Tag Archives: racism

Harry Potter, Race, and British Multiculturalism

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Hagrid’s half-Giant identity is a plot arc in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, so too are the House Elves and Hermione’s crusading, if not paternalistic, attempts to free them from oppression. In the Deathly Hallows the penultimate “other” becomes the mudblood, a term we first hear in Chamber of Secrets. The final book, too, revolves around non-wizarding creatures of, as the Ministry of Magic and Dolores Umbridge put it, “near human intelligence,” and Harry is labelled as a very odd, special, and different wizard by Griphook the Goblin because he treats non-humans with courtesy and respect. The books are dedicated to highlighting the fallacy of “the other” but, and file this under uncomfortable truths, all the human characters of colour are relegated to the sidelines.

JK Rowling has called her books “very British” in a number of interviews, and has even stated that they are a “prolonged argument for tolerance.” However, I can’t help but draw parallels (note: I’m drawing parallels, not determining causality) from her treatment of race and “otherness” in the books to the conversations about multiculturalism and race theory that have occurred throughout British history and continue today.

Rowling has been very explicit about the connection between Pure Blood Wizarding ideology and the Nazism that led to the holocaust. But race theory, the belief that attributes and abilities could be determined by the socially constructed notion of race, was equally dominant in the United Kingdom. Weeding out “undesirables” wasn’t particular to Nazi ideology and was common across Europe.

British identity was partially constructed using internal colonization, where Welsh, Scottish and Irish minorities were subsumed into Britishness, an identity which still remains ambivalent and dynamic. Britishness was also constructed in opposition to a number of external European threats and was only reinforced through colonialism, which was justified by applying race theory.

Even after the Second World War, Great Britain restricted entry to Jewish refugees while simultaneously citing its own tolerance. Jewish bodies were and continue to be racialized, but even though Rowling has been explicit with her works’ connection to the Holocaust, racism is constructed as pureblood witches and wizards versus muggles, mudbloods, and magical creatures.

I’m not the first person to note that the fantasy genre has a history of replacing PoCs with monsters and magical creatures. Writing for Fantasy Book Review, author Lane Heymont states:

…[I]t feels like white authors have an easier time, or are more comfortable, writing from the perspective of  dragons, ghosts, elves, Minotaurs, and other non-humans than another human being. Seems ironically odd, don’t you think? And the writing suffers for it, as does the cause.

I target fantasy specifically because I know that Rowling has the ability to write from a PoC’s perspective as evidenced in The Casual Vacancy, but her fantasy works imitate most of the genre: There’s a brilliant ability to create non-human cultures and magic systems, but fantasy novels with people of colour as main characters are sadly rare.

If these books are “very British” and the quintessential “others” in British society are racialized minorities, than why has race been rendered invisible? Whether intentionally or not, side-lining characters of colour matches the British multicultural model that defines racial integration as near invisibility.

Racialiazing “otherness” has been part of the British experience, and Rowling, with her progressive roots, seems to be reacting towards this kind of cruelty by dedicating seven books and several years of her life to combatting it, only to create works that replicate the systemic exclusion of minorities. To clear up any confusion, I’m not saying that Rowling had to talk about how it feels like to be black at Hogwarts, but what it feels like to be Dean Thomas at Hogwarts. (Incidentally, I was disappointed that while Thomas’ backstory was potentially up for inclusion in the official cannon, it eventually had to be axed due to editorial limitations. I look forward to reading more about him in Pottermore.)

As a series that practically begs the reader to take it personally and that has birthed devoted communities and fan conventions, issues of representation and inclusion become incredibly important: fans want to know that they’re allowed in, and if you’re aiming for an emotional reader response, then this is a reaction that should be taken seriously. Further, the exclusion of active people of colour in fiction constitutes a form of erasure that undervalues their construction of and contributions to both fictional and real societies.

As it stands, we know that Hogwarts plays host to a variety of people of colour (Cho Chang, the Patel sisters, Dean Thomas, Blaise Zabini, Kinglsey Shacklebolt etc.) but they are, in a sense, rendered invisible. Their races are so invisible, in fact, that they’ve become model minorities; their races do not detract from their Britishness.

The idea of integration as a key to a successful multicultural policy stems back to the Second World War. British politicians knew, especially after Kristallnacht, what Germany’s Jews were facing, but still worked actively to limit the number of entries into the country. In 1965, Roy Hattersley, a Labour politician argued that “without integration, limitation is inexcusable, without limitation, integration is impossible,” the idea being that immigration should be restricted because it might rile the emotions of British citizens, the same rational for restricting entry to Jewish refugees. Minorities became responsible for the resentment directed towards them.

The subtle casuistry of this linkage of a commitment to “harmonious community relations” to necessary restriction on immigration and immigrants has continued to be employed by successive British governments. It has a wonderfully corrupt, but popularly acceptable rhetorical formula which argues that:

  • as decent and tolerant people we are naturally opposed to any form of racism or discrimination.
  • simultaneously, we are committed to a harmonious society.
  • however; immigrants and ethnic minorities have a capacity to generate racial hostility and discrimination from the majority population.
  • consequently: in order to guarantee harmonious community relations we must rigorously control immigration.
    –Charles Husband, Doing Good by Stealth, Whilst Flirting with Racism: Some Contradictory   Dynamics of British Multiculturalism

More recently, government officials stated that the reason the London Bombers carried out the 2005 train attacks was because they were insufficiently integrated into British culture, even though the evidence pointed otherwise, thus starting a firm government push to ensure that Britain’s Muslims were also “well-integrated.”

