Renée Yoxon sent along a performance by Patina Miller singing Random Black Girl. It’s about how new musicals all just so happen to include a soulful, sassy, big-voiced, big-bottomed black girl in the ensemble (I’m looking at you, Glee).
My favorite part is at 3:45.
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
I argued earlier that Avatar was not a story about a heroic people, the Na’vi, but a white savior. I summarized:
Sully is not only a superior human being, he is also a superior Na’vi. After being briefly ostracized for his participation in the land grab, he tames the most violent creature in the sky, thereby proving himself to be the highest quality warrior imaginable per the Na’vi mythology. He gives them hope, works out their strategy, and is their most-valuable-weapon in the war. In the end, with all Na’vi contenders for leadership conveniently dead, he assumes the role of chief… and gets the-most-valuable-girl for good measure. Throngs of Na’vi bow to him.
Avatar was heralded as a break-through movie for its technological achievements, but its theme is tired. With the aim of pointing to how Avatar simply regurgitated a strong history of white, Western self-congratulation, Craig Saddlemire and Ryan Conrad re-mixed the movie with other similar movies, including Blind Side, Dancing with Wolves, Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai, Out of Africa, Stargate, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
They go through several features of these narratives: awe at the “native” landanimalspeople, the decision that they are helpless and doomed without White, Western intervention, the designation of a White savior who devotes him or herself to their rescue, native self-subordination, and more. It’s pretty powerful. Thanks to Lizzy Furth for sending the video along!
See also: Formula for a successful American movie.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
A few months ago Lisa wrote about bulletin boards posted in New York City that racialize the abortion debate by presenting it as a particular danger to African American children. The new anti-abortion film Gates of Hell takes this racialization a step further, presenting a future world in which the Black Power movement has begun a domestic terrorist movement against providers of abortion services for what they see as genocide against African Americans. Here’s the trailer, sent in by Dolores R.:
Partial transcript available at Feministing.
The official description, from the film’s website:
Black power. Abortion. Terrorism. “Prophetic fiction”. Three years in the making, “Gates of Hell” is a documentary from the year 2016 that chronicles the crimes of a band of domestic terrorists known as the Zulu 9. Finnish filmmaker Ani Juva travels to the United States to better understand the mysterious black power assassins, the bizarre eugenics conspiracy theory that drove them to commit extreme acts of violence and how America’s political landscape was transformed forever. Blending real history and real public figures with a fictitious (yet plausible) future, it is safe to say that you have never seen a film like “Gates of Hell”.
As yet, the film doesn’t have a distributor; they have an online call for funding to help screen the film. The production company behind it, Illuminati Pictures, is headed by Molotov Mitchell, a contributor to popular conservative website World Net Daily, which posted a promotional video about the movie.
In her earlier post, Lisa questions the apparent concern for African Americans expressed in this framing of the abortion debate, pointing out that in some cases they seem to blame Black women for having abortions and totally ignore the structural factors at play. In a similar vein, this anti-abortion film, while ostensibly sympathetic to the idea of African Americans fighting what they see as genocide, draws on the stereotype of African American men as particularly violent and willing to kill, even while presenting them as possibly justified in this case.
And over at Feministing, Vanessa pointed out that we might question Molotov Mitchell’s genuine concern for oppressed groups given a video he appeared in back in 2009 supported Uganda’s anti-gay bill, which allowed the death penalty for repeat offenders:
As Lisa pointed out, there are very good reasons to be concerned about African American women’s reproductive freedom and the structural inequalities that might push them into making decisions about whether or not to end a pregnancy regardless of their personal preferences. But some of these anti-abortion messages presenting abortion as genocide seem to use racialization as a convenient tool that has little to do with more widespread concern about racial (or other forms of) inequality, discrimination, and even violence more broadly.
Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.
Is a university admissions office the same as the basketball team? Should selecting an entire student body for the college be like selecting players for the varsity?
