare breed of fiction -- a book by a white author with a white protagonist that focuses extensively and insightfully on the significance of the central character’s whiteness.

Unlike most white authors, Mansbach doesn’t only focus on racial issues when non-white characters enter the scene. Like his protagonist, Macon Detornay, Mansbach is probably as genuinely down with blackness as any sincerely studious white wannabe can ever be. However, he’s also determined to turn the racial lens around for a sustained stare at whiteness.

Both Mansbach and Macon foreground their own whiteness -- instead of merely trying to paint it black--because they realize that America’s refusal to get beyond its racial obsessions is not a black problem, nor a brown, red, or yellow one. The reality of racism is a white problem, and it has, or should have, a name -- white supremacy.

As a freshman at Columbia University, Macon also works as a cab driver. Many of his customers are the sort of well-off white folks who take taxis regularly, instead of buses or the subway. After eavesdropping on too many of their conversations, Macon gets fed up with what strikes him as a whiny, pampered, oblivious attitude:

The vapors of entitlement that steamed from these yuppies irked him; they were so fucking sure the cab would stop for them. They’d never been snubbed in their lives, sized up and passed by because the driver thought they wouldn’t pay or that they wanted to be taken somewhere ghetto. Macon had flagged down cabs while [black friends] Lajuan and Aura stood discreetly down the block, pretending not to be with him, approaching only when Macon had the door open. It was another way, he thought with pride, that they had cheated racism.

Macon soon becomes a full-blown Race Traitor by robbing such folks, taking their money and, as a parting insult, their overpriced neckties. As these events hit the news, all of New York City rises up in fear of a marauding, gun-waving, white-folk-abusing, and so of course black, cab driver. Shocked by the counterproductive results of his armed resistance to white privilege, Macon responds by turning himself in.

Suddenly thrust into the media spotlight, he seizes the moment by calling for a "National Day of Apology," by white people, to black people, on a person-to-person basis. Since most white Americans have so little idea of what there is to apologize or atone for, it's not surprising that the mass reconciliation effort doesn’t go very well.

By having his eighteen-year old protagonist proclaim himself even more genuinely hip to hip hop than most black people are, with moves that include tagging, hand-pumping, ball-grabbing, pimp-strutting, and all other things supposedly “black” (and supposedly, black male), Mansbach runs the risk himself of being labeled and denigrated as an embarrassing white wannabe -- a "wigger." He also runs this risk by having his third-person narrator slip in and out of a rapid-fire patois that alternates between old-style be bop and contemporary slam:

Hip hop’s a superpower worn incognito by cats like me, who move with the venom of every rhyme ever spit, cleave courses with the cold-fusion speed-of-sound precision of every turntable cut scratch slice transform and crossfade, and think with the dexterity of every theatric unsolved b-boy battle tactic, from show-stop uprock down to linoleum headspins and impossible whirling-dervish cardboard axis chiropractics.

I chew on gnarled roots, rock grimy sweatpants hoodies and boots, throw cold steel in motherfuckers’ unsuspecting faces and skate away unseen, muttering knockout punchlines in cartoon-bubble frozen breath. Then I dip into a phone booth and emerge jiggified, in tailored clothes with refined flows, my beard trimmed down to elegance, gesturing Shakespearian and quoting Machiavelli in a tone that makes the Western canon bawl.

These stylistic segues usually work very well, as do several extended bouts of open-mic oration by Macon, but Mansbach’s flying fingers must’ve worn out a dozen keyboards writing such prose. At the very least, Jack Kerouac’s Benzedrine-driven be bop riffs in On the Road finally have a worthy successor.

Among the many questions about race that Angry Black White Boy poses is whether both Mansbach and Macon can dodge the charge of being pretentious, culture-nabbing, backstabbing, hopelessly white-souled “wiggers.” Fortunately, what separates both Mansbach and Macon from other dabbling white boy b-boys is the deeply informed sincerity of their efforts.

