Tag Archives: race

The End of Race

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If you talk about white people, you’re not talking about race. If you talk about black people, you are. This is arguably the essence of racism; black people are an aberration or a disturbance; white people are natural. Therefore, to end racism, artists should treat black and white individuals exactly the same. If art doesn’t see color, then the art isn’t racist. QED.

This is the logic that Lamar one of the co-creators of the Pixies’ video “Bagboy,” used when he defended his decision to present a narrative in which a white kid gleefully and giddily trashes a house which, at the video’s conclusion, turns out to belong to a black woman who he has trussed up in her own bedroom.

We knew we were taking some risks when we made the video. When most people see a white kid (Nik’s little brother) and a black woman (my older sister) they can’t help but think “racist” and “misogynist”. This is pretty sad.

From the beginning, when we originally thought of the concept, it was never our intention to make it about a white kid terrorizing a helpless black family. I, myself, being black have gotten to the point where I don’t automatically see color in people. It’s the same for Nik. If the character’s races were switched you’d probably have the same amount of stuff to say about the video.

It’s 2013, at what point do we stop seeing everything as racist. At what point do we stop making things a bigger deal than they are.

The problem here, as Bert Stabler points out, is that claiming color-blindness doesn’t make the rest of the world color-blind. Declaring racism over doesn’t make it so, and there isn’t really any way to show a white kid terrorizing a back woman’s home without referencing the way that white people really have, in the recent past, conducted vicious campaigns of terror against black people for daring to move into middle class homes. The video doesn’t come off as color-blind; it comes off as thoughtless, or (as Bert suggests) as cynically courting controversy. Not seeing race now can’t erase a history of racism, especially when not seeing race seems to just result in you unthinkingly mimicking that history.

Danity Kane’s Ride For You does a much better job of suggesting that race doesn’t matter, though not exactly by ignoring race.

Towards the end of the video, the five female members of the interracial group pair up with various hot guys. Those pairings are integrated; there’s a black guy/white girl couple; a white guy/black girl couple, a back guy/black girl couple, and two white guy/white girl couples. This almost surely has to be a deliberate choice; Danity Kane is not a spontaneous punk rock kind of group,and everything else on the shoot, from the multiple costume changes to the round robin vocals, certainly seems focus-grouped within an inch of its life. Someone during the making of that video decided that they wanted to present a color blind world. But to do that, they had to admit (to themselves, and I think to the audience as well) that they could tell which of their singers (and which portion of their studly male window-dressing) were black, and which were white.

Johnny Ryan’s “E.T. on the Street” also is also quietly but deliberately conscious of race in the interest of avoiding stereotypes, though the success is more mixed.
 

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Laurel Lynn Leake dismisses this, arguing “That whole ET comic is just “what if ET was a bl- I mean, urban man! He would be a total greedy sociopathic asshole, amirite?!” And there’s certainly something to that argument. At the same time, though, you can see Ryan (usually thought of as eager to offend everyone) trying quite consciously to avoid offense. The black guy at the beginning of the comic isn’t a gangsta, and he hasn’t been shot — he’s been hit by a car, and E.T. robs him, not the other way around. Along the same lines, the violent thug at the end is white, not black. And, for that matter, E.T.’s race is unclear. Is he supposed to be black? Or is he supposed to be a tourist in a black neighborhood — ignoring the misery there, and then pretending (with that backwards baseball cap) to be one of the folks he’s just callously robbed? Is the joke that E.T. is a black man and is therefore an asshole? Or is the joke that he’s a white guy pretending to be black, and is therefore an asshole?

The strip is conscious enough of race to make that reading plausible, and, I think, even probable. But it’s not conscious enough to exactly make that reading the point, nor to do anything with it. The end could perhaps suggest something like Crane’s suggestion in the Blue Hotel that believing in stereotypical narratives can make those narratives close around you and destroy you. But E.T.’s motivations are too much of a cipher, and his fate too random, to really sustain that. If the first part of the strip seems to be willing to think about and talk about race, the second just shrugs, abandoning the theme of racial tourism for standard-issue tropes of ghetto violence, sanitized by making the perpetrator a white guy. It’s significantly more careful about racial issues than that Bagboy video. But since it doesn’t seem to want to follow through on them, you do end up feeling, as with the Lamar and Nik effort, that race is here evoked mostly for the sake of controversy.

And then there’s this. (Apologies for the crappy scan.)

