Posts tagged race
“ In a way, [Girls] matters more than the shows that came before it. When those shows were on the air, there was more diversity on screens all around, so we didn’t notice it as much, it didn’t seem as glaringly missing.”
# Where (My) Girls At? | The Hairpin
Jenna Wortham is right: I don’t care if Lena Dunham’s real-life friends are all white, but insofar as she’s Saying Something – and all the coverage about the platform HBO is giving her makes it clear she is doing just that – it’s disappointing/unacceptable that the cast is so white. That’s just not what life looks like, even for privileged twentysomething New Yorkers.
Especially for privileged twentysomething New Yorkers.
This video of a door-to-door salesman came across Stellar today, and I was dumbstruck: it’s an incredible barrage of race-based humor from start to finish. And, of course, it keeps his white customers “in stitches.”
Twenty-first century minstrelsy, completely unvarnished. For all that’s changed in the last hundred years, this one thing remains exactly the same, almost line for line. I don’t even know what else to say about it, other than to simply let it speak for itself at the moment.
(via ★interesting)
“ The very idea of a specifically French history museum is ideological, Mr. Offenstadt added. “To know about French Algeria you need to know about Algeria before France arrived there,” he explained. “If we need any history museum, it would be a world history museum, not a French history museum, to give us a real perspective on who we are, and what is France today.”
How can you not love this country?
“ It’s getting easier to talk about “white culture,” maybe even white politics, without knee-jerk sarcasm or, for that matter, knee-jerk sympathy. And it’s getting easier to imagine an American whiteness that is less exceptional, less dominant, less imperial, and more conspicuous, an ethnicity more like the others. In the Obama era—the Tea Party era—whiteness is easier to see than ever before, which means it’s less readily taken for granted. If invisibility is power, then whiteness is a little less powerful than it used to be.”
I think Kelefa Sanneh nails it here. Zadie Smith and – new to me – the fabulous Valarie Kaur both have spoken beautifully about how a flourishing of mixed/mulatta experience disrupts traditional constructions of race and racial privilege. In the latter half of the twentieth century (inaugurated, perhaps, by Loving v. Virginia), children began to be born who felt entirely at home in what had previously been distinct spheres of experience and self-understanding. I’ve been moved by the picture Kaur and Smith paint of what that coming of age offers our culture, but have been skeptical that it can really start to tear at the edges of white institutional supremacy in a real way.
I think Sanneh’s is a first answer. Whiteness is indeed defined by the unnamed-nature that allows it to take whatever form necessary. As the multivocal (Zadie’s term) and the shadow children (Valarie’s term) grow in number, they give the lie to the invisibility of whiteness. I love the Tea Party example because it’s so immediate. The more we are able to name – to make conspicuous – White America, the more difficult it becomes for whiteness to shapeshift as it did a century ago in an effort to maintain power. I don’t think this is the answer, if there were one, and I certainly don’t think white privilege is going anywhere anytime soon, but this passage from Sanneh’s solid piece really turned a light on for me.
# ‘Beyond the Pale’ in the New Yorker
“ When whites fantasize about becoming other races, it’s only fun if they can blithely ignore the fundamental experience of being an oppressed racial group. Which is that you are oppressed, and nobody will let you be a leader of anything.”
It feels good to know that Analee Newitz, who I loved to read as a teenager, really is effing awesome.
# When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like “Avatar”?
(via an article in today’s Times about the many critical responses to the movie.)
Fascinating: ‘Negro’ will make an appearance on the 2010 census form because there were large numbers of write-ins for the term in 2000, predominately among older Blacks.
[via Rosie]
I asked last month, “can the times really be changing, even if only a bit?” Cornel West, it should come as no surprise, has a mellifluous word on the subject, and he offered it to Stephen Colbert last week:
Thank God we’ve got white brothers and sisters who are a little bit less racist than they were in the past – that’s a beautiful thing. But it doesn’t mean that just because you’ve got a black face in a high place, racism has been eliminated. It just means we’ve made some progress – thats a beautiful thing.
Like Whac-a-Mole, I think I never feel satisfied with the dismantling of white supremacy because there’s always some other manifestation of it I hadn’t happened to notice before. I’ve been grappling with the complementary questions “What just happened?” and “Now what?” for a year come Wednesday morning. Graduate school hasn’t afforded much time to puzzle out an answer, and I’m no further along than I was on that glorious and hopeful morning after.
Say what you will about Brother Cornel, but he is a sort of cultural seer and must have a point here. All I meant to say was: this interview is hi-larious, much better than his first appearance last year. Check it out.
“ To me this film would be as awful and haunting as cell phone videos of real death, and seeing violence of this kind, even if it’s passed off as art, is a kind of voyeurism I just don’t want to participate in. Violence in communities of color must be discussed, but it will never be entertainment.”
Julianne Hing, on the new film ‘Precious,’ over at ColorLines.
Pastor Molly preached on this last year, acknowledging that although she consumes it and although media violence may not beget real violence, there is a “soul-shaking disconnect” between the “real violence we condemn and the fake violence we consume.” Violence in our lives is muffled, “by distance and by euphemisms,” and I wonder if ‘Precious,’ and its mass marketing isn’t more of the same.
How do we walk in the way? Molly didn’t have any answers, but she thinks about this topic a lot and I recommend her sermon to you.
Halloween is always an occasion to perpetrate some racist shit, and this year American Apparel seems to be quick out of the gates with some fabulous costume ideas. For a company known for its misogyny, I still have to say I’m a bit aghast. Really the brown girl as the “warrioress” for a made-up tribe? Black devils? Does this not raise any red flags anywhere between dressing, shooting, editing, and posting? No one? Anyone?
Didn’t think so. I won’t even get into the interracial “hip-hop couple,” whose costumes so accurately send up a community that shops at American Apparel.
