think that apologizing officially for slavery makes a big difference

(source;
probable actual source:
damali ayo's "Living Flag")

This post is actually an open thread -- a request for your input on some recent events and such that white Americans should at least be thinking about. Feel free to offer your input on whatever else related to this blog's topics that you've been thinking about.

My first proffered possibility for commentary -- what do you think about the American Senate's muted, "nonbinding" apology this week for slavery? Is it really going to make any difference? Is its explicit dismissal of reparations an appropriate nail in the coffin of that idea?

Personally, and as I've said before, I don't think so -- I think white Americans should pull that coffin back up and apply some electroconvulsive therapy. After they learn, that is, what "40 acres and a mule" and "generational transference of wealth" mean, and after they read such things as Randall Robinson's The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, and such explanations of seemingly invisible collective white wealth as George Lipsitz's The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, or Karen Brodkin's explanation of "the largest [white] affirmative action program in U.S. history," the GI Bill, in her book How Did Jews Become White Folks.

What I think white America needs to do instead of merely apologizing is acknowledge, understand, and work to counteract the ongoing effects of slavery. And of the de facto slavery and apartheid that took place after "real slavery" officially ended. (I do remain a wishful hopeful thinker.)

We have some Australian readers/commenters here -- can you tell us if white Australia's official apology to aboriginal people last year has made any tangible, substantial difference?

One other question/topic -- are you going mark or celebrate Juneteenth somehow? And if you're a white person, have you even heard of such a thing?

And just one more -- there's so much to talk about -- do you too get a lot of forwarded emails from friends and family members about what a great job Sheriff Joe Arpaio is doing? How he keeps coming up with creative and "finally, effective!" ways of cracking down on prisoners?

I get a lot of those, always from white folks who just love good ol' Sheriff Joe -- is forwarding praise for his draconian ways another example of stuff white people do?

I usually respond to those who forward me such unwittingly racist foolishness with long explanations of why Sheriff Joe's methods are barbaric, counterproductive and racist (only to get another "Go Sheriff Joe!" message from some of these folks a month or two later).

And now, thanks to Nezua at The Unapologetic Mexican, here's something else I'll be forwarding in response:

rescue dark kids (who would never have a chance otherwise)

Are you a Nice White Lady?

If so, there's a LOT of work to do!

The dark kids are waiting for you.

Don't be afraid -- underneath that intimidating facade of self-protective attitude, they're really good kids.




This parody reminds me of that condescending, sanctimonious Michelle Pfeiffer debacle, Dangerous Minds.



I've never seen Freedom Writers -- was it this bad too?


(Not to knock the real nice white people who decide to Teach for America.)


h/t: scsubulldwg92

think that blackface is okay if white people are the butt of the joke

Chicago-Lake Liquors

Minneapolis, Minnesota
(click here for larger version)

On the absorbing and informative blog Kiss My Black Ads, Craig Brimm responds to an ad campaign currently being run by Chicago-Lake Liquors, a store located in a largely black area of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The images above are apparently billboards, and I've embedded below the three TV commercials also included in this campaign. (If you can't view them, they're also running now on the store's site here.)

The ads include "black" language, gestures, body language and so on, as performed by white, middle-class men (why no white women?). As I understand it, the joke is that these white folks are making fools of themselves by imitating black people.

Are these ads racist? Or are they making fun of racist white people? And if they're "only" doing the latter, does that really make the contemporary blackface here any more acceptable?

Does context matter here, with Chicago-Lake Liquors located in a largely black area? Given that, perhaps the ads allow black people to feel superior in a way to these white people, by laughing at their silly efforts to get hip by acting "black." Maybe, but that seems like a stretch.

Speaking of context -- while blackface is largely condemned in the U.S., because it perpetuates and solidifies racist stereotypes, it serves other purposes in some other countries. Take a look at these other examples; as a United States citizen trying to become more aware on a daily level of racism and my own whiteness, I have increasing trouble ever seeing blackface, literal or otherwise, as acceptable. And yet, I'm a strong believer in the meaning-generating significance of social, historical, and cultural context. Many things have different meanings in different contexts.

Last summer, I posted a video in which British TV star Tracey Ullman donned blackface, in order to satirize (effectively, I thought) self-aggrandizing white people who adopt African children. Now, though, I'm not so sure this skit is worth applauding, despite the good point that I think it makes.




Is that acceptable blackface?

Then there's this recent blackface performance by a Turkish newscaster. Apparently, according to ScoopThis.Org, this is a complicated joke of sorts, mostly meant to pay homage and gentle respect to Obama, and also to criticize Turkey itself for recent dealings with the U.S. BuzzFeed adds this: "Apparently, it's actually a metaphor for the way the Bush administration 'darkened' the face of the Turkish public, and how the anchor hopes Obama will turn things around."



Within a Turkish context, is this acceptable blackface?

Whether your answer is "yes" or "no," it does seem worthwhile to interpret this performance in light of the strong probability that Turkish society in general has little sense or understanding of the particular, deeply racist history of blackface in the United States.

I'm also reminded of the Japanese teenagers who used to dress up, and maybe still do, in a fashion known as Ganguro (ガングロ), which literally means "black-face."

According to a Western video report on this phenomenon, this look does not come from people of African descent; instead, its origins are traceable to a Japanese comic's donning of blackface in order to clown around in a loincloth in the guise of an aboriginal Australian.*

(source)

So, I do find the Chicago-Lake Liquors ads racist. Even though the satiric butt of their central joke is clueless white people instead of black people, their version of blackness is insultingly cartoonish. They also basically revive what amounts to an American white supremacist tradition that deserves to die, blackface minstrelsy.

Still, I wonder -- if we consider geographic, sociohistorical context, are some versions of blackface okay? Perhaps even, given its urban location, the contemporary American version in Chicago-Lake Liquors' ad campaign?


* As Restructure! notes in a comment, Ganguro is one of three such modes of teenage blackface identified in the video; Yamanba, which means "mountain hag," is the name of the one that's tied to a comic's racist parody of an aboriginal Australian. Jonathan Ross, the narrator of the video, notes that when Ganguro appeared after Yamanba, "many thought it was simply an homage" to the comic's "beloved creation," but apparently it's not.

claim they have native american blood

But here methinks I can hear you observe What! Englishmen intermarry with Indians? But I can convince you they are guilty of much more heinous practices, more unjustifiable in the sight of God and man. . . for many base wretches amongst us take up with negro women, by which means the country swarms with mulatto bastards, and these mulattoes, if but three generations removed from the black father or mother, may, by the indulgence of the laws of the country, intermarry with the white people, and actually do every day so marry.