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As with most of Berke Breathed’s Bloom County strips, this one is embedded in a lengthy and preposterous narrative. In this case, the Bloom County characters have all gone on strike to protest the shrinking space available for comics; management has hired scab replacements. Oliver Wendell Jones, the strip’s resident child-genius who also happens to be black (and whose picture you can see off to the side in the first panel), has been replaced by a ludicrous rap stereotype.

Part of the reason this strip works better than the other examples here is a function of time. Breathed isn’t working with a 3 minute video or with an isolated gag strip. Bloom County is a daily, and we know Oliver Wendell Jones like a friend. We know him so well, in fact, that he isn’t just a racial marker, as black people too often are in pop culture. Rather, Oliver is a particular person, who, like his dad says, speaks good English and loves astronomy and occasionally crashes the world’s computer networks. Breathed has put in the time to ensure that Jones is not a caricature, and as a result the reader can fully appreciate the travesty of having him replaced by one.

So in part the strip deals effectively with race because it worked to erase race. But that work, obviously, involved seeing race in the first place; making your black character a computer genius is a decision that has meaning. And the joke in this strip, too, requires seeing race, and acknowledging the way it turns individuals into the tropes we expect to see. Even Oliver’s dad, at the en, succumbs, and breaks out into rap, complete with bad grammar. In the meantime, his “son” is up on the roof, looking at the stars, and declaring

Ah seen the moon
All white n’ pretty
Like da hind
O’ Conway Twitty.

I don’t think it’s an accident that a strip about ridiculous totemic blackness ends with a ridiculous invocation of totemic whiteness. The round fat moon hoves into the panel, made visible by both telescope and verse, reminding us, perhaps, that if we must see blackness, the least we can do is remember to see whiteness as well.
 

Pale in the 70s

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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My wife and I took my eight-year-old son to see Dark Shadows this weekend, and thereby discovered that PG-13 covers a lot of territory.  The last Harry Potter films were PG-13, for example, and that meant kind of scary and some people die.  Dark Shadows, though, is PG-13 and that apparently meant not-nearly-elliptical-enough references to oral sex.  Which luckily my son is too young to get, but my wife and I got them and we were sitting there with our son and so were able to contemplate just how unfit we are to be parents.  Which is not a new revelation or anything, but it’s always painful to have it brought home to you like that.  Luckily there were no DCFS agents in the theater.

What there were in the theater instead were a lot of black people.  In fact, I’m pretty sure we were the only whites there.  In one sense, this is not particularly surprising — we saw the film on the south side of Chicago in an African-American neighborhood.  I’ve been to the theater a number of times, and the audience is always heavily black.

Still, it was a little weird in this case because, despite its name, Dark Shadows has a remarkably pale cast.  And I’m not just referring to the make-up Johnny Depp dons as the vampire Barnabus.  No, what I’m talking about is the fact that everyone in the cast was white.  And I do mean everyone.  Yes, of course, white people get all the speaking parts.  But unless I missed an extra hidden behind a gargoyle or obscured by the exploding canning factory, even the bit players here were impressive in their studious eschewal of diversity.  No blacks.  No Hispanics.  Not even any Asians, as far as I could tell.  Hollywood’s fictional 1970s Collinsport, Maine is white, white, and also white.  Unless you count some Curtis Mayfield on the soundtrack, I suppose.  Which I don’t.

Of course, you could argue that the actual Collinsport, Maine, in the 1970s would have been racially homogenous. And that’s true — Maine even today is 94% white, and a small seaport town like Collinsport would be a few percentage points higher than 94%, I’m sure.

Still…the vampire/witch/werewolf population of Maine is significantly less than 6%, and yet somehow the film found room to represent this minority group.  Moreover, while pervasive segregation (https://hoodedutilitarian.com/2012/01/sundown-towns/) has meant that parts of the country have no African-Americans living in them, there is no section of the country that has been untouched by African-American culture.  A good deal of Dark Shadows is devoted to the fish-out-of-its-coffin humor of the 18th-century-born-Barnabas struggling to deal with the brave new world of 1972.  His reaction to changing gender roles (women doctors!) is mined for laughs, as is hippie culture and changing musical tastes (Alice Cooper makes an enjoyable guest appearance.)  But the vast changes in style and consciousness caused by the Civil Rights movement are never addressed.  Surely Barnabas trying to parse Black Power — or even the Electric Company — would have been worth a laugh or two.  But nope.  It’s hard to imagine a 1970s without soul, even in Maine, but Dark Shadows pulls it off.

