Tag Archives: racism

The “Last” Outsider Cartoonist and the Ku Klux Klan

Posted on by

I ask Aline…

“Well, he is a sexist, racist, antisemitic misogynist,” she says.

Does he agree? “Oh, I guess all that stuff is in me, sure. I wouldn’t say I’m an out and out racist or proud or amused by the idea of racism but we all grew up in this culture…[…]…Those things are complex, y’know. They were as much about what was going on inside white people as their attitude to black people. I liked the idea when I was doing that stuff of making things that looked as if they were one thing but were actually something else.”

*          *          *

The first comic (c. 1920) by the “last” outsider cartoonist is morally ambiguous.

KKK 01

The artist’s name is Russel Deiner and the comic is presented in an envelope “made of the same folded and glued paper” as the drawings. Each envelope is crowned with a portrait of a Klansman and the title “Ku Klux Klan.” Their similarity with the comics of fandom do not end there. Each is stamped with a mark of ownership and authorship, as would be done by any self-satisfied artist.

The comic itself is almost subdued in its technical transcription if not facility.

The members of the Ku Klux Klan congregate to build a cross and burn it in the course of 8 panels. The wooden planks which make up the cross are depicted studiously but amateurishly in two dimensions as opposed to the attempt at depth in the depiction of the assembled Klansmen in the second panel.  There is a fitful interest in perspective. It seems of secondary concern.

The atmosphere here is not one of fear but of fascination—a deep enchantment with the lighting of the cross and its illumination of the encroaching darkness. Everything suggests an artist engaged in an attempt to record his own testimony or participation in an event which began in the moderate light of dusk before ending in early dawn; the bare backgrounds shifting from the white light of bare brown paper to the light crayon marks of half-daylight. The sixth panel captures the moment of disruption, when the supports finally break through and the cross crumbles to a heap of burning shards before wasting to embers in the final panel.

A “true” story perhaps. Or could this scene be a work of solemn imagination, the work of someone recording an event as one would a nativity scene during a celebration of the Advent?

Arthur Keller’s picture of two Klansmen (from The Clansman) standing erect above a fallen black victim is presumably imagined but much more specific in its motivation.

Keller Clansman

 

The second story by the “last” outsider artist is more studied in its appreciation of the act of burning crosses.

KKK 02

Much more than in the first comic, it suggests above average powers of observation, beginning first with the yellow flames of initial combustion before simulating the diffuse light of the fire in the crimson night sky. Flames like a geyser of blood pour forth from the redeeming article of the cross.

The members of the Klan are largely absent, two shrouded figures seen considering the cross in the second panel, standing mute and inactive, a testament to the (falsely) avowed purpose of the burning cross as noted in Thomas F. Dixon, Jr.’s The Clansman and D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation—a call to arms.

Absent of course are the targets of this cross burning. They lie at the edge of darkness, quite unseen, perhaps looking defiantly out at this pageantry like the artist, charting the progress of the ceremony and its denouement. Perhaps cowering in their beds. Perhaps a mass of tangled lines like the mangled heap of brush strokes at the bottom of Keller’s infamous illustration.

Keller-Clansman 01

Then the fire is doused by a man dressed in green and the same man sent to prison.

KKK 02b

A seemingly innocuous act rewarded with incarceration.

The man is unhooded, perhaps acting against the will of his neighbors and disrupting the carefully orchestrated festivities. Or is this man dressed in green a Klansman, taken forcibly to a brick-lined labyrinth where he smiles placidly back at us with the satisfaction of a job well done—the Minotaur in his lair. Is the man in green the artist himself?

The auction description for these two items is considerably less cryptic:

“As a child of about six, Russel Deiner attended Klan rallies with his father and the scenes he witnessed inspired his child-like, but artful, renditions of what he saw. As an adult he was an influential member in his local Klan.”

Thus casting aside all notions of moral enigma.

Hanks Stardust

The alcoholic and abusive Fletcher Hanks, Sr. (Stardust, Fantomah) was another outsider of sorts, a neurotic cartooning adept who produced eccentric comics similarly “free” of dubious intentions. Strengthened by biography, the comics have become products of a diseased mind interested in promulgating the concepts of terror, totalitarianism, death, and eternal punishment to his young readers—this once acceptable face of fascism since displaced in our more enlightened times by the charismatic and self-sacrificing leadership of the wealthy vigilante superhero.