Now, if instead of this abominable practice which hath polluted the blood of many amongst us, we had taken Indian wives in the first place, it would have made them some compensation for their lands. . . . We should become rightful heirs to their lands, and should not have smutted our blood . . .

The Reverend Peter Fontaine of Virginia,
in a letter to his brother Moses,
dated March 30, 1757

There's long been a belief among the many family members on my father's side that my father's grandmother was "part Indian." From what I've gathered, such claims are common in white families in the United States. White claims about what may be just as likely -- being part black -- are almost non-existent.

I would like to know what percentage of Americans who self-identify as white contain non-white blood, but reading around on the topic tells me that any particular statistics are not universally accepted by genealogical and DNA experts.

Also, since so many people who did have African or Native blood and could pass for white did so, only DNA tests for a large percentage of white Americans could provide reliable percentages (but even then, the tests themselves aren't necessarily reliable -- the "Native American" results, for example, could be confused with Asian ancestry, given the geographic origins of Native Americans).

According to a Guardian article by Paul Harris on the increasing popularity of genetic testing, "One-third of white Americans, according to some tests, will possess between two and 20 per cent African genes. The majority of black Americans have some European ancestors." (I've yet to find informed estimates of white Americans with Native American genes -- please tell us in a comment if you know of any.)

Harris points out that "Native Americans are growing in numbers, not because of a high birth rate, but because many Americans are discovering unknown native ancestors written in their DNA."

I doubt the same discovery about African American blood is causing that recorded population to increase. Given the regularity with which white Americans impregnated slaves in order, among other reasons, to increase their "property" (and then going on, in some cases, to sell their own children), and again, given the ability of many light-skinned "black" Americans to pass into white society -- given these and other factors, I would think that DNA tests for whites probably turn up more African American than Native American blood. And yet, few white people who find black blood probably go on to proclaim their black ancestry, while many who find Native American blood do go on to proclaim that ancestry.

I should also note that white people in the United States are not the only ones who hope to find Native American ancestry. Many African Americans seek it as well, and significant interaction between the two groups means that some find it. And many Latino/a Americans, of course, don't have to search far at all to find their Native American roots.

Some of the white Americans who take DNA tests or search census and birth records for Native American ancestry do so in the hopes of claiming financial benefits. As Harris writes,

Native Americans often complain they are swamped by "American Indian Princess syndrome," because every white person wants native DNA in their past. In a world of minority grants, scholarships and Indian gambling rights, any debate over DNA and race could easily also become an argument over resources.

Some of these questing white Americans just want to know "who they are." This strikes me as a a dubious quest -- would finding some Native American or black blood really make a person who was raised white, looks white, and gets taken and treated as white, any more "black" or "Indian"?

It's also clear that most white people looking for Native American ancestry are hoping to establish a more romanticized connection to Indian-ness. A connection based in, and stuck in, the past, much more so than the present.

These are the white searchers (sometimes called "pretendians") who hope to fill up a certain emptiness in their bleached-out, whitened identity, but want little part of actual, ongoing Native American struggles. Many of them will never go to a reservation to experience the results of white genocidal practices, even if they do find Native American blood in their DNA. They're rarely willing to fight for treaty rights, nor help with such contemporary problems as compulsory sterilization or substance abuse. Indeed, they're rarely willing to even acknowledge these problems, or do much of anything else that goes beyond vague, sentimental ideas of supposedly authentic Indian-ness.

So why do a lot of white people cherish the possibility of Native American blood so much more than that of African American blood, even when the latter may well be a more likely part of their background?

I think as with the cherished Native American possibility, their distaste and sometimes even disgust for the possibility of black ancestors is based on received notions from the past, but also on those of the present. Ever since slavery in the U.S. was limited to black people in order to divide them from working white people, they've been the most despised racial group. Any sober look at today's American culture in general -- the primary source of our received notions about other people -- would reveal that disdain for racial minorities continues to be strongest for black people.

Actually, common white notions of American Indians are also largely ingested from current cultural imagery, from "brave" or "noble" team mascots, to the continued predominance of TV and movie images of long-gone Indians over accurate representations of the remaining ones actually living today. As gwen notes in a Sociological Images post on this anachronistic tendency in non-indigenous appreciation of "Indian art,"

This tendency is apparent in other elements of U.S. culture, of course: movies like “Dances with Wolves,” books about “noble savages,” and conflicts over what types of technologies American Indians can use when spear fishing (with non-Indians arguing Indians should only be able to use the methods that their tribes used in the 1800s) all indicate a wider perception that “authentic” Indians should inhabit a time-warp universe in which their cultures and lifestyles have remained basically unchanged since the late 1800s or early 1900s, a requirement we don’t ask of other groups.

As far as I know, no one in my family has taken a DNA test to settle the question of whether we actually have Native American ancestors. If some of my relatives do decide to do it, I hope I get a chance to talk to them about just what it is they're really looking for. I'd also like to know what they plan to do if they find something else.

get interested in black skin whenever summer comes around

This is a guest post by Doreen Yomoah, a vagabond currently residing in Shanghai. She's also a founding mother of the Women’s Liberation Army, a motley crew of women scattered throughout the globe who are sick of injustice and planning to do something about it. (She also wrote this popular swpd post: "fail to distinguish african immigration from slavery descent.")



Things you should definitely do to a black person this summer:

Make well-informed observations like, “You’re lucky, you can’t get sunburned.” Melanin isn’t just skin pigmentation; it’s magic! As everyone knows, even though PIGS and TREES can get sunburned, black people cannot.


If you see a black person applying sunscreen, you should ask them, “Why are you worried about skin cancer? You’re black!” As everyone knows, never in the history of time has a black person ever gotten skin cancer. And we are certainly not more likely to die from it than whites.


If a black person you know tries to stay out of the sun, you should say some variation of, “Why? You can’t get any darker.” That is a logical assumption to make because black people, in fact, do not have human skin. Therefore, it does not get darker in the sun, the way every other race’s skin does.


Something that black people absolutely adore is when white people grab our arms and hold theirs next to ours and say, “Look! I’m almost as dark as you are!!!” This makes us feel almost as human as white people.


You should make jokes like, “[insert black person’s name] should go tanning!!!” This is hilarious and gets funnier and funnier each time you hear it. It was amusing the first time I heard it, and now, 12 years later, I actually look forward to hearing people say it each summer, because it’s just so original and clever.


In general, make it a point to talk at every opportunity about how tan you are/are not. This is an incredibly fascinating topic to discuss ad nauseum.


