A Historical Guide To Hipster Racism
…There is absolutely no difference between Blackface Jesus and the blackface minstrel performers so popular at the turn of the century. It’s just as offensive as Mickey Rooney’s yellowface getup as Mr. Yunioshi in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
White people like “Blackface Jesus” think that they have somehow “transcended” racism. Maybe because they hang out with black people, have black friends, or even fuck [excuse my French] black men or women, that means that they couldn’t possibly subscribe to the same racist notions as did the less open-minded previous generations. Sorry to disappoint, fellas, but you guys grew up to be EXACTLY like them.
These two posts led to the internet’s first documented use of the term “hipster racism,” in Carmen’s 2007 piece “The 10 biggest race and pop culture trends of 2006: Part 1 of 3.” For an in-depth discussion of the term, see s.e. smith’s 2009 article: “Hipster Racism” at meloukhia.net, and for a variation on the theme, “Hipster Ableism” at FFWD, also from 2009.
2. “Wes Anderson: The Original Heartbreaker,” Thea Lim (2007)
If I could go back in time, I would rename this post “Wes Anderson: The Original Hipster Racist.” This one has a special place in my heart because it’s how I got hooked up with Racialicious. An excerpt:
Characters of colour in Wes Anderson’s films are always caricatures, hilariously exotic. Anderson uses “race as a novelty”, says salon.com, “suggesting an assertively white-kid view of the world.” …[With Pagoda in Bottle Rocket and The Royal Tennenbaums, and with the Filipino pirates in The Life Aquatic] Anderson also uses Asian cultures to demonstrate just how educated and well-travelled he is. It’s like the movie equivalent of “Some of my best friends are Laotian” and “I went backpacking in Vietnam.” The master of in-joke filmmaking, Anderson’s brown characters are like an inside joke for urban hipsters who’ve visited Little India a few times.
…But here’s the thing about Wes Anderson: he positions himself as an outsider, and his protagonists are always outsiders, painfully awkward and deeply deficient in social skills but also desperately seeking love (and you will notice that his white characters are capable of longing for love in a much more profound way than his characters of colour will ever acheive). But at the end of the day, what is so outsider about Wes? He’s an extremely succesful, wealthy, white dude. That’s not to say that rich white dudes can’t ever feel alienated. But to position yourself as an outsider, while making art that ensures that people of colour are truly outside, is obscenely fake.
3. “The New Yorker and Hipster Racism,” Andrea Plaid (2008)
Another milestone in Racialicious history–this one is from when Andrea was still credited as a Guest Contributor. Here our favourite Associate Editor takes down the New Yorker for its now-famous cartoon of Barack and Michelle as fist-bumping, Osama-loving terrorists:
Humph, you gotta love hipster racism.
I define hipster racism (I’m borrowing the phrase from Carmen Van Kerckhove) as ideas, speech, and action meant to denigrate another’s person race or ethnicity under the guise of being urbane, witty (meaning “ironic” nowadays), educated, liberal, and/or trendy. This racist and sexist balderdash that’s the New Yorker cover fits squarely into that definition
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