Of course, the African-American audience I watched with didn’t seem to be especially disturbed by the lack of diversity.  On the contrary, for the most part they seemed to enjoy the film, oral sex jokes and all.  No doubt they long ago accepted that Caucasians were going to dominate their Cineplexes. As my wife’s been known to say when challenged about her love of eighties hair metal, “If I only liked pop culture that wasn’t sexist, then there’d be no pop culture to like, would there?”  Still, after a couple of hours of ghosts, vampires, and witches, the creepiest moment of the afternoon was leaving the theater and realizing that, as far as the film was concerned, the people around me barely existed even as dark shadows.

Have To Admit It’s Getting Better

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Heroes attempted to turn comic books into television. It got the superpowers; it got the convoluted, incoherent plots; it got the (Marvel-era) whining and repetitive self-actualization. It’s got really hideous looking art for the comics-within-the-TV-show, courtesy of Tim Sale and Alex Maleev (both of whom have done decent work in other contexts — fulfilling another mainstream tradition of consistently coaxing horrible aesthetic performances from talented people.) It’s got the tedious snickering self-reference, epitomized by main character, Hiro, who announces with great fanfare “It’s Wednesday!” and then goes longbox diving to find secret clues to predicting the future (and if that sounds ridiculous, that’s only because it is). Heroes even channels some of mainstream comics dunderheaded, nerd-in-the-basement misogyny by making its two main female characters a cheerleader and a sex worker. “Save the fetish, save the demographic!”

But, despite all that, Heroes fails catastrophically to follow comicdom in one important respect. Traditionally, in comics, mutant genes, power rings, radioactive accidents, and tragic inspirational parental death are all apportioned out almost exclusively to (a) Americans, (b) people with white skin, or most often, (c) both a and b.

This works okay with comics since nobody reads them. But with television you run the risk of actually offending someone if you pretend the entire world is monochrome — which is why John Stewart gets to be Green Lantern on all the cartoons. It’s similar to the way in which businesses will trot out their one black executive (or secretary, if they’re that pitiful) for public encounters in a desperate effort to pretend that they’re not…well, what they are.

Heroes does better than tokenism, though. Its cast is thoroughly integrated in a way that mainstream comics have almost never been. Besides characters from Japan and India, the first season also featured a Hispanic-American hero, two African-American heroes, and an important African-American supporting character. The story is also notable for having multiple interracial romances — including that rarest of pop culture phenomena, an Asian-male/Caucasian-female pairing.

So is Heroes a glimpse of a possible comics future? A future in which DC doesn’t randomly insult entire continents full of people? One in which Marvel doesn’t say…”Hey! Black Panther! Storm! They’re both black! They should get married!” A future in which a black man under the Spidey mask doesn’t cause anyone to freak out even a little bit?

Maybe it is. But if Heroes is the future, there’s not much cause to celebrate. Because, while the show certainly has lots of minority characters, it treats those characters with systematic and concentrated stupidity. White characters are politicians and cheerleaders and single moms and cops; — “normal” people. Hispanic Isaac Mendez (Santiago Cabrera), on the other hand, is a junkie. African-American D. L. Hawkins (Leonard Roberts) is a criminal. Mohinder Suresh (Sendhil Ramamurthy), an Indian scientist, is drafted to spout pseudo-mystical gibberish at the beginning of each episode because Eastern peoples are all spiritual and shit. And, of course, the show’s black characters have a disturbing propensity for ending up dead.

Most depressing, though, is the handling of Hiro (Masi Oka). Presented as the moral center of the show, Hiro is less a person than a mismatched pile of Japanese stereotypes. He works at an oppressively homogeneous Japanese company lifted from paranoid 80s American nativist film; he gets a samurai sword and is taught to use it by his improbably adept father; he obsesses over pop culture like an uber-nerdy otaku. The fact that his English is not so great is used as an excuse to present him as an intellectual and emotional child who coins cutesy nicknames for other characters whenever he has the chance (“Flying Man”, “Evil Butterfly Man”). Just in case you missed the point, the writers actually regress Hiro’s brain to that of a 10-year-old for a while. But whether regressed or not, he and his pal Ando are treated throughout the series as the comic relief — goofy stunted Asians playing at being men.

To be fair, it’s not just minority characters in Heroes who are written poorly. White ethnics like the Irish are portrayed as tribal; the Italian Pettrellis are saddled with stereotypical crime connections and an unhealthy obsession with family. Mohindir has to endure a storyline where he becomes a mad scientist because nobody can figure out what else to do with a scientist besides making him mad. A big part of the problem with the show is simply that it’s crap. The scripts rely on stereotypes and clichés not out of any particular animus, but just because the people in charge are dumb and not especially creative.