For one thing, the novel is packed with apt, credentializing allusions to black cultural and political forebearers. For another, the fanatical appreciation of black culture expressed by both author and protagonist includes a desire to fight against the white supremacy that they themselves indelibly embody.

At one point, Macon remembers his thirteen-year-old self, a white kid sporting a Malcolm X t-shirt in order to proclaim his solid knowledge at “the first annual Boston Hip Hop Conference.” His younger self attended that conference with his "heart fluttering with intimidation and delight as scowling bald-headed old schoolers pointed at his chest, demanding, ‘Whatchu know about that man?’ Which was exactly what he’d wanted, why he’d worn it. He ran down Malcolm’s life for them, watched them revise their expressions with inward elation, nodded studiously at their government assassination theories, rhymed when the chance presented itself."

As Mansbach’s online bio demonstrates, he too has done his homework, as well as made a contribution to The Struggle. He’s written two other racially incisive novels, Shackling Water and the recently released The End of the Jews, as well as a book of poetry with a title that suggests his work’s overall urbanized tone, content, and metaphorical finesse: genius b-boy cynics getting weeded in the garden of delights.

Like Macon, Mansbach also resuscitates printed poetry into the spoken art it used to be, and he’s released a CD of this sort under a stage-name, Kodiak Brinks. Mansbach also describes himself as “the founding editor of the pioneering '90s hip hop journal Elementary, and a former Artistic Consultant to Columbia University's Center for Jazz Studies.” Currently, he writes a weekly political column for NewsOne.com, an online news source “for black America,” and for his day-time gig, he teaches writing at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Asked in an interview about the novel’s own street-cred and lit-crit bona fides, Mansbach described its allusive debt to black cultural production: “Invisible Man, Native Son, Flight to Canada, Another Country, a lot of Baraka’s poetry, ten or twenty different rappers, Gil Scott Heron’s work, The Last Poets, the career of Ol’ Dirty Bastard. I wanted it to have that kind of layering. And Paul Beatty also, I should say.” (Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle does seem like a precursor to Angry Black White Boy, and a challenging one at that.)

As it was for Mansbach, Macon’s adolescent rebellion fermented in a largely white Boston suburb, where he found no one interested in joining his disgust over the Rodney King verdict. Mansbach says that for him, as for Macon, the white jury’s sweeping absolution of L.A.’s abusive, racist police force was an infuriating travesty, and thus a catalyzing event in the budding rejection of his own whiteness:

Looking around at my community I saw a lot of hypocrisy, a lot of people pretending to care about things that they actually didn’t, a lot of malignant neglect going on, a lot of bullshit. I'd already made the decision that I wasn’t trying to be down with the dominant culture, instead I had found hip-hop, the thing that was most vibrantly critiquing that dominant culture.

Feeling compelled to do something, Mansbach led a high school walkout, “just to disrupt business as usual and say we’re too upset to do anything. This led to a rally at city hall.” As with the other parallels to Mansbach’s own life and self, his protagonist's reaction is more extreme -- Macon finds (perhaps too conveniently) an empty police car, which he smashes and burns.

Perhaps in recognition of the absurdity that is the concept of “race” itself, Angry Black White Boy eventually devolves into farce, with Macon running away from the riots ignited by his grand "Day of Apology" idea to the American South. There he meets up with some rather cartoonishly racist characters, who threaten to snuff out him and his race-traitor ways. Macon is then rescued by a deus ex machina, a millionaire who wants to save and commodify him, by spiriting him away in a helicopter named, yes, the Deus Ex Machina.

Like the characterization of Macon, most of Angry Black White Boy makes its incisive satiric points with exaggeration, veering at times into hilarious slapstick farce. Taken on these terms, instead of those of conventional realism, the novel succeeds in illuminating the current state of American race relations, particularly the infantilized state of current white self-awareness.

Instead of trying to end this recommendation with pithy closing words of my own, I’ll leave that to Adam Mansbach below. I'll only add that this novel is also an especially impressive work of literature because it’s so artfully, intelligently informed by a recent area of academic inquiry (which also, of course, informs me), “critical whiteness studies.” And, in case you haven't figured it out by now, the Macon Detornary in this book is a primary inspiration for this blog, and for the "me" who writes it as "Macon D."