In 2003, in response to the Labour government’s proposed legislation on asylum seekers, British tabloids exploded with accusations that immigrants were abusing the system and dirtying the country with AIDS, Hepatitis B, and TB. These accusations don’t seem so far off from the hearings held in the Ministry of Magic, where we saw a witch being accused of stealing a wand (stealing from the system) and not being sufficiently magical (British.) While Rowling’s stories may have been inspired by the holocaust, they still play out in Great Britain today. They are indeed “very British” books; Rowling is both prescient and astute when she highlights government and media sanctioned oppression and she’s at her strongest when she writes these scenes.

Only last week The Guardian published a piece by David Goodhart, who accused liberals of favouring a highly-individualistic identity that transcended the boundaries created by the nation state, roughly defining certain liberals as being pro-immigration and therefore anti-community.

This individualistic view of society makes it hard for modern liberals to understand why people object to their communities being changed too rapidly by mass immigration – and what is not understood is easily painted as irrational or racist…If society is just a random collection of individuals, what is there to integrate into? In liberal societies, of course, immigrants do not have to completely abandon their own traditions, but there is such a thing as society, and if newcomers do not make some effort to join in it is harder for existing citizens to see them as part of the “imagined community”. When that happens it weakens the bonds of solidarity and in the long run erodes the “emotional citizenship” required to sustain welfare states.

According to Goodhart, the very presence of immigrants destabilizes allegedly harmonious British communities with resentment (a romanticized fallacy, especially when looking at Britain’s long history of class warfare), their bodies becoming symbols of chaos that disrupt a cohesive national identity. To be a racialized minority is to have people assume that you are unwilling to emotionally integrate into British identity and society. Some conservatives argue that under multiculturalism people will abdicate working together towards a common collective goal known as nation-building; however, the examples above show that Britain’s ideal form of multiculturalism has always been assimilationist.

Rowling is progressive, clearly pro-immigration, and the Harry Potter series illustrate a typical liberal approach to race blindness. Her works still presuppose that integration is synonymous with invisibility, but she also argues for the potential success of Britain’s multicultural model.  Their well-integrated and invisible races ensure that Cho Chang, Dean Thomas, and the Patel sisters can be British without disrupting British identity with their racialized bodies. While I appreciated that Cho Chang became a sobbing mess in Order of the Phoenix without her emotional deterioration being tied to her ethnicity, I can’t separate issues of representation from the larger systemic trend found within the fantasy genre. (Cho is the character of colour with the most screen time. One chapter is dedicated to her character in Order of the Phoenix, where she spends most of the time crying, and she receives a few sentences here and there from books 4 to 7. When we meet her, in book 3, she doesn’t say much of anything.)  That characters of colour are in the background allow the reader to know that Hogwarts is Very Diverse, but their importance to the plot is minimal. As the very worst possibility, they act as ornaments to Hogwarts’ status as a Very Progressive School.

This integration-as-invisibility approach is distinctly different from the movie adaptations, where the characters of colour wore clothing representative of their ethnic backgrounds to the Yule Ball, whereas the same characters in the books wore dress robes like everyone else. Except…children of immigrants don’t uniformly wear clothing from their parents’ home country. While the Potter books erase ethnic difference, the movies champion essentialism which, to her credit, Rowling can’t be accused of doing.

Rowling spends seven books opining about the importance of diversity, while replicating the systemic sidelining of characters of colour. The characters in the Harry Potters books are proof of multiculturalism’s success, but the structure of the books imitate systematic issues concerning racial representation. There’s tension in this approach: on one hand, it becomes exhausting to have one’s entire identity defined by ethnic background (something we can’t choose) and being able to choose one’s identity through acquired membership (identity markers we can choose, eg. being part of an SF/F fandom) can be a highly liberating experience. On the other hand, if Rowling believes in anti-otherizing, then why isn’t the quintessential British “other” given more screen time, not to discuss race, but to simply be? While a British progressive may envision a rainbow utopia of immigrants and new citizens, we know that their invisibility exists to comfort us while we pat ourselves on the back for being progressive. When it comes to screen time for characters of colour, their stories are still marginalized. The Harry Potter books are in no way the worst offenders in the genre—and I still remain a loyal fan—but there’s a serious cognitive dissonance that needs to be analyzed when a book series extolling the virtues of diversity are not particularly diverse themselves.

The Art of Racism

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A version of this review first appeared at the Chicago Reader.
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“It was shocking that in a city bursting with parade enthusiasts and curious tourists, a pair of European women who stayed less than an hour were the only white faces in the crowd other than ours,” write Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen in their new book Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop. (100-101) The two are describing their experiences at Mardi Gras, where they went to watch the Zulu parade, one of the few places in contemporary America where African-Americans will wear blackface as a matter of course. Taylor and Austen describe their own experiences at the parade in order to convey the manic strangness of carnival; to show why and how even blackface can be normal there. At the same time, though, by highlighting their presence at an all-black parade, they emphasize their whiteness — and, paradoxically, their adoption of blackness. The Mardi Gras description is, at least in part, about two white authors momentarily joining the black community. In that sense, the passage can itself be seen as a kind of literary blackface.