These are things that white people do that black people look forward to each and every single summer.

Please don’t let us down by neglecting to do them, again, and again, and again, and . . .

care more about token diversity than actual diversity

Token Black
from "South Park"
(voiced by Adrien Beard, who was recruited
by "South Park" co-creator Trey Parker
"because he was the only black guy we had in our building at the time")

Diversity has been all the rage in American institutions and workplaces for decades now, but many still fail to achieve it. The white people in such places often know they're supposed to be members of a less homogeneous workforce, or campus population, or cast of characters, so they sometimes find ways to create the appearance of diversity. This is much easier than finding ways to achieve actual diversity, which many white people don't really want anyway.

For a lot of white people, appearing diverse is more important than actually being diverse.

Such people can sometimes be heard repeating this mantra of the modern age: "Thank God for photoshop!"

Workers for the city of Toronto recently needed a photo for their city's "Summer Fun Guide," and they apparently wanted to represent their, ahem . . . "fair" city as a diverse place (okay that "fair" isn't fair -- Toronto is actually a very diverse place).

So, instead of finding some real diversity and taking a picture of it, they altered the following image:


Here's the final image that these folks working for the city of Toronto felt satisfied with. Did Token from "South Park" finally grow up, and find work as a diversity model?


Unfortunately, these civic-minded city workers got caught with their diversity down. Allison Hanes of Toronto's National Post even wrote a story about it, which says in part:

The smiling, ethnically diverse family featured on the cover of Toronto's latest edition of its summer Fun Guide was digitally altered to make the photo more "inclusive," which city officials say is in keeping with a policy to reflect diversity.

A spokesman for the department that publishes the guide listing recreation activities confirmed the publication was doctored to insert the face of a different father.

"He superimposed the African-Canadian person onto the family cluster in the original photo. It was two photographs and one head was superimposed over the original family photo," said John Gosgnach, communications director for the social development division.

"The goal was to depict the diversity of Toronto and its residents."

When asked about the altered photo, Kevin Sack, Toronto's director of strategic communications, said, "You won't find a more inclusive organization than us. We want everyone to feel involved and welcome to participate in everything. That's the only goal. Nothing wrong with that."

Right on, Mr. Sack! In these Politically Correct Times, very little is more important than appearing to embrace diversity. As every good director of strategic communications knows, that's much more important than demonstrating actual diversity.

This is pretty clumsy photoshopping, which should inspire a new term -- "photochop." (Oh, wait, that already is a new term. Or maybe an old one -- it's hard to keep up with the Urban Dictionary.)

This photographic insertion of a Token Black Guy -- and it always seems to be a black guy -- in the interests of appearing diverse is nothing new.

In September of 2000, the University of Wisconsin got caught trying to portray its campus as "diverse" with this brochure cover -- can you spot the awkward black guy?

for larger image, click here

As Professor Hany Farid writes at a site advertising his image-tampering detective service,

The original photograph of white fans was taken in 1993. The additional black student, senior Diallo Shabazz, was taken in 1994. University officials said that they spent the summer looking for pictures that would show the school's diversity -- but had no luck.

Which is no surprise, since like most "flagship" state universities, the University of Wisconsin is still struggling -- or supposedly struggling -- to make its student diversity somewhere near that of the state's overall population.

In their bumbling clumsiness, these attempts to keep up appearances might seem like something out of The Onion. Indeed, the writers at that venerable fount of shark-toothed satire seem to have been inspired by the U of Wisconsin's snafu when they wrote a faux exposé, "Black Guy Photoshopped In," accompanied by this image:



Interesting choice for this exquisitely bad photochop -- Iowa State. Iowa is a notoriously white state, but to its credit, many white folks there are anxious about that (after all, their selection of Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries really got his campaign ball rolling).

Are Iowans anxious enough to resort to photochop, in order to appear diverse? Well no, perhaps not -- that's an Onion parody.

The Onion article that accompanies this purposely awkward photo is priceless; it captures the face-saving hypocrisy of university, city, and other diversity-minded officials very well.

Here's part of it -- have you encountered other instances where white folks seem more concerned with the appearance of diversity than with actual diversity?

"Here at Iowa State, we have a remarkably diverse student body, with literally dozens of non-whites," Iowa State director of student affairs Andrea Driessen said. "We thought a picture with at least one non-white happily interacting with whites would be a great way to show off this fact. Unfortunately, we didn't have any pictures of whites and non-whites actually interacting, so we had to make one up."

Said chancellor Dr. Michael Arbus: "An unaltered, or 'real,' cover photo would not have adequately captured the glorious rainbow of multiculturalism that is ISU. We thought it best to take a more illusory, 'less-actual' approach in depicting this school's racial demographic."

The black guy, added using Adobe Photoshop, has been identified as Marcus Jamison. A Shreveport, LA, native, Jamison attended Iowa State for one semester in 1996 before transferring to Grambling University. His face was lifted from a photo of him attending a racial-sensitivity seminar during his freshman orientation and digitally added to the course-catalog cover by graphic designer Brian Tompkins.

"Believe me, this was not an easy task. We combed through hundreds of school-newspaper and yearbook file photos before we found a picture of a black guy," Tompkins said. "Even then, we had to keep searching, because we felt it was important that the black guy be smiling."

Added Tompkins: "If you think it's hard to find a picture of a black guy, try finding a smiling black guy!"


As many white folks know, diversity isn't just a buzzword -- it's important.

In fact, it's almost as important as appearing to have diversity.


Have you encountered this phenomenon, in terms of photos, or other ways of keeping up diverse appearances? Please describe for us in a comment any encounters you've had with these sorts of face-saving white folks.


UPDATE (9/2/09): For more on this, and especially on Diallo Shabazz, the awkwardly posed black guy used and abused by the University of Wisconsin, see Lisa's post at Sociological Images, where she writes in part,

Diallo sued. He didn’t ask for a settlement. He said that he wanted a “budgetary apology.” He asked that, in compensation, the University put aside money for actual recruitment of minority students. He won. Ten million dollars was earmarked for diversity initiatives across the UW system. The irony in the whole thing is that UW requested photos of Shabazz shaking administrators’ hands in reconciliation (i.e., photographic proof that everything was just fine). Oh, and also, the Governor vetoed part of the earmark and many initiatives wore off with turnover.

see white, right-wing terrorism as "isolated incidents"

Shepard Smith is a Fox News commentator who's currently being labeled an "undercover liberal" and a "traitor" on right-wing sites, to which I refuse to link, for occasionally calling out some of the extreme manifestations of right-wing ideology.