KKK 02c

Hanks’ fantasy of justice is transposed to an earthly reality in Deiner’s Klan comics—an adventure in vigilantism which ends in pleasing imprisonment. Some readers will find in the eighth image of Deiner’s tale a portal into the dungeon of his mind; the panels of the comic forming windows into a self-contained reality.

These panels were hung behind a “country store style glass case…with other childhood memories such as jacks, marbles and a cap-gun.” The nostalgia of the true outsider; as uninhibited as any dauntless truthsayer and a premonition not only of the anti-Catholicism and xenophobia of Jack T. Chick but also of the tireless gnawing and prodding of the undergrounds and their adherents. Russel Deiner was the “first” outsider cartoonist; he was the “last” outsider cartoonist.

 

Carnet D’Racisme entre les Animaux

Posted on by

Are comic books really not for kids anymore if their pretenses at intellectualism are taking shape as the miasma of rhetoric excusing the straightforward use of crude racist stereotypes by white male cartoonists as satirical and over the heads of the rest of (x) unsophisticated rubes.  And hey, is the racist iconography in question even really a known quantity, or something the cartoonist deliberately inserted to provoke reader (x)’s assumption that it is exactly what it looks like, dummy (x).

I’ve used sarcasm to draw your inference that I meant the opposite of the words I just typed (I am very sophisticated).  Ugly, stereotyped, demeaning images of non-white people are racist.  As Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr has pointed out specifically, sambo art’s past prevalence (or onmi-presence) in society was a deliberate social tool to shape dominant white attitudes about black people with the specific goal of dehumanizing and politically repressing them, which is exactly what happened (continues to happen).  The lines on paper, the blots of ink, when arranged in this way traces a current of malice from history to the artist’s hand today.  Even though it’s fashionable in some circles to affect a veneer of cash-and-carry general repulsiveness as a shield against any specific allegation of consciously doing ill with ink on paper, degrading racist cartoons do hurt people.
 

jano1

 
This is supposed to be funny under the assumption that this is scenario is alien to white Westerners.  It is not because it is not.

How we cartoon people is important, even if we’re cartooning people as animals. I’ve written previously (before I was officially HU’s correspondent on Furries) about the furry detective comic Blacksad and transposing human racial attributes onto a setting with anthropomorphic animals. Blacksad is not an example of a lucid and well-measured application of this trope. In fact, it’s a disaster. In contrast to Blacksad’s racialized concept of speciation, I remember reading the cartoonist Dana Simpson mentioning in a response to a reader question that using funny animals was a way to avoid racial prejudice in a reader as a barrier to empathizing with each character. Cute animals are just cute animals.  The pitfall here is that without context, characters in this setting can sometimes be read as white by default. Still, some funny animal cartoonists elect to take the route of no thought or consideration and draw the same offensive stereotypes, but now it’s a cat. This is an old idea. Look at Mickey, here.
 

mickstew

 
The Mouse’s features mirror those of his companion, though it’s clear that Mickey is supposed to read as white, in blackface, and his purpose in this cartoon is to humiliate his black counterparts.  Of course these cartoons have been buried as an embarrassing fart of less-enlightened history. I can’t help compare the racist Mickey Mouse pictures to their contemporaries from the old Fleischer Studios, where black music and performance were showcased; rotoscoping technology turning the magnificent Cab Calloway into a spooky ghost in Snow White.  Bimbo the dog shares Mickey’s white/black distribution of shade, but less of the minstrel attribution.

When I was studying comics at the SCAD campus in Lacoste, France, and later goofing around in Spain, I discovered that cartoonists were still drawing funny animals this way.  In Madrid, a sambo holding a saxophone at a jaunty angle spray-painted on the wall with the text “jazz club,” etc etc etc.  I was shocked and puzzled at the ubiquitous caricature of non-white people I saw in the comics shops in the Latin Quarter and Montmartre and Angouleme that only the boldest and self-consciously controversial American artists would think of rendering.  In my extreme naivete, I just didn’t… mention…. how weird it was, at the time.  In Apt, I even picked up second-hand copies of two of Jean Leguay (aka Jano’s) travelogues, Carnet D’Afrique and his collaboration with fellow cartoonists Dodo and Ben Radis, Bonjour les Indes. Inside, Jano’s uproarious, chaotic, sensational, grotesque drawings show an exaggerated portrait of the places the French cartoonists is fond of visiting.
 

jano3

From Bonjour les Indes.