At one point, Macon lands on what amounts to a personal race traitor’s slogan. It’s not quite as catchy as “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity,” the slogan of an apparently defunct academic journal, which took as its title the incendiary slur, Race Traitor. Macon's slogan is in the same vein, though: “White people are not evil but evil is white people.”

An interviewer asked Mansbach about this slogan, “How much of that is true to you?”

Mansbach replied:

I would probably amend it to evil is whiteness, because I don’t want to implicate individuals as much as a concept. The concept of whiteness goes un-interrogated, unanalyzed, and in the absence of definition it has often been a horrific thing. That is to say, whiteness being the top of the socio-economic pyramid. Basically it is mostly defined by what it is not.

Whiteness is a state of not ever really having to think about racial identity because whiteness is seen as normative in this society. I think there is a tremendous level of disengagement on the part of most white people when it comes to race. I don’t think it’s something that white people want to think about unless something forces us to think about it. The legacy of whiteness in this country has been of oppression and co-option while maintaining a cavalier attitude.

assume asians are smart

Self-identified Filipino Mark Roper confirms the common white assumption that Asians are smarter than white people. And other things too.

white movie friday : safe

Todd Haynes' Safe, released in 1988, is an unusual “white movie.” Unlike most movies made about white central characters, this story of "Carol White," a mysteriously ill American woman, expresses a filmmaker's awareness of the racial status of his characters. Safe goes even further, by analyzing this whiteness. It does so by addressing a series of rather abstract questions about what it means to be classified as "white," and about where white people in general think they’re going, in their fundamental movement away from that which is not white.

In its portrayal of the sad, inward collapse of its central character, Carol (played by Haynes regular Julianne Moore), the film’s basic racial questions can be put this way:

Whiteness was established as an important social category in order to distinguish the people in it from other people, especially because those other people, namely "red" and "black" ones, were a threat. Since, in these terms, whiteness is fundamentally a movement away from something it fears, then where is the “safe” place that such a movement is ultimately aimed toward? And if any white people ever get there, what is life like for them, once they've achieved the White Dream?

Throughout his career, Todd Haynes has been this type of abstract and nettlesome filmmaker. His main subject seems to be not the American Dream per se, but rather a series of more specific American dreams. In his first film, the notorious Karen Carpenter Story (1987), Haynes burrows beneath the surface of a wholesome, ethereal, and very white American icon, hoping to discover what it was that led Karen Carpenter, at the age of 32, to starve herself to death. The film traces Carpenter’s anorexia to its roots in a stifling, success-driven, and superficially happy family life. The Karen Carpenter Story (available in all its mad, 43-minute glory at various Google-able locations) is a very powerful, moving film, thanks in no small part to its actors, an array of meticulously costumed Barbie Dolls.

Working just out of film school, Haynes clearly saved money with this casting choice. However, in an artistic film that signaled the complexity of his later work, the choice serves several purposes. Rob Gonsalves points out, for instance, that the dolls are “used brilliantly”:

Haynes is saying that Karen herself was reduced to a dress-up doll by her overbearing brother and mother, living in a plastic universe that enforces surface femininity on women without taking into account the psychological price they often pay. . . . Karen's visible sickness—culminating in her collapse onstage—is bad for the Carpenters' squeaky-clean image, another façade that Haynes suggests was as hollow as Barbie.

Screenings of the film are now forbidden, thanks to a successful lawsuit filed by Karen’s singing partner and brother, Richard, over Haynes’ unlicensed use of music by The Carpenters. But like I said, Google now brings you the world, and it can also bring you The Karen Carpenter Story.

In all of his work, Haynes refuses to follow the rules of cinematic propriety. His second film, Poison (1991), is a series of allegorical vignettes based on the deliberately upsetting writings of the homosexual son of a prostitute, Jean Genet. Taken together, Poison's vignettes form an eloquent elegy to the AIDS-stricken gay community (such as it was) in the 1980s. Poison won the Grand Jury Award at The Sundance Film Festival, despite having enough unsettling and graphic content to earn a denunciation as “homoerotic filth” by a prominent Christian watchdog group, the American Family Association.