This is not to criticize Taylor and Austen. On the contrary, this very mild stumble — if it even rises to a stumble — serves mostly to throw into relief how very surefooted, thoughtful, and perceptive they are for the bulk of the book. This is no mean achievement, since black minstrelsy — the practice of blacks donning blackface and/or performing routines associated with minstrel shows — is surely one of the most charged and uncomfortable topics in American pop cultural history.

In the late nineteenth and early 20th century, blackface performances by whites perpetuated vicious racist stereotypes of happy, lazy, stupid chicken-eating, watermelon-slurping, vacuously-grinning darkies. And yet, as Taylor and Austen show, blacks themselves have been long time, and even enthusiastic participants in the minstrel tradition. From Louis Armstrong to Flavor Flav, minstrel clowning and tropes have been central to black American music and black American comedy.

What, then, did blacks get from minstrelsy? Was it an example of false consciousness, with African-Americans duped into adopting hurtful stereotypes as their own? Or were black entertainers forced to adopt minstrelsy to make a living in a white-controlled entertainment industry?

Such explanations have been staples of the longstanding black anti-minstrelsy tradition, from Richard Wright to Spike Lee’s 2000 film Bamboozled. But while Taylor and Austen have great respect for anti-minstrelsy’s commitments and aesthetic achievements, they mostly reject its conclusions. Black minstrelsy, they argue convincingly, was not, at least for the most part, the result of self-deception or coercion. No one, for example, forced the politically engaged Paul Robeson to record “That’s Why Darkies Were Born,” a minstrel type song which told blacks to labor cheerfully in the cotton-fields and “accept your destiny.” (208)

Instead, Taylor and Austen argue, blacks used minstrel traditions in a number of different ways. Sometimes, they deployed it as a critique— as Spike Lee does in Bamboozled. Sometimes, they adapted and subverted racist messages, as in Robeson’s version of “That’s Why Darkies Were Born.” Robeson, Taylor and Austen argue, treats the song as a spiritual, in which blacks shoulder suffering, hardship and injustice on their way to the Promised Land. Rather than a justification of racism, in Robeson’s hands the minstrel song becomes a dream of liberation. In a similar vein, the great early-20th century black blackface performer Bert Williams injected pathos and nuance into his performances and songs, undermining the racism of minstrelsy by emphasizing the humanity of his characters.

While black minstrelsy could be used consciously to confront or undermine racial tropes, however, that does not seem to have historically been its main appeal to black performers and black audiences. On the contrary, in many cases, Taylor and Austen suggest, minstrelsy was enjoyed by blacks in much the same way it was enjoyed by whites — as low humor and nostalgic escapism. Southern hip hop performers who gesture towards minstrelsy with clowning about chicken or watermelon do so because they enjoy such humor…and aren’t going to be embarrassed about it just because various cultural arbiters say they should be. Similarly, Louis Armstrong sang “When Its Sleepy Time Down South” — with its evocation of the lazy “dear old Southland” — because a nostalgic vision of ease and plenty appealed to him and other blacks during the Great Depression, just as it appealed to whites. (211)

In minstrelsy, this paradise of laughter and ease is, of course, racialized. A world of blackface is a world in which, by definition, everyone is black. For whites, this world is in part an object of ridicule. But it is also, as Taylor and Austen argue (and with their trip to Mardi Gras, perhaps demonstrate) an object of yearning. To put on blackface is, for whites, to be free, crazy, funny, authentic, cool. And this is also, Taylor and Austen suggest, what it means, or can mean, to put on blackface for blacks. Thus, Zora Neale Hurston, who loathed white minstrelsy but used minstrel tropes extensively in her work, often spoke admiringly about black primitivism, naturalness, and spontaneity. “[T]he white man thinks in a written language,” she said, “and the Negro thinks in hieroglyphics.” (269)

Hurston’s investment in black minstrelsy and black folk traditions inspired her to create Their Eyes Were Watching God, one of the great American novels of the twentieth century, built on her love of black people and black community. But her investment in minstrelsy also arguably inspired her to oppose integration, on the grounds that she didn’t want black primitivism and naturalness to be contaminated. Racial pride and racism for Hurston were two sides of the same mule bone.

Hurston’s habit of calling herself “your little pickaninny” in letters to a white benefactor is viscerally jarring. But her black minstrelsy is perhaps only a more exaggerated and painful form of a problem that confronts any minority cultural production within a racist society. Black music, theater, literature, entertainment, and comedy, from the days of black minstrelsy to the present, have been a glorious, seemingly limitless aesthetic treasure. But those riches have been created, and are in some sense dependent upon, the subcultural marginalization resulting from segregation and oppression. To celebrate black cultural achievement, whether Mardi Gras, or Hurston, or even Paul Robeson, is to celebrate in part the fruits of racism.

Nothing could make this clearer than black minstrelsy, a black art form built — with courage and cowardice, subversion and acquiescence — out of racism itself. Darkest America is, in this sense, not a story about an obscure and forgotten curiosity. Instead, it is a surprisingly graceful and erudite recuperation of what may be our most inspiring, most shameful, and most American art form.
 
