By Guest Contributor Julia Caron

Florence + the Machine released the latest video this past Friday, for “No Light No Light,” the third single from their new album Ceremonials. Since frontwoman Florence Welch is known for her theatrical music video productions, the clip was eagerly awaited by her fans.

The video, directed by Iceland-based duo Arni & Kinski, has already garnered over 800,000 views on Youtube, in addition to generating countless responses over the images in the video. It’s actually slightly astounding how much racist imagery they managed to pack into just four minutes and 15 seconds.

You can watch the video for yourself to get your own interpretation, but if you can’t watch it for whatever reason here’s a brief summary: Welch, a thin white red-haired British woman, is the focal point, but at various points, we see what seems to be an Asian man in blackface, misreprentations of the voodoo religion (which of course inflicts harm on the poor white woman). The overall plot of the video seems to be of a white woman pursued by “darkness,” represented by the aforementioned man in blackface, who ends up falling into “whiteness,” represented by a choir of young white boys in a church. Oh yes, that old trope. Black = evil, white = good. Echoes of British religious imperialism and its violent history of colonization abound. You get the picture.

The video has already attracted criticism from around the blogosphere, and Jezebel’s Dodai Stewart mapped out why the representaion of the Voodoo religion in the music video is not only negative, but factually incorrect:

Haitian Vodou is a religion that is very misunderstood. Slaves were brought to the Caribbean against their will and forbidden to practice their traditional African religions as well as forced to convert to the religion of their masters. The Bond movie/Eurocentric/Americanized viewpoint presents Vodou as an evil, primitive version of witchcraft. But it’s a religion like any other, with a moral code, gods and goddesses. Many ceremonies deal with protection from evil spirits.

In addition, the “voodoo doll” itself has been misconstrued. In Haiti, it was traditional to nail small handmade puppets or dolls to trees near graveyards; these small figures were meant to act as messengers to the spirit world, and contact dead loved ones. It’s safe to imagine that European folks didn’t understand this — and assumed an evil intent behind a doll with nails in its body.”

On the other hand, all sorts of defenses and excuses are being pulled out of the hat to try and label this music video as anything other than what it is: racist. Glorifying the white female central character as representing goodness, all while vilifying the evil dark skinned heathen Other. The number of times this has been done in film date back to one of the very first blockbusters, D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, and continue on until today with this latest incarnation. But in this age of “colour-blindness” and “post-racial” talk, we confront a fairly new beast: vehement denial.

That’s where a large part of the problem with the discussions around this music video lie – the desire to talk about anything other than race. Fans of Welch’s have offered their own denials, including:

•  ”it’s not blackface, he’s green!”
• “It’s not blackface, people in Britain don’t know about blackface.”
• “It’s not blackface, it’s a representation of darkness.”

Even fans who will readily agree that this music video is “symbolic” and uses darkness (in the shape of a, lest we forget, a human being, an Asian man in blackface who practices voodoo and chases Welch) to represent “evil” and whiteness to represent “good” will still find ways to vehemently deny it is racist. “Maybe it looks like it could be racist, but it didn’t mean to be!” they say. When it comes to confronting the argument of whether or not the video was “intentionally” racist, I’ll point to  minh-ha t. pham’s response for Threadbared to Crystal Renn’s yellowface photoshoot, where she explains:

Racism is so deeply entrenched and pervasive in many societies that everyday racism is often unintentional. On the other hand, what is always intentional is anti-racism. The struggle against racism resists the pervasive ideologies and practices that explicitly and invisibly structure our daily lives (albeit in very different ways that are stratified by race, gender, class, and sexuality). Anti-racism requires intentionality because it’s an act of conscience.

What Pham hits on there is the need to first acknowledge we live in a world where racism and white privilege exist. In the end, the excuses over why “No Light, No Light” is not racist are pointless to entertain if you can’t even begin to acknowledge that. You’d have to live in a very sheltered world to believe that this video is anything other than a giant platter of rehashed racist imagery.