Thinking about Smith and what he says in the clip below, and what he doesn't say, helps me think about how whiteness works. It contributes to such terrorist incidents as James von Brunn's assault yesterday on the Holocaust Museum, by demonizing "Jews" and other minorities, but it also deflects our understanding of how more general and common white attitudes help to cause such incidents.

In the video clip below (a transcript appears at the end of this post), Smith talks about "scary" emails that he's been getting. He doesn't say that they're from right-wing extremists, even though that's clearly the case. In an effort to explain their hatred and their heightened frequency, Smith ends up blaming the blogosphere, rather than more proper targets, such as his own network and other corporate media outlets; conservative ideology; and America's more general white supremacist culture.




In terms of his own employer, Smith is overlooking or denying how the exaggerating blowhards on Fox News foment what he refuses to label "domestic terrorism." He also refuses to identify the political location of this extremism -- on the "Right," the conservative side, the side where Fox sits in all but name and slogan ("Fair and Balanced" -- Yeah, Right!). It seems to me that instead of denigrating the Right, Smith is serving more mainstream conservative interests, by trying to distance extremism "way out there on a limb," rather than within the Right Wing.

Nevertheless, some Fox fans have written on blogs and comment forums that Smith should "get his ass on over to CNN," or MSNBC, "where he belongs." But when it comes to race, and especially whiteness, other networks are nearly as bad as Fox. They too fail, not only by refusing to routinely call right-wing domestic terrorism what it is, but also by refusing to identify the overwhelming whiteness of that terrorism, and of their own blinkered perspective.

On Fox News and elsewhere in the corporate media, "terrorism" is what Arabs/Muslims do. Like most white people, corporate media workers see white people as individuals before they see them as "white." That tendency makes it less likely that they'll see violent white people who commit terrorism as members of a group, as people whose actions in any way represent that group.

Because corporate media workers view and depict the world through a white racial frame, they're more inclined to depict white people who commit what amounts to group-supported (and perhaps sponsored) terrorism as lone individuals. As "nutcases" whose horrendous acts are "isolated incidents."

But incidents of domestic terrorism are not isolated, and they're happening more frequently. As Alex Kingsbury writes,

In the past two weeks, the country has seen the bombing of a Starbucks coffee shop in New York City, the arrest of four men for allegedly plotting to blow up synagogues and shoot down planes, the shooting of two soldiers at an Army recruitment center in Arkansas, the assassination of a doctor inside a Kansas church, and the shooting at the Holocaust Museum. Although these are not all cases of right-wing extremism, each is an example of domestic terrorism.

Aside from their recent heightened frequency, these incidents are also not "isolated" in the sense that those who commit them are often informed by, or members of, right-wing groups that openly espouse hate, and even murder.

They're also not isolated in another sense. While the corporate media, and American culture in general, depict minorities in countless group-oriented and negative ways, white individuals are very rarely identified as white. And yet as a group, whites are implicitly identified as the ones who need to protect themselves from the supposedly encroaching and dangerous minorities. All of this promotes an "us versus them" mentality, which in turn encourages these supposedly lone actors to act.

It's easy to see that in glossing over the significance of the hateful email he receives, Shepard Smith is denying the complicity of his own, clearly conservative network in stoking the hatred of extremists.

But I think a bigger, and more crucial issue here is how the corporate media at large, and white Americans in general, fail to understand the common white tendency to view white individuals as merely individuals. That isolating perspective stops us from seeing the multiple pernicious forces that contribute to domestic terrorism by influencing those who commit it. Correcting that failure means focusing on and understanding all forms of whiteness that inspire violence, not just the extreme forms.

America itself is founded and grounded in white supremacist violence to all sorts of non-white people; Americans currently live in an empire (declining though it may be) that has long bolstered itself with the resources, sweat, and lives of non-white people. America's violently white foundations may be invisible to most of today's white people, but their influence continuously flows into all of us, and then out into our actions.

___


Video transcript:

Shepard Smith: I read a lot of email around here, and the email, to me, has become more and more frightening. It's not a new thing; it's been happening over the past few months. It's been happening, you know, to some degree since the election process went along. I mean, we had a woman, we had a black man, we had a lot going on. And there are people now who are way out there on a limb. And I think they're just way out there on a limb with the email that they send us, cuz I read it, and they are out there, I mean, out there in a scary place.

I'm gonna read to you a little bit from one -- and I'm not gonna read the name -- but this is, I promise, a representative sample of the kinds of things we get here:

Shepard, How dare you tell us to get over Obama not being a US citizen? Where is the birth certificate, where? He won't show it. So why are you so trumped up to believe it. I cannot stand Hussein, he is a socialist Marxist who is at fast rate destroying our country.

If you're one who believes that abortion is murder, at one point do you go out and kill someone who is performing abortions? Well, I think we just learned, for [sic] the murder of Dr. Tiller.

If you are one who believes these sorts of things about the president of the United States, and I could read a hundred of them like this, I mean, from today, people who are so amped up and so angry, for reasons that absolutely wrong, ridiculous, preposterous. Yet they are mad, and they're very mad that I just called it preposterous.

Other Guy: Well, if anybody wants to know the level of anger, or whatever you wanna call it, crazy, just take a spin around the blogs out there, on the Internet. Just take half an hour and go on through and randomly see what is being said out there. It is, it's frightening on a lot of different levels, and part of the problem is that they're feeding each other. People are not going out there --

SS: They are! They're on web sites, feeding each other, the same bunch of hate that's not based in fact. And it's ginning itself up, and I guess if that's what you want to do with your time, maybe that's what you do. But more and more, it seems that people are taking the extra step and getting the gun out.

only care about "gang violence" when it hits white people

Having thought for awhile now about how race works in the U.S., I know very well that in the mainstream imagination, "white" equals "normal." I also know that the most full-fledged "all-American" people are also thought to be white people.

Sometimes, though, I'm still shocked by how pervasive this kind of thinking is, and by the double standards it leads to.

I was struck again this way when I saw the following Good Morning America segment, about the death of 14-year-old Christopher Jones. He was a white suburban boy who was recently knocked off his bicycle, and then beaten and killed by a group of six kids. Two have been arrested; one, a 16-year-old, is black, and the identity of the other, a 14-year-old, has yet to be released.

For the makers of this Good Morning America segment, Christopher Jones' death is sad, but something else is the real story. That story is about the place he lived, "the suburbs," and the violation of that space by a contaminating element, a violent, racialized element that its residents thought they'd spent enough money to get away from.

The words "black" and "white" are never spoken here, and yet, that racial divide, with "normal," well-off whites on one side and "violent," impoverished blacks on the other, is what it's all about for the producers of Good Morning America.