Southern California, where both Todd Haynes and Karen Carpenter grew up, is also the setting for Haynes’ third film, Safe. The movie opens with a theme-setting long-shot, filmed from the seat of a car, winding through a gated community, then through a gated driveway, and into the safety of the White home, where Carol and Greg (played by Xander Berkeley) live with twelve-year old Rory, Greg’s son by a previous marriage.

Viewers are quickly subjected to a ceiling shot of Greg and Carol having sex. As Greg labors away at what has clearly become just another routine for the Whites, Carol gazes away absent-mindedly; she brings herself back to the moment just often enough to coax Greg toward the usual finish.

In subsequent scenes, the camera pans over the enormous houses of the Whites and their neighbors, nary a person in sight. As Greg goes off to his nameless day-job, Carol busies herself with commiserating halfheartedly with a friend who’s lost a brother, and then with having lunch with her again the next day, when her friend encourages her to try a bold new thing—"a fruit diet" that’s "supposed to cleanse the body naturally of all its toxins."

We then see Carol picking up some dry-cleaned clothes, drinking lots milk (at one point she admits, “I’m a total milkaholic”), and going through the aerobic motions at a health club, where a friend remarks with envious amazement, “You know, Carol, you do not sweat!”

By mainstream American standards, the Whites have arrived. They live a life that seems to ask of them no sweat whatsoever. Whatever Greg does for work, it doesn’t seem to stress him out much; it also pays for their enormous McMansion, and it allows Carol to spend her days however she likes. Unfortunately, as with her friends, this freedom means little more than endless bouts of self-pampering, and obsessive attention to the details of her cavernous house.

When a new set of furniture arrives and the color is wrong, Carol freaks. But of course, she does so in a polite, restrained manner.

“Oh my God,” she says, her mouth agape. “It’s black. This is not what we ordered.”

As she rushes to call the furniture store, Haynes lingers on an extended reaction shot of Carol’s uniformed Latina maid, the ironically named Fulvia.

As she watches Carol's anxious fussing over furniture that probably costs as much as her yearly salary, the expression on Fulvia’s face says, all too clearly, “Lady, you think this a problem? I should have such problems!”

When Carol goes to the furniture store to demand a teal-colored replacement, a clerk tells her that the original order was a request for black. “That’s impossible,” Carol insists. “It doesn’t go with anything else we have.”

As in actual settings of this sort, the racial whiteness of these characters goes unnamed, and unnoticed, by the white people themsevles. As I’ve been suggesting, though, this family’s surname and the rejected "black" furniture aren't the only indications that Haynes means to mark that whiteness, and to analyze it.

As the Whites sit down to dinner with their son Rory, he reads them an essay he’s working on for school:

There were more and more gangs in the Los Angeles basin, plus many more stabbings and shootings by AK-47s, Uzis, and Mac-10s, and killings of numerous innocent people. L.A. was the gang capital of America. Rapes, riots, shooting of innocent people, slashing of throats, arms and legs being dissected, were all common sights in the black ghettoes of LA. Today, black and Chicano gangs are coming into the valleys, in mostly white areas, more and more. That’s why gangs in L.A. are a big American issue.

“Why does it have to be so gory?” Carol asks.

“Gory? That’s how it really is. God.”

As with the symbolically colored furniture, Rory's essay gives voice to the racial fears that account for all those gates outside the White home.

The looming intrusion of contaminating elements, into what amounts to a very bleached, antiseptic, and safe domestic space, soon takes another form. Having fallen asleep before an infomercial on “deep ecology” and the threat of viruses, the apparently suggestible Carol begins a series of severe coughing, wretching, and wheezing spells, and then, while her husband is sympathetically hugging her in an unusual moment of genuine intimacy, vomiting.