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Retreat from the Citadel: Confessions of an Ex-Comic Book Reader

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It took me a very long time to realize that mainstream comic book industry isn’t at all interested in me, isn’t at all talking to me; that it is, in fact, talking over my shoulder to the straight white man-boy (and people who identify with the straight white man-boy) reading his comic book behind me.

Every time I imagine that I’m just being hyperbolic, seeing problems where none exist, and return to the beloved hobby of my childhood, I am unceremoniously reminded of just how hostile that environment is to a conscious mind. I made the regrettable mistake of reading the current issue of a comic book that I had long abandoned: Wonder Woman. The book’s current course, and current success, can be traced, I believe, to its decidedly macho-friendly, anti-feminist tone.

It wasn’t enough that this new iteration of the character jettisoned her previous origin of a child being formed from clay by a desperate Queen Hippolyta and blessed with powers by loving set goddesses (and one god) from the Greek pantheon. To add insult to injury, we were told that not only was Wonder Woman now the product of a tryst between Hippolyta and Zeus, the womanizing king of the Olympian gods, but that she also belongs to a tribe of man-hating women that periodically creep away from their island hideout to have sex with unsuspecting men, murder them, and would murder the male offspring from those unions too if not for the kindness of another god. If it sounds like ancient Greek misogynist propaganda with a modern twist, it’s because it is. And it is, in my opinion, all for the benefit of making Wonder Woman relatable to a bunch of men in the industry and in the audience, who simply can’t relate to a character designed to attack patriarchal notions and empower women in revolutionary ways.

In the latest issue of Wonder Woman, another character, a new god named Orion, slaps Wonder Woman on the ass in a fit of sexist entitlement. Wonder Woman is denied the ability to respond to the assault because of other matters that take precedence in the story. The story seems to be saying that there are some things more important that getting upset over some harmless slap and tickle. You can almost hear chants of “Let a man be a man! Stop trying to emasculate us!” in the subtext. The wonder, for me, is in how this scene was deemed acceptable and harmless to begin with.
 

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I’m sure that to Brian Azzarello (the writer of the story) and most guys in general, it was all very innocent, designed to show us, through action, just what kind of rapscallion Orion is. No one asks, however, if there are other, less rape-y ways to convey the same point. I imagine most men don’t see the harm because men rarely have to be on the receiving end of these sorts of violations, which are products of rape culture. Largely, men don’t have to walk through creation tense and braced for anything in nature to leap out on them and sexually violate their bodies and spaces. One out of every six men aren’t raped. Ninety percent of rape victims aren’t men. Men’s bodies aren’t under the constant policing and legislation of other men. Don’t let the members of the “men’s rights” movement (yes, that’s an actual thing) hear you say this, though. Ruling every major institution on Earth apparently isn’t enough; men have to be considered innocent and absolved of every crime, too. Patriarchy is a helluva drug.

When you have the luxury and privilege of wielding massive amounts of institutional power, Wonder Woman getting slapped on the ass in a comic books seems like a silly thing to get worked up about. It doesn’t matter that this act is just the latest in a string of very clear hostilities toward the idea of female and feminine self-government and self-determination—hostilities that aren’t limited to comic books. I propose that this action isn’t harmless, not even when it happens in the funny pages. I believe depictions like these reinforce the idea that there are no limits on men’s behavior, particularly in relation to women’s bodies. If the most powerful woman in the universe can get slapped on the ass and all she gets to do in response is get angry and, generally, live with the violation, men’s power is reaffirmed and all is right with the universe.

Except that it isn’t right.

I made another crucial error: I posted my feelings on a comic book message board. Not known for their cultural or political sensitivities, many comic book message boards are merely echo chambers in which people who are, by and large, sycophants gather to reinforce each other’s narrow-mindedness and reflect each other’s images at twice their actual size (to paraphrase Virginia Woolf). The audience, at least by way of message boards and comments sections, is remarkably repetitive when faced with sociopolitical criticism about the stuff they love: first defense, then denial, then a hyper “rational” analysis of why there couldn’t possibly be any misogyny/racism/sexism/homophobia in their beloved art form. They insist that the problem lies with the observer not with the object being observed. Dwayne McDuffie, rest his soul, had this audience pegged.

My comments were met, mostly, with simmering rage or the aforementioned cognitive dissonance: “Let me explain this to you rationally: I’m not a bigot and I like this book. So this book couldn’t possibly be bigoted in any way.” Anyone who agreed with my commentary was summarily dismissed, talked over, or explained away.

And, of course, there’s the tried-and-true option of dragging out the token members of the audience, the few blacks or women or queer people in the ranks who support the status quo. Nothing says “conversation ender” like, “Well, I have a female friend who said it was okay. So it’s not misogynist.” As though institutional pathologies like misogyny, racism, or homophobia require that every member of the oppressed class sign off on its identification; as though members of oppressed classes don’t succumb to the psychological warfare that is bigotry and participate in and perpetuate ideologies that are harmful to them and others in their social group; as though the oppressed don’t sometimes identify with the oppressors. Stockholm syndrome is very real.