I feel terrible for the family and friends of Christopher Jones -- no one should be treated like that, let alone die like that. At the same time, though, I can't overlook the unspoken white lens, or filter, through which this story gets told. I have to wonder -- would this story still be told this way by Good Morning America, or even at all, if Christopher and his parents were black?




Right from the start, the makers of this Good Morning America segment imply that the lives of well-off suburban white people are more noteworthy, more fundamentally valuable, than those of the implicitly non-white people who live in "the inner-city." Gang violence, and the misery and death caused by it, are presented as an old, boring story -- but not this time, because one white child died from it, in suburbia.

I find this story difficult to write about because I don't want to minimize the suffering of Christopher Jones' parents; their loss is horrific. The thing is, I think it's the producers of Good Morning America who minimize their suffering, by using it to tell a sensationalistic story about "all-American," implicitly white lives invaded by black gang violence.

The story of Christopher Jones' death is presented as a "cautionary tale" for the residents of "suburbia," an unspokenly white place where the residents have achieved "the American Dream," and thus a place where these kinds of things just shouldn't happen.

Never mind, dear viewers, that "old news" about how "gang violence" happens a lot more often in other places. To other kinds of people. And for all sorts of complicated, but addressable and workable reasons. We know you're bored with that story, about those people.

Never mind either that the relatively small group of kids who attacked Christopher Jones weren't really in what we normally call a violent, drug-dealing "gang." We're going to insist that it was a "gang," and that it committed "gang violence" against a "suburban" (and white, and thus especially innocent) child.

Among the many things Christopher's mother must have said during her interview, Good Morning America chose to highlight this statement:

"He died on our street. In suburbia. Where we paid $350,000 for a townhouse. In a neighborhood where our shutters have to match our doors."

So this becomes a story about the shocking invasion of supposedly safe suburbia. But again, this isn't just a story about people in general who've arrived at a cozy rung on the American class ladder, is it? It's really about white people who've done that; it's a safe bet that if non-white people who've done that were to lose a son in the exact same way, Good Morning America would not be in their spacious kitchen interviewing them.

To illustrate that the story being told here is also about race, that it's really all about race, imagine if a black child of black parents in that same neighborhood had been killed in this same way.

Would his story be covered by Good Morning America like this? I doubt it.

Would it even be covered at all by Good Morning America? I doubt that too.

Never mind asking if Good Morning America would cover an inner-city black or Hispanic or Asian American child's violent death with this same wide-eyed concern, and this same heart-tugging music. We know that'll never happen (though I do hope that someone will provide a link to a GMA video-clip that proves me wrong).

A quick Google search reveals that other major news outlet have also seen fit to treat Christopher Jones' death as a major story. The Washington Post, for instance, sent a reporter to his funeral. Again, I can't imagine a non-white child being described in the corporate media this way:

The images projected on the screen . . . were perhaps the most telling. Christopher appeared a normal, happy kid. He loved the Redskins. Made snowballs in the back yard. Had a boxy plastic play set. Mugged in pictures with mom.

"He was a boy's boy," said Anand Rawls, a longtime family friend. "You couldn't ask for a better son."

Again, Christopher Jones' death is horrible, and I feel for people who loved and knew him.

However, there's another horror here. As with the more familiar Missing White Girl stories, what I find appalling here is the loud-and-clear implication that Christopher Jones' story is significant because it happened to a certain kind of son, and not to another kind of son.

In other words, that other horror, which I consider symptomatic of a common white pathology, because so few white people actually see this horror, is this -- Christopher Jones was a child whose death is deemed more sad, and more alarming, than those of many other children who have died a similar death, merely because of his race, and merely because his parents live in the suburbs.

white quotation of the week (patricia smith)

Heartland

From a tiny black and white television
an a sullen truck stop just east of Advance, Ind.,
a sports announcer screams his voice to a squeak.
Mike Andretti, six laps away from winning at Indy,
has pulled his machine over smoothly, without sputter,
without benefit for a final dramatic choking.
The announcer is clearly insulted by this affront
to American values, and is trying very hard
to remain objective, trying hard not to yell
“Get back on the road, you chickenshit sonofabitch!”

I tune out his feverish buzz and glance at the four
proprietors of this gastronomic hellhole . . .

All four have swiveled on the creaking stools
to stare at me, all of me much blacker than they
can imagine, much more of a show than the tiny
cars whizzing around the screen, much more shocking
than Mike Andretti’s white light moment of failure.

If it were summer, fat flies, drunk on bacon grease,
would drag their last across this tabletop. As it is,
I am sitting across from my white husband, and we are
hungry, angry, and for the moment, strangers.
I refuse to eat and amuse myself instead by watching
the Waltons try to figure us out -- me sipping
vehemently on lukewarm Diet Pepsi, my husband inhaling
three mutant pieces of country-fried chicken.

He picked that colored girl up at the race, and now
he regrets it. He’s a pimp from Ohio, a businessman
who picks up hitches. She fucks him for money.
She twists her body the way he wants it, for money.
They all agree I’m in it for the cash,
that he’s in it for whatever that song is
black women sing with their bodies. They’re all wrong. . . .

This is not my heartland.
However, this is my heart, pumping hard through
ribbons of cornfields and sleek shopping centers;
this is my heart, stopping whenever we walk
into a restaurant and clocks slam shut;
this is my heart
throbbing wild in those dim convenience stores
that sell hats embroidered with shotguns,
Confederate flag belt buckles and earrings,
stale cupcakes with bright pink frosting
and those cheap goddamned souvenirs you shake
to see fat flakes of white snow
fall on any one of a million American cities.



Patricia Smith is a four-time national individual champion of the Poetry Slam, the most successful competitor in slam history. She was featured in the film Slamnation and is the author of five books of poetry, including Blood Dazzler, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award. An instructor of performance, poetry, and creative writing, Smith is a Cave Canem faculty member, as well as a former Bruce McEver Chair in Writing at Georgia Tech University. She is currently at work on Fixed on a Furious Star, a biography of Harriet Tubman, the verse memoir Shoulda Been Jimmie Savannah, and the young adult novel The Journey of Willie J. "Heartland," excerpted above, is from Smith's book Big Towns, Big Talk. She performs another poem on whiteness here: "Skinhead"

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).

calling out the boos (open thread)

The many comments you wrote in response to last week's Boo Radley post revealed that a lot of people read this blog, but don't normally leave comments. I don't necessarily blame anyone for that -- different people have many different reasons for commenting, and for not commenting.