While often poking fun at clueless white tourists, the book generally portrays Indian people  as dirty, simple, venal, self-interested and exotically dangerous, mostly for comedic effect.

His characters are ducks, dog-things, sometimes vaguely bovine creatures with generally blank features, skin like pitch and painted red lips, their individual qualities, background, social status differentiated primarily by costume. It’s a jarring tableau, the post-imperial plundering of faux-quotidian details for broad, sometimes brutal comedy intertwined with mundane, naturalistic, documented daily life that we Americans omit from our envisioning of the world when we reflexively chide ourselves for our “first world problems.” Jano’s travelogues sometimes humanize overlooked experiences while simultaneously reveling in images, exoticism and racist stereotypes meant to dehumanize them.  We see people in markets, at the cinema, on a train, buying a guitar, and on the last plate of Carnet D’Afrique, a comic beheading with a sword.  Jano has an eye for detail, but too often he misuses it.  Instead of highlighting the richness and variety of the lives of his subjects, he instead focuses on sordidness, a cheap thrill here, an ugly little chuckle there, which diminishes them.  Gallows humor is a wonderful thing, but artists should keep in mind who erects the gallows and who swings from them.

Reading these books, I can’t really find a reason why Jano draws the people in his travelogues as anthropomorphic animals instead of humans.  What thought went into the creation of these images other than “this will look cool?”    My great fear, especially writing my own funny animal comic, is that there really is no right way to translate human culture into a world of differentiated animal species that isn’t glib, clumsy and married to racist narratives. Are animal people inherently cruder and cheaper and less dignified than people-people?  Was that the whole purpose of the funny animals’ creation?  Does drawing a racist image as a dog deflect from the awfulness of the image, or does it enhance what is already a purposeful dehumanization?  If furry art is, as I think it is, or ought to be, an imaginative space, furry artists have to consider the historical backdrop in which funny animals have been used and misused to represent people, and do better.  Much, much better than’s been done before.
 

kellermanvice
 
For god’s sake at least better than this.  Yiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiikes.
 

jano2

Isaac Butler on Perceiving Race

Posted on by

Isaac Butler from a recent comments thread drops some science on perceptions of race:

Basically, our brains have evolved to do an enormous amount of automatic processing of and reacting to simuli and life experience. They do this through a few different processes, but they mainly involve creating cateogories, associations between these categories and what get are called “schema,” which are essentially stories our brain tells itself without our conscious knowledge.

The associations and stories we have often involve categories of people, which we call stereotyping (it doesn’t have a negative connotation in psych circles). A lot of stereotyping is harmless. How do you know without having to think about it that a large, bald, fat human that’s crying probably doesn’t need a diaper change but a tiny, bald, fat human does? How do you know that a black rectangle that rings is a phone and not a wallet? it’s all these kinds of processes.

Anyway, not all of our associations are harmless or value neutral, often they involve preferences (when they’re positive) or biases (when they’re negative) about people in certain groups. Simply put, we have a story about them in our heads that we do not realize we have.

This whole phenomenon, one where our decision making and POV is affected by prejudices ovcuring at the unconscious level, is called Implicit BIas. It’s not limited to race and it’s not limited to the United States. It is, in fact, part of the human condition. It also isn’t a moral failing. The majority of white people in this country consciously hold egalitarian values. This is why explicit measures of bias and prejudice basically have no predicative value as to what people will actually do.

Implicit measures, on the other hand, do tend to predict behavior in experimental settings. The most famous of these is the IAT, which you can actually take yourself at projectimplicit.net. The IAT tests categorical associations through reaction times.

Anyway, this is long-winded, but there’s decades now of scientific evidence as to the validity of implicit bias, its predicative power, etc. and so forth. There is also considerable evidence that believing oneself to be objective actually causes people to act with more rather than less bias. There is some evidence that being aware of implicit bias, coupled with context-specific interventions, can help safeguard our decision making processes from implicit bias’s effects.