I’ll agree that the problem lies within the observer (only not the observer the aforementioned audience believes), but the problem also lies within the object being observed. The reason why this audience doesn’t perceive any harm, intentional or otherwise, is because the creators, institutions, and this audience are literally speaking the same language. White supremacy isn’t white supremacy amongst white supremacists; it’s reality. Misogyny isn’t misogyny amongst misogynists; it’s normalcy. Homophobia isn’t homophobia to homophobes; it’s just the way God intended things. It’s very difficult for anyone inside a giant circle to have the necessary perspective to perceive its full shape.

There’s a reason relatively few women, black people, or openly queer people are employed in the mainstream comic book industry or hold relatively few positions of power within the institutions that distribute them. There’s a reason why those who are employed there have to do much to tamp down any perceived differences in opinion or worldview and get on board with the straight white male status quo. It has nothing to do with women, black people, or queer people not being talented enough to compete or there not being enough them present in the potential talent pool. It has everything to do with already being friends with an influential straight white guy at the company. It has everything to do with a group of frightened individuals setting up shop in their citadel, trying desperately to fortify their tower of straight white male hegemony in a world where that hegemony is becoming decidedly less tenable.

And you don’t only see this happening in the comic book industry. You see it in mainstream politics as well with organizations like the GOP trying to decide if they should jettison some of their more outrageous, overt bigotries in order to court enough Latinos, women, and gays to win elections. It reads to me as a sort of panic, a sort of regrouping of the straight white guard as they try to figure out what it means to be straight, white, and male in a world where queer people are demanding civil rights, a black man is the leader of democracy, and women are asserting control over their own bodies.

One of the ways in which they think they can reclaim the power they believe they’ve lost is through media propaganda. Since Obama’s re-election in 2008, for example, we’ve seen the incredible return of overt racist paradigms like the white savior and black pathology, as well as the puzzling return of 1950s values in relation to feminism post-Sarah Palin—not just in the real world, but in entertainment media as well: Did you miss World’s Finest #7, where Power Girl decided she knew everything she needed to know about African nations and their child soldiers because she watched KONY 2012? Or what about Miles Morales in Ultimate Spider-Man, who was not only at odds with his criminal uncle, but has to hide his identity from his ex-con father, too? Because, you know, nothing says “black” like criminal pathology. And don’t get me started on Bunker in Teen Titans, the gay Mexican character whose power is, wait for it: creating purple energy bricks. Purple. Bricks. I couldn’t create that big of a stereotype even if I tried really hard. But for some folks, it’s apparently rather easy.
 

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We’ve seen these corporations pay lip service to diversity, but it’s always diversity for diversity’s sake—that is, diversity because they think it makes them look cool and hip in multicultural spaces. But bigots don’t understand the difference between diversity and tokenism, nor do they recognize diversity as something beneficial to themselves. They don’t see it as something that can open them and their organizations up to new ideas, new audiences, and new ways of being. They always regard the concept of diversity suspiciously, as something forced upon them, a notion that tries to coerce them into being politically correct, a practice the makes them, against their will, admit into their ranks “unqualified” people who didn’t “earn” their spot (because, you know, being a popular writer’s friend is considered earning a spot).

When called out on their nonsense, these corporations blame the bigotry on their audience: “Well, we tried to get this product featuring X Minority Figure off the ground, but the audience just wasn’t ready for it.” Bigots, unfortunately, have a collusive and mutually beneficial relationship that allows blame to be passed around (but never landing where it should), while keeping us distracted from the fact the structural impediments remain unmoved. And that’s all according to plan.

I’ve concluded that it’s useless to have these discussions with people whose fantasies rest on the fact that none of the social conventions upon which comic books stories are built can be seriously challenged or interrogated. It’s pointless to have these debates in this “post-racial” age where you’re only a racist if you use the n-word, you’re only a misogynist if you beat up women, and you’re not a homophobe, you’re just beholden to religious principles. Bigots—even passive, rational ones—are incredibly similar in their reaction to criticism: “My feelings are more important than your struggles.”

The only option left to individuals like myself who have had enough of the microaggressions and the chorus of defenders and deniers—who have had enough of the grating, tone-deaf depictions of women, people of color, and queer people in these often poorly written, poorly drawn, increasingly expensive books—is to opt out. And that decision is made evermore clear when you consider that the industry has been bigoted since its inception and you simply weren’t conscious enough to detect it when you were a kid. While the country has taken strides toward being a more perfect union, the mainstream comic book industry has, for the most part, dug its heels in and refused to move.

So I admit defeat. I am, ironically, waving the white flag. The bigots win. I’m plum tuckered out. I don’t have the energy to fight anymore. I say if they like the comic book industry and its product just the way they are, faults and all, let them have it. As long as I don’t ever have to read a misogynist Wonder Woman story or a racist Spider-Man story or a Superman story told by a homophobic extremist ever again, it’s all good. There are better products to spend my money on. That the mainstream comic book industry doesn’t want my money for fear of alienating their core audience of bubble blowers is the fault of their bad business model, not mine. In the meantime, I’ll be over here reading novels digitally on my iPad. These works, at least, reflect the world as it is, as it could be, as it should be, rather than as some defective, reductive supremacist fantasy.
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Robert Jones, Jr. is a writer/editor from Brooklyn, New York and creator of the Son of Baldwin blog. He is currently working on his first novel.
 