Remember that kid at UC Merced, the one who argued that the graduated income tax was like redistributing GPA points? He found students who supported a graduated income tax and programs for the poor but who wouldn’t sign his petition to redistribute GPA points from the A students to those with lower GPAs. None of the students could articulate, on the spot, their reasons for not signing the GPA petition (assuming that he didn’t edit out any who did offer a reasonable explanation). (My earlier post on it is here.)
He’s baaaack. This time he’s asking students to sign a petition for affirmative action in sports – specifically to give preference to whites trying out for the team. Get it? If you support affirmative action in college admissions but not in sports, you’re a hypocrite. As before, students support one use of race preference but not the other, and as before none can give a convincing reason. The students all say, “It’s different,” but they can’t explain why.*
(To save time, I’ve set the video to start near the end – most students say the same thing. To see the whole thing, just drag the slider back to 0:00.)
Nyahh, nyahh – you’re for preferences for blacks where they’re a minority but not for whites where they are the minority. You’re a hypocrite.** Either that, or your thinking has been muddled by liberal ideas, which is pretty much the same thing, isn’t it?
The video concludes with the dictum that college admissions and sports should be the same. “Race-based preferences are wrong.” Ah, moral clarity.
Is college really the same as a sports team? They are certainly different in their consequences. If you’re a student now, in the coming years when you apply for a job, will HR ask you if you played varsity? Maybe. But unless the job you’re applying for is power forward, your answer won’t matter very much. But HR will absolutely want to know if you have a college degree. And your answer will matter. A lot.
Sports and school are different in another important way. Schools seek out minorities more for the sake of campus diversity than for the benefit of individuals. Yale probably gives preference to applicants from Montana or Mauritania over those form Manhattan. (Yale also might give preference to a power foward if the team this year is short of guys who can work the low post.) The purpose of this admissions policy is not to benefit Montanans (or power forwards) but to provide other students with the experience of living with a diversity of people (and to provide the basketball team with the right diversity of skills).
That same goal of demographic diversity does not apply to the competitive teams or the glee club or orchestra for that matter because those groups have a much more narrowly defined task. It’s that difference in purpose, rather than the difference in which race gets helped, that underlies the responses in the video. Take those same liberal students who support admissions policies that bring more blacks to campus; ask then if they would also support race-based preferences to get more blacks into crew, the glee club, or the chess team. I’m sure they would say no. As in the actual video, they would probably be unable to explain why giving preference to African Americans is acceptable in admissions but not activities.
They’ll say that the two are different, even though they can’t immediately explain why. Does that make them hypocrites, natural or un-?
The next time someone shoves a microphone in your face and asks for a justification for some distinction you make, smile at the camera and say, “As Michael Polany wrote in The Tacit Dimension, ‘we know more than we can tell,’ an insight that Richard Nisbett later developed with much social science evidence in his book Knowing More than We Can Tell.” See if you make it into the version that gets posted on YouTube, or into Robin Hanson’s blog.**
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*I had assumed that the petitioner and his camera people were students at Merced. But in this new video, he’s at UCR.
** As with the previous video, Robin Hanson, on whose blog Overcoming Bias I found both of these, files the students’ attitudes in the folder marked “natural hypocrisy.”
Dolores R. sent in a story at about a recently-released internet campaign ad in the CA-36 special election that Talking Points Memo has called “Willie Horton on steroids,” referring to the infamous racial-fear-mongering ad released by George H.W. Bush in the 1988 presidential campaign. The CA-36 ad was released by a new super-PAC (able to raise unlimited funds), Turn Right USA. (The guy who produced it also produced a striking ad for a candidate for Alabama Agriculture Commissioner in 2010.) It attacks Democratic candidate Janice Hahn over her support for gang intervention programs. And it’s a doozy. It is definitely NSFW:
Aside from the just over-the-top racist and sexist nature of the ad, it’s also interesting because of the issues it brings up about technology and democratization of ad campaign materials. Turn Right USA isn’t directly linked to or affiliated with the campaign of Hahn’s Republican rival in the race, Craig Huey. Huey’s campaign has reacted with dismay, condemning the content and distancing themselves from it. They clearly fear a backlash that will hurt Huey’s chances (and he’s already the underdog in the race). And yet, they didn’t create the ad, there’s no evidence that I’ve seen that they worked with Turn Right USA, and they don’t have any ability to take it down or symbolically fire the producer to show how little they think of it. We saw a similar situation recently in Florida, with a mailer apparently intended to discredit a candidate who had nothing to do with it.