Carol visits her doctor, who can find nothing wrong with her. When the symptoms persist, she repeats her visit, only to be told again that she’s physically fine. The symptoms are clearly taking an emotional and mental toll as well, bringing Carol before a psychiatrist, who also fails to find a source, and eventually, to a hospital.

Lying in bed with AIDS-like marks on her skin and lips, Carol channel-surfs until she lands on an informercial for a retreat called the Wrenwood Center. This is the place, she realizes, where people like her belong. As a soothing, generic TV voice says, “Safe bodies need safe environments in which to live.”

The Wrenwood Center is run by Peter Dunning, another suggestively named character. Dunning’s first line, delivered to his collected patients, is a blandly disarming effort to assure them, apparently falsely, that he’s not out to dun them for money: “Now, if you’ll all close your eyes, and pass your valuables to the front. Heh heh.”

Sequestered in a hill-top mansion of his own, Dunning calmly, creepily lectures his environmentally challenged disciples on the Center's core value, the need to take individual responsibility for one's problems.

Having detached herself from her family, physically and, it seems, emotionally, Carol finally retreats into her own sterilized, white, plastic igloo. Having arrived at no definitive answer for Carol’s problem, the movie’s final lines (which I won't give away here) suggest the end of her journey--a steady march into the emptiness of herself. As Rob Gonsalves puts it, "There's nowhere for Carol to escape except into herself, which would be fine if she had a self.”

Like many works of art, Safe supports multiple interpretations. Many viewers choose to overlook the film’s ambiguity and its intricate symbolism, viewing it as a straightforward, sympathetic portrait of extreme environmental sensitivity. Others consider Carol’s plight another of the openly gay director’s extended allegories on the AIDS crisis.

Given the parallels it suggests between Carol’s journey and that of the white race, the film can also be interpreted as an allegory about racial fear. Viewed this way, the neurotic obsession with a clean, secure environment depicted in Safe suggests the logical end of the road for the people who declared themselves white, a racial group that still fundamentally defines itself in fearful relation to other, darker races.

Here, then, is how such a parallel works: formerly non-white people who became white began down this road by moving away from what they were before, and also by defining themselves through a process of also defining more explicitly, and fearfully, those whom they were not. As many historians of whiteness have explained, America initially declared itself, loudly and openly, as a “White, Anglo-Saxon” nation.

In fact, in one of its own self-defining documents, the Declaration of Independence, the new nation specifically defined itself in this fearful, racially relational sense.

In their list of grievances against King George III, the newly white colonists wrote, “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

In 1790, the desire for safety from the threat of racial contamination was further codified, in the form of the “Naturalization Act.” This law defined, among those coming to the new country, who could become citizens, and who could not. Among the stipulations was that of being a “free, white person.” Non-white people could come and live in America, but all the way up until 1954, when this Act was finally put to rest, they could not become Americans.

What Haynes ultimately says in Safe about whiteness, in an allegorical, symbolic way, is that this initial fear of fantasized, caricatured racial threats remains a fundamental characteristic of white people. It still prods them into gated communities, exclusionary workplaces, segregated schools and so on, spaces that seem safe because they’re as free as possible of the contaminating threat of non-whiteness.

Again, Haynes’ film is an allegory—it uses the method of unrealistic but pointed exaggeration to comment on parallel social phenomena. In terms of race, the story of Carol White parallels a journey to the logical end-point of whiteness.

Given the fearful underpinnings of the collective white psyche, the end point of the white race’s flight from contamination is its own empty self.



(here's the trailer for Safe)

eat cottage cheese

White people sometimes let non-white people work with them. In those situations, non-white people could use some advice.

(Crudely unsafe for work, perhaps--especially if you work with white people--but some truth sneaks through here.)

(from MTV's "Nick Cannon Presents Short Circuitz")

hold black people to higher standards

White folks often fail to realize how much more stressful life can be for black people, especially those with jobs in predominantly white workplaces. Aside from being accused by some fellow blacks of "acting white," a major cause of black stress is the higher standards that most white colleagues use in judging them. Black public figures entrusted with authority endure this double standard as well.