Kim Thompson on Tintin in the Congo

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Domingos Isabelinho’s post on the Belgian courts and Tintin in the Congo provoked an interesting discussion in comments. I thought in particular I’d highlight Kim Thompson’s comment:

(1) At this date I think it’s irresponsible to publish TINTIN IN THE CONGO in kid-friendly formats without a warning or contextual introduction of sorts. (I specify “kid-friendly formats” because I don’t really have a problem with the expensive, black-and-white facsimile ARCHIVES format version, either the French one or the now-out-of-print Last Gasp English language version.)

(2) That said, I’m very, very, uncomfortable with the idea of legally enforcing the addition of this material under threat of a ban (and I have the American free-speech-libertarian’s extreme discomfort at European and Canadian “hate-speech” bans).

(3) That said, I can well see why someone who was sensitive to the material becoming so frustrated with the adamant refusal of those who control it to concede to this very reasonable request that they take legal action.

(4) And it’s somewhat unfair to accuse Mondondo of wanting to flat-out ban the book when it seems pretty explicit that he’s looking for the contextual warning and the ban is more of an if-they-can’t-agree-to-that threat that is part of the lawsuit.

(5) TINTIN THE CONGO is clearly not harmless, and I suspect those who minimize its toxicity, whether journalists or judges, do so to justify their own squeamishness on point 2.

(6) My guess is that if Hergé was still alive he’d either ask that the book be withdrawn (as it was at certain times) or insist on that kind of contextual material himself.

(7) It’s nice that later in life he was publicly and vocally mortified at the content of TINTIN IN THE CONGO himself, although maybe a little creepy that he seemed more genuinely distressed at Tintin’s bloodthirsty hunting rampage.

(8) I love TINTIN IN THE CONGO.

(9) I recognize TINTIN IN THE CONGO is evil.

(10) But I think in creating it Hergé was at worst misguided and naïve.

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My Son, The Cultural Critic

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So this is a self-indulgent, proud father kind of thing, but what the hey.

Two anecdotes about my nine-year-old son’s critical acumen.

— My son was talking to a friend about the movie “Brave.” My son hadn’t seen it yet, so he asked his friend how it was. “It’s okay,” the friend said, “but it’s got a girl hero.”

My son paused for a moment. Then he said, with a fair bit of outrage, “You don’t like it because a girl’s the hero? That’s sexist!

—I mentioned Django Unchained for some reason, and my son said, “what’s that?” I explained that it’s a movie about slavery, and about how slavery was bad. I added, “The funny thing about that is that there really aren’t very many movies about how slavery is bad.”

My son narrowed his eyes and said, “Is that because most movies are made by white people?”

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Furry Blacksploitation

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I notice the air getting very thin when I’m in a discussion with cartoonist peers and the subject of furries is brought up (oftentimes by myself and my friend, the glass of wine), filling the vacant atmosphere like a silent fart. To the sub-culturally literate who know and love to hate us, we are mad, shallow tacky perverts; aesthetically handicapped loser-kin often more adept at creating elaborate webs of internet drama than art, stories or comics of any value to people outside of the fandom. This is a half-truth.

There are artists working within and at the margins of the furry subculture producing spectacularly daring, inventive, funny, hyper-aware fiction who nevertheless feel deeply insecure about associations with such a maliciously misunderstood subculture. There aren’t many works in the canon of respectable comics which feature anthropomorphism in furry style ™. Instead of majestic, inventive comics like Krazy Kat, furry style was initially shaped (as an offshoot of science-fiction fandom in the early 80s) by admiration for Disney cartoons (Robin Hood, woof!) and advertising mascots. Our foundational sensibility is gene-spliced super-soldier pulp paperbacks, Tex Avery and the naïve dom/sub sexuality of old Fox and Crow funnybook covers. And those comics suuuuuuuuuuuucked. Sucked the paint off a barn. The vicious aside about funny animal comics near the end of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay stings all the more bitterly because woe, it is so so true.

So we furrs pounce when a sophisticated mass-market comic featuring talking animal-people gets a little, or a lot of love from readership and critics. The Blacksad series by the team of writer Juan Diaz Canales and illustrator Guarnido might be the holy grail of furry respectability within the world of comics. The stories utilize a cast of upright-walking humanoid animals that exist within a model of human behavior, yet their individual animal speciation informs their human-like character and personalities. These are conceits that furries can claim as their own, regardless of actual authorial involvement in the subculture. (This applies retroactively to previous iterations of pop-anthropomorphism as well —but let’s not get sidetracked.) Blacksad has cred, it’s popular, and it’s very furry. It’s also very troubling if it’s the type of material that we’re going to hold up as a standard of excellence for anthro comics with a broader market appeal than furaffinity.net.

Blacksad has been recently reprinted in hardcover, bundled with the unreleased -en Anglaise- Ame Rouge, by Darkhorse as well as a second volume of new material which I have not yet read. The previously released second volume, Arctic Nation, won a Harvey award in 2005. It thrusts our hero, the titular John Blacksad, into an intrigue set against an atmosphere of mid-century racist tension and violence outside New York City. Rather than a sober European critique of American racism and class struggle (haha let’s not trouble ourselves with that thought), Arctic Nation is unfiltered, earnest pulp. It begins, subtle as an asteroid collision in your nana’s parlour, with a lynching. On page 2.