Still, for comics folks, it can’t help but be a sobering spectacle. Heroes is embarrassingly bad in most ways. And yet, in its handling of minority characters, it’s significantly better than the vast majority of superhero comics. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the mainstream needs to get much, much better before it can even be said to merely suck.

Country Race

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This piece first appeared on Splice Today.
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Much of the best American music is the offspring of miscegenation. Whether it’s African-Americans in New Orleans repurposing white band instruments; or Elvis combining country and R&B just as his hillbilly forbearers did for generations; or mash-up artists deliriously merging together white and black; segregation has traditionally, and gloriously ended at the borders of the recording studio.

SoulJazz’s two-disc compilation Delta Swamp Rock: Sounds of the South, At the Crossroads of Rock, Country and Soul provides another satisfying instance of musical cross-breeding. Expected country rockers are represented—Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers show up on several tracks. But the comp spreads its net wider, too, focusing especially on the scene around the famous session players at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, but also reaching out to Memphis and Nashville, with some surprising results. Cher, of all people, delivers a soul-soaked, down and dirty vocal for “Walk on Gilded Splinters,” recorded in Muscle Shoals. Area Code 615, a group of Nashville session musicians, provides “Stone Fox Chase,” a bluegrass-meets-blues-funk rave-up that was later sampled by Kool G. Rap and others. Dan Penn, known for writing hits for James Carr and Aretha Franklin, here sings his own Stax-ready, Memphis-recorded “If Love Was Money.” Linda Ronstadt on “I Won’t Be Hangin’ Round” is encouraged by a chorus that seems to have strolled out of a black church; Waylon Jennings’ “Big D” sidles up to funk, and the whole album is soaked in blue-eyed soul.

SoulJazz’s eclectic, thoughtful choices throughout the two discs emphasize the oft-ignored fact that the South, at least as much as the north, has been a locus of racial integration and racial borrowing. This comp makes sense of the fact that the couple who won the case for racial intermarriage in the Supreme Court, the Lovings, came, not from New York or LA, but from rural Virginia. It’s a reminder that some of the first integrated sessions ever were Jimmie Rodgers recordings.

And yet. While SoulJazz has provided a testament to the South’s proud and little-known history of color-blindness, it’s also highlighted the South’s much better known, and sadder, history of segregation. In its extensive liner notes, SoulJazz mentions several times that the Muscle Shoals scene, steeped as it was in soul music, nevertheless represented a step back in terms of race. The Memphis-based Stax, where so many soul hits were recorded, had as its house band Booker T. and the MGs, an integrated band. Muscle Shoals was inspired by Stax’s example… but its musicians were all white.

The Allman Brothers band did have a black drummer, Jai Johanny Johanson. But the other pillar of the Southern rock movement, Lynyrd Skynrd, was not only all white, but flirted with segregationist rhetoric, unfurling a Confederate flag during their live performances and giving a bump to George Wallace on their hit “Sweet Home Alabama” (not included on the comp.) The fact that African-American Merry Clayton sang back-up on that track intensifies the cognitive dissonance, but doesn’t exactly excuse it. As SoulJazz says, “Walking the line between southern working-class pride and simply reinforcing southern stereotypical bigotry could be a tricky business.”

The sad part about Delta Swamp Rock is that it chronicles a moment when maybe the South could have figured out how to separate bigotry and working-class pride once and for all. There is no doubt that the musicians represented on this comp, and the scene they were part of, loved black music… and indeed, no doubt that they saw it, not as black music, but as Southern music, an integrated tradition that was simply theirs, without the painful fetishization and authenticity-mongering that has so often marred work by non-Southern musicians, from Janis Joplin to the Rolling Stones. Bobbie Gentry’s rough vocals drip, not with black accents, but with Southern accents. She sounds like a black singer, at times, not because she needs black vocal tics to validate her, but because she comes from the same part of the world.

But then there’s the question—if you come from the same part of the world, if this is your tradition, and if that tradition is color-blind, why are the people you surround yourselves with so overwhelmingly pale? The tradition SoulJazz chronicles here was eager to integrate music, but its willingness to integrate musicians was much more nervous. A drummer here, a back-up singer there, but overall blue-eyed soul remained separate from just-plain soul. American R&B attained its current, not insubstantial level of integration through the urban bricolage of hip-hop, rather than through the rural byways of country. White Southern identity remains, to this day, white—defined by a sideways avowal of a rebel segregationist past, rather than by an embrace of its rich and honorable integrated culture. Delta Swamp Rock makes the case that things could have been different, and points to some of the painful reasons why they weren’t.