This is why color-blindness is such a pernitious idea. It’s actually the opposite of what we need. It’s the delusion that we’re objective. And what the Right does is talk about color-blindness through one side of its mouth while stoking White racial anxiety with the other. So they take race off the table as a valid topic for discussion (“playing the race card”) while also talking about it in ways guaranteed to panic Whites. For an example of this, look at Fox’s coverage of the Zimmerman verdict.

 

George Zimmerman

The End of Race

Posted on by

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.
 

a3173b135ccded00b232dd1fcfccdbaa

 
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.)

bloom county021

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.
 

Debaser

Posted on by

My dear friend Chris, who loves the Pixies, mentioned their new song “Bagboy” to me. The song is a cryptic quiet-loud hiss-shout anthem in their classic style, but the video overwhelms it somewhat for me, as it features a young white boy trashing a house with colorful items (Froot Loops, balloons, liquids, sundry mists and sprays)– a house that, at the very end, is revealed to (presumably) belong to an African-American woman who is tied up in the bedroom (foreshadowed by a photo early in the video). Perhaps a potent metaphor for post-multicultural something. Perhaps an unproblematized depiction of a hate crime. Perhaps a strange reference to the mad Negress of Jane Eyre– who knows?

Anyhow, here’s a digest of my conversation with Chris, but I’m paraphrasing his devil’s advocate parts, as he felt a tad reticent.

So, for openers, I feel irritated by the video’s attempt at being controversial. I mean, Family Guy annoys me, but I still watch it. The Seth MacFarlane edginess is usually part of some narrative. When a character pukes on a copy of The Feminine Mystique, it seems like a somewhat harmless boneheaded provocation that might get kids to read Betty Friedan. When he makes a joke about how quiet restaurants were during Jim Crow, it’s really not offensive to me, even if it might irritate someone older who lived through Jim Crow.

But in Chicago, where I live, there’s a long history of police torturing black people– we live in a country with lots of black people in jail. There’s also a long history of housing discrimination against blacks. You could use that to make an edgy joke, like Chris Ware did when he advertised prisons as “Large Negro Storage Boxes.” But the video did it in a way that was basically “Birth of a Nation” with a soundtrack; my vibe was that “terrorism against middle-class black people is awesome!” I disagree.

On the other hand, I’m told that one member of the video production team is black, and it could certainly be read as an indictment of white entitlement and hatred, or just an Obama-era version of A Clockwork Orange. Or the white kid could be read as a trailer-trash shithead a la Gummo (which then raises the specter of class war). Maybe, in the class war frame of mind, it doesn’t matter that she’s black, but only that she’s a homeowner. Maybe he’s just an evil kid.

Well fine… I would read it differently if it was a black band, or a band with one black member, or a band with any significant black fan base. But the Pixies are predominantly white people (excepting Filipino-American guitarist Joey Santiago) predominantly addressing white people, and their message (in general) is about how mutilation is fun and how blaming “redneckers for getting pissed at stupid stuff” is stupid. Drop out of college and tell women about how you fear losing your penis to a diseased whore. Which is cool- they’re a great rock band with decent angry-white-male anti-intellectual intellectual lyrics.

But to me there’s no question that the kid was the protagonist, and he was victorious. It takes some serious rationalizing to make him a villain (even though that may have been the intention). And, just to touch on the lyrics– they would seem fairly opaque without the video as context, but now I can’t help but read “She had some manners and beauty but you look like a bug,” accompanied by the sneering insistence to “polish your speech” and “cover your teeth” as patrician advice on proper racial assimilation that not even Bill Cosby would utter.

After reading a draft of the above, Noah pointed out quite astutely that the departure from the band of bassist Kim Deal, known for having a strong woman-positive voice in her other musical projects, does coincide neatly with a video that is not only depicting violence against blacks, but violence against women. It seems doubtful that a country act, a rapper, or a metal band would get a pass for making their misogyny visually explicit, but the fact that an “alternative” act apparently can should certainly provide food for thought.