Backing up a bit. I can’t offer much in the way of relevent analysis or anything new to say about racism, or depictions of racism in comics per se. I don’t have a seat at that table. Furthermore, the Blacksad universe is very clearly meant to represent a pulped version of reality, and it’s up to discussion whether fiction in this vein should be judged according to its reflection on political reality or read on the terms of the self-contained universe of its creators’ imagining. But the animals Guarnido populates the world with are meant to suggest inferences about human traits, including racial ones. And I do feel, as a furry, like I have something to say about their use in Arctic Nation (or the use of various species to represent different ethnicities and nationalities of human beings in the first place. Hint: it’s a really bad idea!).

The second volume in the Blacksad story follows our hero John, the taciturn tom-chat noir private eye, on an assignment into a suburb called the Line, which is in a state of social upheaval following the decline of its post-war manufacturing boom. The world, entirely populated by a managerie of anthopomorphic animals, expands in complexity here. A coalition of animals of various species who share in common their white fur, many of whom occupy ossified posts of old social power has hardened into a hard-right group -a mixture of the Ku Klux Klan at the height of its influence and the American Nazi Party of the 60s and 70s- that overtly terrorizes everyone else. The only organized resistance, the “Black Claws” — an obvious parody of the Black Panthers — is cast as equivalent in their odiousness to the white hate group.

This brings up an interesting point that is not readily apparent in the first volume of Blacksad. John, a black-furred cat, is in terms of a human analog, a black man, and is treated as such — but with a caveat. He has a patch of white fur on his muzzle which affords him some access to interactions with the white-furred power brokers within the neighborhood. This concept of his “whiteness” is directly alluded to on page 9 of the iBooks paperback printing when he is hassled by Arctic Nation thugs in a diner that conspicuously displays a notice that reads “NO colored people ALLOWED.” He rolls his eyes and offers a deliciously smug, self-confident grin. “This here isn’t enough?” The initial victim of the AN goons’ attention, an old blind crow wearing a US Air Force Jacket, a possible nod to the Tuskegee Airmen, isn’t so lucky. He also has white facial markings but they are signs of age, and without John’s gift of brute strength (applied with gusto in the following page) he is an easier target.
 

 
One of the most interesting characters in the story, for many reasons, is Weekly, the sidekick and comic relief to John’s turgidly upright straight man act. An unctuous tawny-furred mustelid, Weekly reads as white but is unsympathetic to the Arctic Nation’s fanatical racial vision. He is a target of scorn by the white-furred citizens of the Line, though this could be attributed to his unsavory profession as a weasely tabloid reporter or his “European” approach to hygiene (his nickname stems from the supposed infrequency of his change of undergarments). His exclusion from the ivory racist clique also exempts him from the system of oppression against black-furred animals in the Line. He is familiar, actually chummy, with our hero from their first interaction. The only system of oppression in Blacksad’s universe is at the hands of a white nationalist extremist population which has the means to mobilize against a specifically black one. Red or brown or orange fur occupies a “neutral” territory.

John is on a case of a missing child whose mother is reticent to report her disappearance. John is working on behalf of the girl’s concerned teacher, Ms. Grey (symbolism!). The “plot” that transpires hurls him neck-deep into a preposterous, Oedipally-fraught revenge scenario whose architecture involves murder, incest, the previously-mentioned abduction and plenty of manipulation through the withholding and dispatching of gratuitous sex. In spite of all this spice, it’s not all that interesting. A polar bear named Karup (wordplay!) falls in love with and marries a deer, but their relationship is poisoned by his lust for power and inclusion in the white-furred elite of the Line. He abandons his pregnant bride to die in a snowstorm (symbolism!) and goes on to become chief of Police. She survives and gives birth to two fraternal “twin” daughters, a white-furred polar bear and a vampy, heavily caricatured black deer (more symbolism! nonsensical biology!), but separated from her husband’s love, she wastes away into alcoholism. (An aside: if the case were to be made for Arctic Nation being in fact a hideous racist publication, the panel where we are made to leer at the deer’s degradation and death while her daughters stoically look on would be exhibit A. It’s skillful cartooning at its most rotten, twisted, and cruel). Moving on!

Karup’s daughters, now adults, set their revenge against him in motion, Jezebel (a Madonna/Whore cliché, goddamn with the symbolism) marries him, though their relationship is icily chaste. She meanwhile uses her sexual wiles to foment a power struggle within the Arctic Nation. Dinah meanwhile orchestrates the kidnapping of her own daughter to exploit standing rumors of Karup’s perverted predilections and set up a coup for his ambitious subordinate Huk. Just about everyone dies gruesomely, leaving Jezebel with her thin victory to cloak her grief and Blacksad to righteously brood over the twisted nature of the world.