Stress has become widely recognized as a primary cause of physical and mental problems, including obesity, heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, depression, and higher rates of drinking and smoking. African Americans suffer higher rates than others of all these afflictions, and the extra layer of difficulties brought about by dealing with white folks is a primary cause.

As Michelle Johnson points out in her handbook, Working While Black: The Black Person's Guide to Success in the White Workplace,

Being black is a full-time job. If I constantly see my white coworkers treated with grace and dignity through every screwup, while I know that my mistakes put me one step closer to the firing line, chances are that I will smoke or drink more or eat more or act more recklessly when I'm away from work, which increases my risk of cancer, heart disease, accidents, and so forth. You get the point.

For black readers, Johnson's point is that instead of "going postal,” as whites sometimes do (and blacks almost never do), they should stop internalizing their stress; they should also resist the human tendency to self-medicate the resulting depression, and instead find more healthy outlets, like exercise or yoga.

If any white person were smart enough and curious enough to read Johnson’s handbook, the “point” for them might be that they should stop damaging the health of their black colleagues. One way to do so is to stop applying higher performance standards for blacks than for whites.

In Blue-Chip Black, a recent analysis of interviews with a range of middle-class African Americans, Sociologist Karyn Lacy writes of another common source of stress, the need to adopt and develop “public identities” when navigating white-dominated spaces. Her explanation of this strategy is worth quoting at length—if you’re not black, imagine the extra stress of having to do this nearly every day:

A key component of the public identities asserted by middle-class blacks is based on class and involves differentiating themselves from lower-class blacks through what I call exclusionary boundary-work. Washington-area middle-class blacks are firm in their belief that it is possible to minimize the probability of encountering racial discrimination, if they can successfully convey their middle-class status to white strangers.

To accomplish this feat, interviewees attempt to erect exclusionary boundaries against a bundle of stereotypes commonly associated with lower-class blacks. Exclusionary boundary-work is most readily apparent when middle-class blacks are shopping or managing employees in the workplace. Middle-class blacks also engage in inclusionary boundary-work in order to blur distinctions between themselves and white members of the middle class, by emphasizing areas of consensus and shared experience.

Barack Obama is undoubtedly one African American who deploys such tactics when appearing in public. As my choice of image above suggests, he also faces stress-inducing white double standards.

While all presidential candidates endure microscopic scrutiny, an extra set of measures gets applied to Obama because he's "black" (that he's actually "biracial" does little to alleviate this pressure). Hillary Clinton no doubt endures extra scrutiny because she’s a woman, but oddly enough, her gender gets far less media attention than Obama’s race does.

Black people carry their blackness around with them all the time, especially in the eyes of white people (no matter what whites might falsely claim about being "colorblind"). The latest round of white conniption fits over Obama's former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, is a case in point. Because whites tend to lump black people together into a monolithic mass of similar thought, action, and capabilities, the outlandish words of Obama's former pastor stick to Obama himself, no matter how many times he directly distances himself from them.

The words of white associates and advisers do not stick to white candidates this way. Take the case of former Clinton adviser Geraldine Ferraro, who recently made the rather stupid assertion that “if Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is.”

Fortunately, Ferraro’s comments were widely rejected. Notice, though, that unlike the attachment of the comments of Reverend Wright to Barack Obama, the words of Geraldine Ferraro did not stick like tar to Hillary Clinton.

This is partly because whites (but not blacks) did not find her words as outrageous as those of Reverend Wright. But it’s also because white people are perceived in the white-dominated media, and in the minds of white people, as individuals—and because black people are not. As a result, Ferraro was given more leeway to speak for herself, while Wright was not.

The application of this standard—the judging, that is, of candidates on the basis of what their advisers have to say—becomes even more apparent as an unfair double standard, when the words of Reverend Wright are juxtaposed with those of another outrageous, politically influential religious zealot.

Pastor John Hagee is a wealthy televangelist who recently endorsed John McCain, an endorsement that McCain was clearly glad to receive. Hagee’s proclamations form an interesting contrast—make that parallel—with Reverend Wright’s calls for God to “damn America” if it continues its oppressive treatment of black people.

