The comments section of the Ebony White posts (here and here) have become more or less unnavigable, so I wanted to highlight a couple of the most interesting comments.
First, Tom Crippen reminded me of this great TCJ post about Ebony I’d utterly forgotten. He also wrote this short but thoughtful rebuttal to my piece. Here’s an excerpt:
If Ebony is as great a character as I and Matt Seneca (he started the fuss with a blog post here) like to believe, he cannot be a simple piece of ugliness that deserves to be kept in obscurity. Read Ebony and you’re reading about a person, and that’s the best antidote to racism there is: seeing that the other (if you’ll pardon the phrase) is also human.
It’s not just that Ebony’s human qualities mitigate the racism built into the character; they counteract it. In Ebony we have a racist antidote to racism. Bizarre, but such is life.
And Caroline Small had a passionate comment about her own experiences in the South and racism.
I think one of the problems in this thread is that people just aren’t accepting the extent to which socio-cultural racism, even racism the person doesn’t recognize, is still really truly honest-to-God racism.
I have a lot of personal experience with this: I grew up in a fully segregated town in the rural south. I knew a lot of people who, in all other respects, were tremendously kind and good-hearted, but who accepted segregation and a hierarchy of the races without questioning it.
I know many black people who, as poor rural children, were not dissimilar to the stereotypes of rural Southern blacks when they were children — but they grew up to be nothing like those stereotypes, once they had the opportunity to be something different. But the vast majority of those kind and good-hearted people couldn’t see that potential, and they couldn’t see the role that prejudice and stereotypes played in blinding them to it. I should say we, or I’d be lying, because I didn’t figure it out until college. We didn’t understand the damage segregation and stereotyping and low expectations and just plain not NOTICING did to “those people” and the possibilities they saw for their lives. We let ourselves off the hook because we knew we weren’t evil.
And we knew what the evil was too, so we meant it when we said we weren’t evil. When I was 6 years old, the Ku Klux Klan marched in front of my house on their way to an empty field where they were having a rally. This was back when they could still cover their faces, so it was the whole shebang — fire and masks and chanting. I was utterly terrified, sobbing — I can still conjure up nightmares just thinking about it. I wasn’t one of those people — so I wasn’t racist.
But that’s bullshit. I wasn’t violent. I didn’t take pleasure in scaring people, or in mob rule. But I wouldn’t have dated a black man. I didn’t invite my black classmates, many of whom probably had interests more in common with me than my white classmates, to my house to play or to a movie. I didn’t have any respect for black culture or cultural mores. I was put off when my classmates didn’t smell clean — and nobody ever mentioned to me (until I was in my late teens) that many of them didn’t have running water in their houses.
None of those perceptions changed until I went to college and left that environment, until I met people who helped me see it differently. I did not know any better. But my attitude and perspective were still completely totally fucking wrong. In every possible respect. And I would repudiate anything I did then that reflected that perspective.
So it really doesn’t matter to me if Eisner was a really great guy. It doesn’t matter if that was the culture he knew. It doesn’t matter if he made great art anyway.
Those attitudes are STILL RACIST and IT’S STILL HIS FAULT, just like all the little things I did and felt are still my fault. It’s not grey.
Thanks to everyone else who commented too.
I would love it if Tom were right and all it took to diffuse racial prejudice was to temper stereotypes with “humanity”, but I think the dehumanization of dark-skinned people isn’t always conscious or overt enough for that to be true.
http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture/studies-expose-apelike-stereotype-among-whites-20708/
I think this issue is a lot more problematic when visuals are involved, because racial prejudice is based on shallow, surface visual cues. To a non-racist, who already knows to look beyond the surface, it’s possible to read Ebony White the way Tom does. But the problem is that in other respects the Ebony White character is a very realist representation of the perspective of a racist white person: you meet this amazing person with all these incredible traits — but what you see is a monkey, and suddenly those impressive attributes don’t really matter. Even if you know they’re there. That’s HORRIBLE, but that’s pretty much the way it works. Racism is insensitive to the humanity of its victims, and if the only thing we had to do was point out that the victims are human too, racism would have been eradicated a long time ago.
The visual only reinforces the bias that no matter what black people do, no matter how much they achieve, they still wear that mark. Nothing is counteracted if that faulty visual surface judgment is perpetuated, because the racist error is so tied to that visual sign.
The literature of “passing” is important here, books like Charles Chestnutt’s “House Behind the Cedars.” Part of the conversation about race in the pre-’60s US was the notion — and the white fear about it — that black people could “pass” as white if their skin and features were Caucasian enough. It’s why there was a “drop of blood” measure under Jim Crow, and why the fears of miscegenation were so virulent. Anything that ties racial identity to surface appearance is complicit with this notion. Strong human characterization just isn’t sufficient to fully temper or “counteract” those insidious visual stereotypes, because the visual stereotypes are themselves the problem.
The tricky issue to me isn’t whether racist art can be great (I agree with Domingos) but whether racist people can make great art. Does the fact that someone is wrong about race make it impossible for him or her to be right about love, or gender, or grief, or capitalism, or fate? I think we have to accept that human beings are more complicated than that: it is possible that the person’s views on race reflect a broadly blinkered attitude that taints his or her views on everything else, but sometimes a person can just be blinkered on race — especially in a historical place and time when that person had limited opportunity to understand otherwise. I’m hesitant to say that the 1940s in the Northeast constitute such a place and time, though, but maybe they did.
But all that means is that the person might be inadvertently racist or naively racist or racist without being a complete asshole or racist-with-the-potential-to-learn better — it doesn’t mean the person isn’t racist.
People aren’t all good or all bad, but, honestly, people really can be all wrong about something.
Yeah; that’s a good point which I hadn’t really managed to articulate, to myself or in the conversation. I agree that that’s why Al Jolson or Will Eisner infusing a measure of humanity into a racist image isn’t sufficient. The opposite of racism isn’t humanism; it’s anti-racism.
By which I mean…if there’s not some actual ideological push-back against the racist imagery, it’s hard to see how you’re overcoming it. Making interesting characters is a good thing in itself, but giving a caricature a heart doesn’t really necessarily counteract a prejudice based on surfaces. If it did, there wouldn’t be any racism, since real people who are black are obviously going to be more complicated and human than Ebony White…yet their humanity wasn’t sufficient to get them treated equally. For that there had to be an ideologically engaged movement committed to equality.