While non-campaign-funded attack ads clearly helps candidates in a lot of situations (for instance, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads against John Kerry in 2004), they can also hurt the candidate they’re meant to help. Campaigns can’t control their content and they can’t retract them if they sense a public backlash. Voters may blame candidates for content they didn’t approve and can’t fix. And the increasing number of third-party advocacy groups, combined with the ability to distribute materials widely over the internet instead of buying TV time, seems likely to increase the danger to campaigns of these types of ads ostensibly meant to “support” them.
A few weeks back, Forbes named Pittsburgh as the most livable city in the U.S. The description of the city talks about its “art scene, job prospects, safety and affordability,” and presents a picture of Pittsburgh as a city that has rebounded from both its industrial past and the current economic crisis to become a cultural and intellectual hotspot:
Forbes ranked cities based on unemployment, rates of income growth in the past 5 years, crime rates, cost of living, and cultural/artistic opportunities (according to Sperling’s Best Places Arts & Leisure Index). The final score is an average of the different elements, each of which are weighted equally, though I can’t help but think a lot of people might think some of those factors are more important in how they evaluate a location than others. Also, I have some reservations about rankings from Sperling’s Best Places, as they have a “manliest cities” ranking commissioned by Combos snacks that includes “sales of salty snacks/crackers” and deductions for “emasculating” criteria like sushi restaurants.
But I digress. As it turns out, this glowing report is only part of the story of Pittsburgh. The city also tops the charts in terms of African American poverty. African Americans in the region haven’t benefited from the economic turnaround Forbes discussed.
In light of this fact, Jasiri X, a rapper from Pittsburgh, wrote “America’s Most Livable City.” In the song (lyrics here) and video he questions who, exactly, the city is livable for, contrasting the image portrayed in the Forbes article with the region’s neglected and under-developed African American neighborhoods:
There are also three videos featuring Jasiri X interviewing residents of poor neighborhoods. All are worth a watch, but I think the best is the 2nd segment. A local resident discusses how what he sees as exaggerated media reports of the crime and danger in some areas — some created by well-meaning people trying to bring attention to the needs of the community by, he believes, playing up the bad aspects — served to justify abandoning Black neighborhoods in desperate need of economic opportunities:
For another discussion of very different experiences of economic crisis and recovery, see our guest post about Forbes ranking Stockton, CA, as the most miserable city in the U.S.
Thanks to Abby Kinchy for the link.
In response to my post yesterday about tourism ads presenting local (often, though not always, non-White) residents of vacation hotspots as tourist attractions and amenities for relatively privileged travelers to enjoy, Lauren J. sent in a Heineken ad that pokes fun at the expectations visitors to Jamaica often have about how Jamaicans would act, and how local residents may feel obliged to play along and give tourists (with their cash) the “authentic” experience they desire:
We have posted in the past about non-Whites being used as props in tourism and travel ads, there for the enjoyment and convenience of tourists, like other tourist attractions. Rhiannon J. sent in another excellent example of the residents of vacation areas being treated like just another amenity. In this ad for Travelocity, a White family enthuses about the many pleasures of their vacation spot — including the sun, the sand…and “the Rodrigo”:
As Rhiannon pointed out, the family discusses Rodrigo, who apparently loves carrying fruits for White tourists, the way you might discuss a stray dog.
UPDATE: Reader Chorda correctly points out that, while my use of race as the dividing point made sense when viewing these ads as a group, in this particular case “ethnicity” would probably be a more appropriate term to use.
