race/ethnicity

Cross posted at Racialicious.

In many places in the midwest the American Indian is very present, but in other places in the U.S., like in California, Disney’s Pocahontas is as close as we get to “Indians.”  The idea that American Indians are gone comes, in part, from the ubiquitous representation of them with feathers, buckskins, and moccasins. These anachronisms are everywhere (see, for example, here, here, here, here, and here).

American Indians are as modern as the rest of us, why are representations of American Indians, as they live today, so unusual?  And what effect might that have on the psyche of American Indian people?

Via PostSecret.

NEW!  One of the commenters at Racialicious pointed us to a cartoon that illustrates how anachronistic images of American Indians may shape our ideas of what they are like:

I found this two page article in a travel magazine aimed at extremely, excessively, egregiously rich people. There is a long history of exploration tourism in which locals are positioned as subservient–see, for example, this colonial era travel poster–and this history immediately came to mind when I saw these two pages.

There is nothing overt here, but I did notice that the author tells us the name of the elephant, but not the guide.  It may not seem like a big thing, but this erasure of the African guides as subjects is troubling to me given the history.  Text below the images.

Text:

We were about 100 feet from a herd of Cape buffalo. They stood perfectly still, their curly horns giving them a comical George Washington-wig look. Even though they are one of the deadliest of the big six animals, from where we stood they looked almost cuddly. My elephant handler stayed just long enough for me to get several great photos before urging Lundi, the elephant we were riding, to move forward. My guide saw several giraffes up ahead and wanted to get there before they galloped away.

This graph shows the total number of people allowed into the U.S. under refugee status since 1983, by region of the world:

Here is the key to the numbers on the graph (found here):

*Refers to fiscal years with the exception of 2004, for which data ends in June.
1. Large Cuban and Indochinese waves of refugees, prior to 1983
2a. Cold War period, Glastnost/Perestroika, 1985-1991
2b. Soviet Union dismantled, December 1991
3a. Balkans period: Break-up of Yugoslavia, 1992
3b. Balkans period: Expulsions of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, 1998
4. Civil conflict period: Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, Ethiopia, late 1990s-present
5. Terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001
Authors’ tabulation of ORR data.

This Australian commercial for Toyota Corolla (found here) includes a homogenous, racialized out-group.  More after the video:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ckb-wUHj9WU[/youtube]

The term “out-group homogeneity” refers to the way in which members of an in-group tend to overestimate the extent to which members of an out-group are all alike.  I suppose we don’t know what good kitty’s friends look like (do they all look exactly like him?), but we certainly have the presentation of an out-group that is both categorically different from good kitty and homogeneously so.

I would also like to suggest that that out-group is racialized.  They didn’t use just any kind of cat to represent bad kitties, but a dark-colored cat.   (If I know my cats, the bad “guys” in this video are Russian Blues.)

Michael T. sent in an observation about the Yes on Proposition 8 website, which (successfully) aimed at amending the California constitution to disallow gay marriage.  Along the top of the screen, the four different images below accompanied the slogan “Restoring Marriage & Protecting California Children.”  These marriages, Michael surmises, must be the ones that need protecting.   In addition to reproducing heteronormativity and childbearing, notice that the images are self-consciously diverse, but represent all marriages as within race.

Thanks Michael!

Recently I saw this wood sign for sale in a catalog (available here, if you really want one):

Looking around online I found this t-shirt here, which combines the “My Indian name is” element with a twist on “kicks like a girl”:

I have seen things like this before, and they always irritate me (and I blame the movie “Dances with Wolves” for the whole “Indian names always follow the pattern ‘Present-Tense Singular Verb + With + Noun'” idea). There’s an element of othering here–the idea that American Indian names are funny or weird. Part of what I think is considered funny is that the names are presumably tied to actual activities or things (for example, Mankiller or Redbird). Of course, many European surnames originated the same way (for instance, “Smith” was a surname often used to indicate the person was a blacksmith, silversmith, etc.), but they now hold the status of “normal” surnames that are unremarkable (although Smith has become somewhat remarkable as a symbol of White non-ethnic normality, such that it is often used in movies and TV shows as an alias by spies and others wishing to avoid attention).

That website led me to this one, where there were lots of “Native American” t-shirts. As far as I can tell, it’s not a Native-owned company, it’s just a bunch of shirts with Native people or themes on them. Some, like these, associate American Indians with animals:

Whereas the t-shirts with men on them tend to show them in battle or hunting, those with women generally have romanticized, sometimes vaguely sexualized images. I noticed several have a common element: the upturned face, often with closed eyes, as well as stereotypically “Caucasian” features, except with darker skin and hair. This one is called “Purity”:

You might use these in a discussion of representations of Native Americans, particularly how they continue to be worn as symbols by other groups. The things associated with American Indians–wildlife (particularly wolves), nature, and the warrior tradition–tend to romanticize their connection to the natural environment and even portray them as part of nature themselves, able to communicate with the other “wild things.”

It’s a weird double bind: on the one hand, presumably American Indians are more “noble” than other groups–surely they wouldn’t have driven wolves, bald eagles, and bison to the verge of extinction, given their close connection to nature. But at the same time, they are depicted as relics of the past, brave fighters from the glory days. American Indians who drive cars and wear t-shirts and blue jeans (and have last names like Smith and Thomas) don’t have a place in our romanticized images of Native groups.

NEW! D. Cho sent in three more t-shirts that draw on Native American icons or images. Here is Spirit Happy Fox:

Chief Many Feathers:

How the West Was Fun:

Between 1864 and 1923, there were 14 forced county-wide expulsions of African Americans (alongside many town expulsions).  The figure below shows the percentage of African Americans living in Vermillion County, Indiana in the years before and after an expulsion.

Click here for an interactive website with information about these expulsions made by the Austin American Statesman newspaper.  See also our post about “Sundown Towns,” which kept Blacks out by making it illegal for them to be there after sundown.

Via Jose at Thick Culture.

Anneliese W. sent us this Australian ad campaign for Noble Rise bread.  The claim is that other breads are “bland” and that Noble Rise bread is not.  To make the claim, the advertisements use Black people to signify spice and flavor.  Anneliese writes:

…what really struck me about this campaign is the use of coloured bodies to represent excitement, flavour and coolness. The slogan for the campaign is something like “take a stand against bland” – bland being ‘normal’ and everyday, and in some ads the obvious unspoken is that blandness is white.  Framing blackness as the opposite of ‘bland’ is just another example of the ‘other-ing’ of black bodies, and re-enforcing the idea that white western culture is ‘bland’ or non-existent.

[youtube]http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=aXfxKJnR54Q[/youtube]

[youtube]http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=xpO3eF7wrC8[/youtube]

[youtube]http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=cwIOM3BzjOM[/youtube]

[youtube]http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=h3SSPQgm2jA[/youtube]

I offer several more examples of this phenonemon here.