I haven't tried an Open Thread here for quite awhile, because I wasn't sure if many people would step out from behind the drapes like Boo Radley, and actually do something (by leaving a comment). But since this blog clearly does have a lot of readers, I've decided to try again.

Feel free, and invited, to leave a comment on anything relevant you like. I also invite links to other items, including your own posts.

What's been on your mind in terms of race and whiteness this week?

Will either or both come up for you somehow this weekend?

Have you been doing anything in resistance to racism? Or, do you plan to?

Here's one more possible discussion starter -- what, more specifically, can white people do?

I think that what this white person -- Walt Staton -- did is good. To me, Staton and his cohorts are heroic "race traitors," white people who resisted the messages and rules of their culture about what they should and shouldn't do as white people (which is not to say, of course, that all of the people working with Staton are white) . . .




Activist Convicted for Leaving Water Jugs for Migrants

In Arizona, a human rights activist from the group No More Deaths has been convicted for leaving plastic jugs for undocumented immigrants crossing near the US-Mexico border. The activist, Walt Staton, says the water jugs were left to prevent migrants from dying of dehydration. On Wednesday, Staton was found guilty of “knowingly littering” in the Buenos Aires Wildlife Refuge. In a move criticized by defense attorneys, the jury was ordered to reach a verdict after initial deliberations ended in a deadlock.

Staton is a member of No More Deaths, which has worked for years to provide migrants with humanitarian aid. Over the past decade, nearly 2,000 men, women and children have died while trying to cross the border into Arizona. In a statement, No More Deaths said, “By penalizing life-saving work, the United States is showing callous disregard for the lives of our neighbors to the south, whose only crime is to seek a better life.”

(source)


FURTHER INFORMATION

* "No More Deaths Volunteer to Be Arraigned for Littering"

* No More Deaths / No Más Muertes ("Humanitarian Aid Is Never A Crime")

* No Border Wall (further background information and reactions to Staton's conviction)

Spring break volunteers for No More Deaths
prepare water jugs for desert distribution

think that doing something racist is okay if you somehow distance yourself from the racism

So many forms of racism are emerging these days in response to the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor that I'm finding it difficult to keep up. Much of it is blatant, such as the bilious eruptions of Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan, and some of it is more covert.

Here's a cartoon about Sotomayor that's making the blog-rounds this week. This image strikes me as clearly sexist, and its racism seems obvious as well. But then, does the latter actually depend on how you read it?

"fiesta time at the confirmation hearing"

Chip Bok @ The Oklahoman

It seems to me that the first problem with this cartoon is that it's ambiguous. A quick interpretation for many would be That's racist!, because it depicts a Latina as a piñata (and also depicts her hanging from what looks like a noose) and it plunks a Mexican stereotype on the head of Obama.

Who is not Mexican, but rather . . . African American.

Okaaaaaaay. . .

As I said, whatever this cartoon means can quickly become ambiguous. Here's one possible reading, given the presence of the rather confused elephants/Republicans:

Obama's selection of a Hispanic/Latin American woman was at least in part racially motivated, but that's because he knew that Republicans would reflexively attack her in terms of race, by dredging up all sorts of stereotypes about her (as represented by the piñata and sombrero). Thus, the cartoon represents Obama cleverly tricking Republicans into beating up on Sotomayor, making themselves look bad in the process.

That the cartoonist depicts the Republicans as hesitant, rather than rabidly ready to take the bait, suggests that he gives them some credit for being able to at least check their racist impulses. Or maybe, given the multiple cameras pointed at the scene, for knowing that they'll be seen as racist if they "beat up" Sotomayor in interviews, newspaper columns, and then the confirmation hearings.

That's one way to interpret this depiction of a racially charged political moment, the relative calm before Sotomayor's confirmation hearings. By this reading, the cartoon doesn't seem to land squarely on either side of the political spectrum (such as it is in the American corporate press, which almost always equates "Right" and "Left" merely with "Republican" and "Democratic").

This reading would also seem to absolve the cartoon, and the cartoonist, from charges of racism, because his depiction of blatantly racist stereotypes is distanced in a way. The stereotypes are supposed to be in Republicans' heads, and maybe in Obama's (because he knows they're in Republicans' heads), and not in the head of the cartoonist. He's depicting them, that is, ironically. Which would mean it's okay that the piñata and the sombrero are there, and that they're stereotypically attached to Mexico, instead of to Sotomayor's actual background place, Puerto Rico.

However, as anyone who's been paying attention to the new ways that racism works these days knows, ironic racism is still, basically, racism. "Hipster racism" is a good example, as exemplified by such purveyors as Asher Roth, Amy Sedaris, John Oliver, or a has-been trying to make a comeback with "I'm not REALLY a racist" humor, Paulie Shore.

Is this a hipster cartoon?

Maybe. But even if you read it that way, the imagery it contains does not escape the charge of "racism" just because its racist imagery is portrayed ironically. It still circulates, and thus perpetuates, racist imagery.

You could also read the cartoon as more "conservative," which actually makes sense, given the particular cartoonist, Chris Bok. A look at other cartoons on his site, Bokbluster, demonstrates that Bok has a conservative bent. For instance, here's his take on the recent murder of Dr. George Tiller, who was killed because he performed late-term abortions:



Get it? Sure, Tiller's murder was heinous, but what's really important is that late-term abortions are heinous too. (Bok adds below this image on his blog, "When Obama started talking about heinous acts of violence I didn’t know if he was talking about Dr. Tiller’s murder or his job description.")

Here's what Bok wrote on his blog about his "Sotomayor-as-piñata" effort:

The president is all about minority life experience -- except in the case of Clarence Thomas, as WSJ’s Kimberley Strassel rudely points out by quoting him. As for Judge Sotomayor’s non-Latina qualifications, Jeffery Rosen in TNR says he’s been told she’s, “not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench”. Gallup, however, shows that the public likes her and David Broder thinks the president once again has republicans right where he wants them.

Like the cartoon, not exactly straightforward, but I think Bok is still distancing himself here from the cartoon's blatantly racism imagery. Instead of putting the racism in the Republican's heads, he's putting it solely in Obama's head -- Obama is supposedly deploying racist stereotypes, merely by choosing a Latina nominee.

Bok seems to be saying, "Republicans wouldn't say anything racist; it's Obama who's the racist, because his affirmative-action Latina pick is a cynical attempt to bait Republicans into doing something racist."

Which still doesn't make the cartoon's racism okay (and probably makes it worse). Ironic racism from Conservatives is no less fundamentally racist than it is from hipsters.

say "i love you" a lot

Maybe the title of this post should be expressed as a question, because I'm really not sure if this is a white-people thing or not -- to say "I love you" a lot.