Hagee condemned another religious institution, the Catholic Church, as a “great whore” and a “false cult system.” He has also claimed that God subjected New Orleans to the wrath of Hurricane Katrina because it was planning to host a gay pride parade, and that the Islamic Qur'an “contains a “mandate to kill Christians and Jews.”

Recently, Jeremiah Wright has gone on to make even more ridiculous statements, forcing Obama to denounce and sever more firmly than ever any ties to him. In contrast, McCain has offered little more than mild assertions that Hagee’s comments are “nonsense,” and workers for the corporate media have not pressed him on the issue with nearly the force they’ve applied to Obama regarding Wright’s comments.

The New York Times did note the following in an editorial on Obama and Wright yesterday:

Senator John McCain has continued to embrace a prominent white supporter, Pastor John Hagee, whose bigotry matches that of Mr. Wright. Mr. McCain has also not tried hard enough to stop a race-baiting commercial — complete with video of Mr. Wright — that is being run against Mr. Obama in North Carolina.

However, this bit of analysis was buried within an editorial on the Obama-and-Wright controversy, and comparative analysis of the two stories is similarly lopsided elsewhere in the corporate media.

Sometimes I think Barack Obama and his family members might be better off, personally at least, if he didn't become president. In addition to the heightened fear that a racist assassin's bullet will find him, the pressure to represent blackness, all the while trying to dissociate themselves from it in response to an opposing pressure, will be both enormous, and enormously taxing.

What I think white people should realize in all this is that there’s a bitter irony in the intense scrutiny they tend to apply to blacks who achieve a level of professional success, as opposed to the lighter measures used to judge whites who do so.

What this double standard amounts to is a whitening of black people—whites think they're seeing a black person, but what they're really seeing is a reflection of themselves, in the form of their own, unfairly applied standards.


(props to Shark-fu for inspiration, and James C. Collier for the White-Obama image, from his "MUGCUT" gallery at Acting White)



UPDATE (5/5/08): Via New York Times columnist Frank Rich's "The All-White Elephant in the Room," a telling video of Rev. John Hagee. It should be appearing hourly on the corporate news outlets, but, for reasons I explained above and more, isn't:





As Rich writes, the video shows

a white televangelist, the Rev. John Hagee, lecturing in front of an enormous diorama. Wielding a pointer, he pokes at the image of a woman with Pamela Anderson-sized breasts, her hand raising a golden chalice. The woman is “the Great Whore,” Mr. Hagee explains, and she is drinking “the blood of the Jewish people.” That’s because the Great Whore represents “the Roman Church,” which, in his view, has thirsted for Jewish blood throughout history, from the Crusades to the Holocaust.

[By] his own account, Mr. McCain sought out Mr. Hagee, who is perhaps best known for trying to drum up a pre-emptive “holy war” with Iran. (This preacher’s rantings may tell us more about Mr. McCain’s policy views than Mr. Wright’s tell us about Mr. Obama’s.) Even after Mr. Hagee’s Catholic bashing bubbled up in the mainstream media, Mr. McCain still did not reject and denounce him, as Mr. Obama did an unsolicited endorser, Louis Farrakhan, at the urging of Tim Russert and Hillary Clinton. Mr. McCain instead told George Stephanopoulos two Sundays ago that while he condemns any “anti-anything” remarks by Mr. Hagee, he is still “glad to have his endorsement.”

I wonder if Mr. McCain would have given the same answer had Mr. Stephanopoulos confronted him with the graphic video of the pastor in full “Great Whore” glory. But Mr. McCain didn’t have to fear so rude a transgression. Mr. Hagee’s videos have never had the same circulation on television as Mr. Wright’s. A sonorous white preacher spouting venom just doesn’t have the telegenic zing of a theatrical black man.

If we’re to judge black candidates on their most controversial associates — and how quickly, sternly and completely they disown them — we must judge white politicians by the same yardstick.