So yes, “racist” and “sexist” does account for perhaps a majority of, well, all recorded music. Non-recorded as well maybe. There is an entire musical subgenre known as “murder ballads,” this subgenre forming one element of the blues, noted target of wholesale white appropriation, etc. It just might be fun for at least a moment to consider the ways in which the quasi-elite pop culture pantheon, seemingly a sparkling realm of gender- and race-blind self-made genius, have some connection, however tenuous and refracted, to the ongoing worldwide disenfranchisement and exploitation of a teeming underclass.
 
__________
Update (by Noah): One of the video’s creators replies in comments; please scroll down to see his response.

Picture 2

John Hennings on How Country Music Got More Racist

Posted on by

I really liked this comment John Hennings left last week about Brad Paisley’s “Accidental Racist”, so I thought I’d highlight it here.

Noah, I agree in general with your points about this song, and I enjoyed this essay, but I think you got the title wrong. You correctly assert that country music got more racist, but you don’t explain how. At the risk of stating the obvious, I think it was an unfortunate side effect of the polarization during the Civil Rights Movement. But I don’t think that’s the whole story of what happened to country music, and I don’t think racism, per se, is the problem with the song.

You and my fellow commentators are right to point to country’s current vacuity as one source of the trouble. Country music is far from uniquely Southern and Western, but it is identifiably so. Like other forms of music from the poor, rural places, it is borne of hard times. Despite the current economic struggles, times aren’t as hard for most of us hillbillies as they were in Hank Snow’s day, so country music now has less to say. We’re also not as isolated, so country music is less distinctive.

The culture that made Jimmie Rodgers and Louis Armstrong the men they were is severely endangered. The Starbucks reference in “Accidental Racist” is a good indicator. Prosperity and progress have made the lives in the flyover states (regardless of color) more similar to those on Long Island or in Orange County than to those of Roy Acuff or DeFord Bailey. Many rural kids listen to pop, hip-hop and rock growing up. They don’t start voluntarily listening to country until they get jobs and families. Country music now talks about the responsible grown-up lifestyle more than other music, so we mature into people for whom country music speaks.

Had “Accidental Racist” been the integrated, honest modern equivalent of “Blue Yodel #9?, Paisley and LL Cool J would have commiserated over the petty politics of their homeowners’ association, or the difficulty of getting your children into the best schools. Those aren’t compelling issues, but they’re genuine.

In the South, we also listen to country because it is identity music. So are related forms like southern rock, gospel, blues, dirty south hip-hop, and gangstagrass. We associate country with our traditional culture — the slower pace of Southern life; the connection to the land; and the greater emphasis on family, community, hospitality, and faith. The attraction is even more powerful if none of those things describe our lives anymore. The irony of this nostalgia is that when we were children, the homogenization had already begun.

I grew up in classically (not to say stereotypically) rural Southern surroundings and circumstances. I love “The Ballad of Curtis Loew” maybe more than any other Lynyrd Skynyrd song. For me, that is saying a lot. The Ballad is about a homeless, black, blues guitarist and the white child who would scrounge money and defy his parents to hear him play. It could easily have happened in the racially mixed town I grew up in. In my mind’s eye, it did. It is an honest song that makes a statement about human equality. That statement may not be quite as organic or “accidental” as the statement in Blue Yodel #9, but it is nearly so, and it is neither preachy nor flat-footed. “Accidental Racist,” in contrast, seems more like the narrative of a frustrated suburbanite, awkwardly stumbling through race issues for which his primary preparatory life experiences were those very special episodes of “Diff’rent Strokes” and “The Facts of Life.”

On second thought, maybe it is an honest song, after all.

I’ll add one more word of defense for Brad Paisley. When he and I were kids growing up, white and black Southerners considered the Confederate battle flag a symbol of the South and Southern culture. More defensively, it was a badge of our us-against-them attitude toward those who believed themselves our superiors. White supremacist groups actively re-branded the flag and made it a symbol of slavery and racism. Where I lived, that took effect a little before I graduated high school, much to our vocal lament. I don’t know if that was contemporaneous with the rest of our society. This was pre-internet; we were frequently behind y’all when it came to zeitgeist awareness.

Interestingly, with the notable exception of England, Southerners in many European countries also lead simpler, more agrarian, lifestyles than their more cosmopolitan countrymen. So when football teams from southern Italy or southern Germany play their northern rivals, you can expect some fan to fly the Confederate battle flag.