I have noticed that many of the white people I've known say it frequently. Women more than men, of course. Lucky me, some might say, to be around so much love.

But then, is it "love," when people say it so often, almost like a habit, or like, a duty?

And even if these expressions of love usually are genuine, is saying "I love you" the only way to express love?

Of course not.

But maybe saying it a lot is an especially white thing. Which is not necessarily to say that it's not something that some other racial or ethnic groups say a lot too.

I see white people habitually ending phone conversations this way--kind of, hurriedly.

"I love you! Bye!"

I've seen them saying it to their children as they drop them off at school, again as the last or second-to-last thing they say: "Bye! I love you, you know!"

It's sweet, I suppose, and as I was growing up, my own mother said it a lot too. I know she meant it, but I sometimes cynically wondered how sincere she really was, if she kept saying it so often.

My father didn't say it often. He hardly ever said it. I now realize, with gratitude, that he showed it instead.

Actually, that's how I hear it generally works in some other cultures -- don't say it, show it.

In Native Speaker, a novel by Korean American author Chang-rae Lee, the protagonist is Henry Park, a son of Korean immigrants. He's married to a Lilia, a white woman, and much of the story revolves around their marital problems. One big problem that Lilia has with Henry is that he isn't emotionally expressive enough. Not enough for her, that is.

"I know you have parts to you that I can't touch," she tells him.

As Henry struggles to figure out whether he does have some problem openly expressing his emotions, and especially his love for her, he thinks about how love was expressed during his immigrant Korean upbringing. He especially thinks about his father:

To tell him I loved him, I studied far into the night. I read my entire children's encyclopedia, drilling from aardvark to zymurgy. I never made an error at shortstop. I spit-shined and brushed his shoes every Sunday morning. Later, to tell him something else, I'd place a larger bouquet than his on my mother's grave. I drove only used, beat-up cars. I never asked him for his money. I spoke volumes to him this way, speak to him still, those same volumes he spoke with me.

Writing for the web site Urbanatomy Shanghai, a white guy named JFK Miller takes on the dubious task of speaking for Chinese people on this topic. Miller attempts to explain, as his article's title says, "Why the Chinese Don't Say 'I love you.'"

Miller finds evidence suggesting that in China, verbal expressions of love may be common between family members, but not between lovers:

Shanghai Love Education Institute founders Ni Meiqi and Dong Xingmao say Chinese love is “like a thermos – cold outside but hot inside.” Western lovers (particularly those of the American variety), they claim, say “I love you” far too much, and what’s worse, “they don’t actually mean it all the time.”

So while some Westerners tend to overuse “I love you,” those three little words (or rather, their Chinese equivalent, “Wo ai ni”) just don’t seem to roll off the tongues of Chinese lovers so nearly as readily. Between parent and child, yes; but between man and woman, well, Chinese people seem to subscribe to the notion that some things are best left unsaid. . . .

Miller also interviewed professor of psychology Yan Wenhua, who says that in Chinese culture,

actions speak louder than words, especially when it comes to love.

“To the Chinese mind, if I do all these things for you, then you should know I love you," explains Prof. Yan. . . .

“In Chinese people’s eyes, if I say ‘I love you’ too often . . . then maybe you don’t really love me because you say it so much."

In a recent memoir, Vietnamese American writer Lac Su directly addresses this topic, right in his book's title: I Love Yous Are for White People.

Like Lee's Henry Park, Lac Su is a son of immigrants. In a review of Su's memoir, Terry Hong writes,

Desperate for his father's approval, Su dares to voice his love for him. His father's reaction when Su utters the three unforgivable words ironically gives Su his title: "Are you trying to imitate those white people by telling me those f- words? . . . Is that what the whites are teaching you at school? To say stupid things and stand there crying like a girl? If you love me, show me. . . . Words are useless -- they do nothing but piss me off."

Maybe, instead of saying "I love you" a lot being a white thing, not saying it much is more of an Asian thing? No -- I'd need a lot more evidence before I could safely say that. Again, at this point I can only speculate, and sift through largely anecdotal evidence.

I don't know much about how love is expressed among other groups, and I suppose even what "love" itself is could vary widely across cultures. Who knows, when different people say "I love you," they might be saying very different things.

I also imagine other factors play a role, such as gender, as well as socioeconomic status, and all that goes (or doesn't go) with it. Being exhausted or frustrated or frantically busy can leave little time or inclination for expressing one's love.

And yet, people still do find ways, don't they?

I remember the following poem, by African American poet Robert Hayden, about a father who found ways to show his love, apparently instead of saying it. However, I don't know how "black" this poem is (no matter how much I'm encouraged in America to read it that way by my awareness of the author's race).


Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?



What do you think?

Is it an especially white thing to say "I love you" a lot? Or maybe, to say it lightly? And to put less emphasis on instead showing it?

Do you think white people tend to say that more often than members of other racial or ethnic groups?

And if so -- why might that be?

perpetually think of asian americans as foreigners

I don't normally post commercials, especially for a grossly abusive and unhealthy outfit like KFC. I'm posting this one because it exemplifies so well something that white people often do--think of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners.

I mean . . . is this for real?




As Angry Asian Man points out about this ad,

As you can see, it features folks of varying size, shape and color debating the merits of fried versus grilled chicken... including two Asian dudes dressed in ethnic costume for no apparent reason. Seriously, everyone else in the commercial is dressed "normally," but these two Asian dudes -- speaking in heavily accented Engrish, for good measure -- are going full Oriental.

What is the reasoning behind this? Once again, the Asian guys serve as the funny foreign element in the commercial -- looking, speaking, and at the end of the spot, dancing like silly-ass fools. That's racist!

I don't know, perhaps KFC would like to hear from you about this. Customer contact info here.


Law Professor Frank Wu calls the racist phenomenon exemplified by this ad the "perpetual foreigner syndrome." The term should be self-explanatory, but for many, it's not. Wu's label basically identifies a common American conception of Asian Americans as outsiders, as "un-American," no matter how fully they signal their American-ness.

Advertisements like this one play up to and perpetuate this syndrome. Ordinary Americans demonstrate that the syndrome has penetrated and infected their psyches when they laugh along with such portrayals, and when they think of those who object to them as oversensitive purveyors of "political correctness."

I called KFC and complained. It took a few minutes to get through, but then I spoke to a pleasant and very cooperative person, who wrote down my complaint and promised to "pass it on to upper management." I added my voice to what I hope becomes an indignant clamor, demanding that they take the commercial off the air.