Throughout, John does little actual detecting. He slinks throughout cross-sections of the Line and throws a couple of well-placed elbows when things get hot while the sisters’ plan falls into place on its own. He sneers at the endogenous old blue-bloods, the white tiger Oldsmith and his mentally-handicapped Cheetah son whose only purpose is as a tidy avatar of rebuke. He tussles with a few representative members of the Black Claws, two beasts of burden and a Rottweiler. Acting as a typically crass reduction of black resistance movements, the lead black toothy horse first intimidates Weekly to publish some piece of propaganda and then taunts John for his whiteness. “What happened to your snout, brother?” he asks before attempting to smear the white patch on Blacksad’s muzzle with motor oil. John responds by plugging his revolver into the assailant’s waistline. It’s no accident that this Claw is a horse – what with their prodigious members. You emasculate me, and I’ll emasculate you! Either way, John will have none of your Black Consciousnes, sir. Whiteness unbesmirched, John fumes in the car outside after the claws disappear into the foreground and from the story altogether. “You’re not going to publish that crap, are you?”
 

 
I might wonder similarly at Blacksad’s editors. Guarnido employs honed caricature, meticulous detail and a sophisticated color palate in service to a crude and unsophisticated pulp rag that exploits images of American racial and class struggle for cheap moralizing while rendering nothing of any value. Anthropomorphism is a give and take, and often works better when we allow the animal traits (themselves human projections) to reveal character i.e. Sam the Clever Fox or whatnot. Shoehorning human society onto one or several unsuspecting ecosystems and tossing them together in a fantastical New York is simplistic and prone to breakdown. The relationship between the arctic fox and the snowshoe hair is warped beyond any sense within the boundaries of Arctic Nation’s universe. Are they bonded as brothers in attempted domination of the vampire bat, the grizzly bear, nay any creature not possessing white fur, an arbitrary gesture of humanity draped over animal cyphers? We can use funny animals to talk about funny peoples, but my god we can do so much better than this turd.

Thomas Nast and The Art of Betrayal

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Earlier in this roundtable of hate Alex Buchet wrote about racism in European kids comics. Among other things, he pointed out that the skill of the rendering in this case compounded rather than excused the crappiness of the comics. Skill used in pursuit of vice is itself a vice, not a virtue.

I think this also arguably applies to the work of Thomas Nast. In particular, I’m thinking of a couple of Nast’s cartoons which were highlighted in James Loewen’s excellent book Lies My Teacher Told Me. Loewen first points to the illustration below.

The cartoon was titled “And Not This Man?” and was printed in Harper’s Weekly, August 5, 1865. As Loewen says, the cartoon “provides evidence of Nast’s idealism in the early days after the Civil War.” It also shows the strong memory of black’s recent service in the Union army, and links that service directly to their citizenship, their equality, and their suffrage rights.

Here is another Nast cartoon, from nine years later.

This one is titled “Colored Rule in a Reconstructed(?) State.” Again, it was printed in Harper’s Weekly; the date was March 14, 1874. As Loewen says, “Nast’s images of African Americans reflected the increasing racism of the times…. Such idiotic legislators could obviously be discounted as the white North contemplated giving up on black civil rights.”

I think it’s clear enough that the second cartoon is, on its own merits, a vicious and evil racist piece of shit, which uses blackface imagery and racist iconography to (as Loewen says) justify inequality and discrimination. This sort of imagery and language was the basis for 100 years of Jim Crow. Moreover, this vision of Reconstruction still undergirds neo-Confederate sentiment and racism to this day.

But the second cartoon is only more painful when compared to the first. Sometimes cartoonists are excused their use of racist caricature on the grounds that they couldn’t have known better at the time, or that everyone was doing it back then. But, clearly, Nast did know better, and was perfectly capable of drawing black people without using caricature when he felt like it. He became more racist over time, not less. His racism was a function of his era, but it was not a function of simply living in the past. Rather, he was racist specifically because he was capitulating to a society which was becoming more racist — and not only was he capitulating, but he was actively encouraging that transformation. America betrayed its ideals…and Nast betrayed his own right along with those of his country.

And if Nast was culpable in 1874…well, it’s hard to see how Winsor McCay wasn’t culpable in the early 20th century, or how Eisner wasn’t culpable even later. Racial idealism wasn’t foreign to America; artists who were sufficiently intelligent or brave or moral had an iconographic and ideological tradition to draw on if they wanted to present black people as human. Cartoonists who chose not too — like Nast in 1874, or McCay and Eisner later — or Crumb later than that — were making a choice.

Along the same lines, I think these images show that Nast’s formal powers were deliberately and maliciously perverted. He used his considerable skills (evident even in these crappy scans) to make caricature look natural and feasible, to ridicule the weak, and to portray the Reconstruction period as one of chaos and monstrosity. If he were a lesser artist, the drawing would be less effectively racist. But even beyond the utilitarian argument, the second drawing seems more evil because we know, from the first, that Nast is capable of seeing and depicting black people as human. His betrayal is more thorough because there is a talent and a vision there to betray.

These cartoons don’t exactly make me angry the way that the comics I dislike the most make me angry. I was really furious after reading In The Shadow of No Towers, for example — the pompousness, the tediousness, the stupidity, all seemed to be speaking directly to me in a way which I’m afraid I took personally. That second Nast cartoon, though, is so old, and so clearly ideologically repellant that looking at it I don’t feel individually assaulted — just depressed and a little despairing for my country. Still, while it’s not my least favorite, I think that the magnitude and influence of its betrayal puts it in the running for being the worst comic ever.
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