 

images

How Country Music Got More Racist

Posted on by

This first appeared on Splice Today.
___________

Brad Paisley’s new song “Accidental Racist” is a sodden, self-pitying slog. Over surging, hookless country radio gush, Paisley’s anonymous vocals blandly wail about how he’s caught between southern pride and southern blame because the folks at the Starbucks don’t appreciate his Confederate flag T-shirt.  “I’m a white man/living in the Southland/just like you I’m more than what you see/I’m proud of where I’m from/but not everything I’ve done,” he declaims, then mumbles about how Reconstruction was bad (for who, exactly?) and how we can’t rewrite history so we might as well celebrate the symbols of slavery?  Then LL Cool J comes on and starts to bargain: “If you don’t judge my gold chains/I’ll forget the iron chains.” Hey, if you don’t judge my big schnozz, I’ll forget the Holocaust.  Can’t we all just get along?

Pretty much everybody has already weighed in on what a piece of shit this song is. But I think to really appreciate its badness fully, it might be helpful to listen to an earlier country music take on race.

 

That’s Jimmie Rodgers, the father of country music, and the genre’s first major star, with Blue Yodel #9 from 1930. The piano player is Lil Hardin; the trumpeter is her husband, Louis Armstrong.

Rodgers doesn’t mention the Confederacy or race. Still, with Louis Armstrong standing beside him, the opening lyrics seem fairly pointed:

Standing on the corner, I didn’t mean no harm

Along came the police, he took me by the arm

It was down in Memphis, corner of Beale and Maine

He said, big boy, you’ll have to tell me your name,

I said, you’ll find my name on the tail of my shirt,

I’m a Tennessee hustler, I don’t have to work.

In “Accidental Racist,” Paisley sings ” I try to put myself in your shoes and that’s a good place to begin/it ain’t like I can walk a mile in someone else’s skin”  — a couplet that seems half lament and half excuse.  Rodgers, on the other hand, and with much less fuss, demonstrates that hillbillies and black folk have plenty of common ground. A half century before hip hop, this is, after all, a song about police harassment.  Rodgers could be speaking for a young Louis Armstrong, out there on the streets of Memphis — though Armstrong didn’t usually yodel.

Armstrong gets to speak for himself, too — and, to no one’s surprise, his trumpet is considerably more eloquent than LL Cool J’s lyrics. The song, in fact, is a conversation, with Rodgers throwing out a line and Armstrong’s horn answering with its mix of jaunty assurance and melancholy. The two performers couldn’t be much more simpatico; both are completely comfortable with the blues and the raggy swing of Hardin’s piano accompaniment.

“Accidental Racist” is an ostentatious declaration of difference and tolerance; you’ve got your traditions, I’ve got mine, but we can still tolerate each other. Rodgers and Armstrong, though, aren’t tolerating each other’s differences, because they aren’t that different. Their musical traditions and influences, and even, the song suggests, their life experiences are congruent — almost as if they come from the same country.

That country is not the one that flies the Confederate flag.  Paisley builds his marginal Southern identity on the symbols of slavery, identifying with a tradition of oppression. Rodgers builds his on the experience of being a hobo and a drifter on the butt end of the law. Paisley declares his Southern individuality by perpetuating completely anonymous country radio dreck. Rodgers declares his by demonstrating his links with the quintessentially Southern music of Memphis. “Accidental Racist” sees the south as white and the north as black; Rodgers and Armstrong, though, know their home, and their music, is integrated.

We tend to think about race relations in terms of progress. Once, we were benighted, but slowly we have crawled into the light.  And it’s certainly true that things have gotten better in some ways since 1930; we’ve gotten rid of Jim Crow, we’ve elected a black President.  But Paisley’s crappy track is a reminder that later isn’t always better. Once upon a time, there was room for a rural white identity which defined itself not in opposition to, but in continuity with, the black experience. Paisley’s track is a depressing reminder of how thoroughly Lynyrd Skynrd has replaced Jimmie Rodgers for contemporary country — and of how thoroughly that is a change for the worse.
 

large_rsz_brad-paisley-accidental-racist