Will you call? (I don't see an email address on their contact page.)

U.S. 1-800-225-5532
Canada 1-866-664-5696

wonder what the sex is like in interracial relationships

"Hey, listen, did you ever do it with a nigger wench?"
"Sure."
"What was it like?"
"Like nurse shark."

--Ernest Hemingway,
To Have and Have Not *


I was reading a post at Racialicious today by Wendi Muse about interracial relationships, and it reminded me of a common white question that I've heard several times -- "What's the sex like?"

Wendi Muse's post is an insightful argument against double standards that get applied to such relationships. For one thing, those in interracial relationships get asked a lot of questions that those in intraracial relationships don't, even though the answers to those about the latter could be revealing.

At one point, Muse writes,

When the presence of an interracial relationship is noted, its very existence at times solicits a barrage of questions in the minds of onlookers, one firing after the other. The questions range from the simple, “how did they meet?” to the complex, “do they really love each other or are they just together because they wish to rebel against social norms?” to the intrusive, “how is the sex?” Some of these questions are customary when considering any relationship, yet with interracial relationships, there seems to be an exceptional increase in curiosity, one that certainly rivals that of monoracial pairings.

I agree, except that I think the curiosity about interracial relationships far exceeds that about monoracial pairings, especially about what the sex is like. This curiosity no doubt comes from both sides of any white/non-white relationship, but I suspect it usually has particular qualities or features when it comes from a white questioner. And again, I think "what the sex is like," or supposedly like, is often an especially intense curiosity.

I remember, for instance, sitting in a bar a few years ago with two white male friends, Craig and Jack.

Craig had just returned from working with the Peace Corps in . . . I was about to write "Africa," but in light of yesterday's post, I'm going to resist that lazy American tendency, and work my brain a few seconds longer to come up with the specific country. . . okay, I remember. He'd been working in Benin.

I asked Craig if he'd made any friends there, and he said that he had, both local people and other Peace Corps workers.

"Did you find a girlfriend?" I said, knowing that he was, like the other two of us, heterosexual.

"Uh, sort of," Craig answered. "But it didn't last."

"Was she African?" I said.

"Yes, she was."

I honestly can't remember if I wondered about what the sex was like, but I probably did. I probably wondered if he'd found it any different from sex with American white women.

I do remember what Jack said: "So, what was the sex like?"

Craig literally blushed. Then he looked into his beer mug and said, "Well. I don't really want to talk about that."

"Oh come on!" Jack exploded (I almost wrote "ejaculated"). "I mean, was there anything like, different about sex with her?"

Craig just looked away, and then he moved on to other stories about his two-year absence.

I think this American-white-guy curiosity about sex with non-white bodies is common, and I suspect it's a result of something that we learn as children. We learn not only that non-white people are supposedly different from us in fundamental ways, but also that they're more "bodily" than us. That they live in their bodies differently from how we do, and in many cases, somehow more than we do.

We're curious about sex, like all children, but our curiosity about sex and other, darker people is often somehow different.

Do you remember this one?

When I was a kid, I heard something bizarre from other boys about "Chinese" women. Maybe it came up when I was in the backyard with my best friend Brian, literally trying to "dig a hole all the way to China," as my father said we could do, if we just dug for long enough.

I was only six or seven at the time. At some point I was playing outside with Brian, and he said to me, "Do you know what's special about Chinese woman?"

I didn't want to admit that I didn't know, but since I was curious, I did.

"It's their vaginas," Brian said. "They have sideways vaginas."

I knew what a vagina was, but I'd never heard that before. But then I heard it several times afterward, enough that for awhile, I actually believed it. I never did figure out, though, how that made Chinese women special.

I think this white male curiosity about supposed, fundamental differences in non-white sexuality is common. If it is, then where does it come from?

It seems to me that a quick look at the history of race in America provides some explanation. We often like to say that the past is dead and gone, but I don't think it is.

Last week, we lost a great American activist and historian, Ronald Takaki. He's been widely praised as a pioneer of multiculturalism, but his writings have also taught me a lot about white Americans. In regards to sex and the body, for instance, Takaki explains in an early book, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America, that a combination of religious, economic, and cultural influences encouraged white American citizens (which especially meant white men) to think of an individual's body as something in need of control. In need of self-control.

To summarize (and oversimplify) Takaki's analysis of white American male conceptions of bodies, he basically explains that the new, self-consciously "American" citizen felt a need to restrain his body, and to emphasize instead his controlling, rational, and intellectual capacities. White women were conceived of as more bodily -- and as desirable in large part because of that supposed bodiliness -- and less rational and "of the head" (and thus less capable of producing any indepth thought worth hearing about, which was basically why they were considered incapable of the full responsibilities of citizenship, including voting).

In their civic-minded zeal to harness productive energy in various sorts of metaphorical "iron cages," white men also applied the same overemphasis on the body to non-white people, both male and female. Because "Indians," for instance, supposedly failed to properly harness or "cage" their bodies, white Americans considered them lascivious, and un-industrious. Because they supposedly did not restrain their baser instincts and channel their energy into such productive labors as proper land cultivation, and because so many refused to convert to the regulating, disciplining strictures of Christianity, well then, taking their land seemed more than justified -- it seemed like the white man's duty.

According to Takaki (and to subsequent scholars), similar concepts, which constituted white projections of both fears and desires about the body, were also imposed on imported black slaves, and then later, on Mexicans and imported laborers from China.

Remnants of this general white conception, of proper white constraint and "excessive" darker bodiliness, pop up all over more recent American life and culture -- from the 1950s Beatnik fondness for black jazz and Jack Kerouac's romantic fondness for laboring Mexican "fellahin," to today's "wiggers" and "rice kings" and "rice queens" (and there's probably a word now for white people who are sexually obsessed with Native Americans -- does anyone here know of such a term?).

So I think the common white curiosity about sex with someone from another race is more than just mere curiosity about sex with someone who's supposedly different (and I don't mean here that I'm arguing with Wendi Muse's post, which you really should read). The imagined differences of non-white ways of being in the body are often more specific; and yet at the same time, they're more general too, in that they're usually about the more bodily, sexual "nature" of many types of most non-white people in general.

Exceptions do of course exist, such as the de-sexualization in the white imagination of Asian men. In many other cases, though, I think the common white curiosity about interracial sex is fueled by a collective, stereotypical, historically built fantasy about people who supposedly live in their bodies "more" than white people do. And if that's still with us, then it can make us overly curious, and even strangely excited, about what really amounts to our own, dehumanizing fantasies about interracial sex.