Now, one thing I’m surprised others have not raised in their criticisms of the “No Light, No Light” music video is that this isn’t the first time Welch has been criticized for being “culturally insensitive,” to put it mildly. Her other music videos could hardly be excused as perfect, either.

A quick look at “Dog Days Are Over” (which has over 20 million views on Youtube) features a mishmash of unidentified Othered cultures in the background, such as women in head scarves banging on drums, an all-black gospel choir with silver foreheads, and two blue women (yes, blue). The already very light-skinned Welch is painted an even whiter white, and is featured prominently in the foreground leading the masses of ambiguously ethnic backup dancers in a frenetic crescendo:

At the end of the video, they all explode into bursts of bright colours, leaving the “wild” Welch draped in a furry tattered garment, waving a flag.

What these music videos show is the amount of misrepresentations around race that many (white) artists are able to use, all under the guise of “art.” It happens in fashion photoshoots, music videos, films, books, etc on more occasions than one could possibly count. While it happens all the time, that does not make it any more defensible. And being a fan of an artist who makes a misstep and ends up creating something racist, intentionally or not, does not oblige you to running to their defense. Being a card-carrying fan of an artist or musician does not make them infallible.

Discussions about whether or not Welch is personally responsible for this racist music video have cropped up. When you break it down and imagine the number of people who were behind the storyboarding, choreographing, casting and creative direction around this video, it is slightly astounding that not one person raised concerns about how problematic this video is. Many petitions have cropped up, asking that “be pulled, edited, or reshot and she and her label should issue a sincere apology.” In putting forth this music video attached to her album and her persona, Welch has given it her unspoken seal of approval. In this case, she has also simultaneously alienated any number of people of colour and critical folks in her fanbase.

We’ll probably be waiting with bated breath, as Welch nor her label have responded to the public outcry so far.

In the end, the most important and all too often ignored factor in the case of this racist music video is just that: calling it racist. The fact that in 2011, a top-selling young creative artist has released a music video like this one means we still need to have conversations about racism, stereotypes, blackface, and impact that images in music videos like these ones have. Let’s take this opportunity to talk about how to hold artists, including pop stars, accountable for propagating racist imagery. Let’s talk about why blackface is always wrong, about why reductive stereotypical misrepresentations of people of colour are harmful and need to be confronted, and why we still have to unlearn colonial histories and legacies.

Dear Person that decided to dress up as an Indian for Halloween,

I was going to write you an eloquent and well-reasoned post today about all the reasons why it’s not ok to dress up as a Native person for Halloween–talk about the history of“playing Indian” in our country, point to the dangers of stereotyping and placing of Native peoples as mythical, historical creatures, give you some articles to read, hope that I could change your mind by dazzling you with my wit and reason–but I can’t. I can’t, because I know you won’t listen, and I’m getting so tired of trying to get through to you.

I just read the comments on this post at Bitch Magazine, a conversation replicated all over the internet when people of color are trying to make a plea to not dress up as racist characters on Halloween. I felt my chest tighten and tears well up in my eyes, because even with Kjerstin’s well researched and well cited post, people like you are so caught up in their own privilege, they can’t see how much this affects and hurts their classmates, neighbors and friends.

I already know how our conversation would go. I’ll ask you to please not dress up as a bastardized version of my culture for Halloween, and you’ll reply that it’s “just for fun” and I should “get over it.” You’ll tell me that you “weren’t doing it to be offensive” and that “everyone knows real Native Americans don’t dress like this.” You’ll say that you have a “right” to dress up as “whatever you damn well please.” You’ll remind me about how you’re “Irish” and the “Irish we’re oppressed too.” Or you’ll say you’re “German”, and you “don’t get offended by people in Lederhosen.”

But you don’t understand what it feels like to be me. I am a Native person. You are (most likely) a white person. You walk through life everyday never having the fear of someone mis-representing your people and your culture. You don’t have to worry about the vast majority of your people living in poverty, struggling with alcoholism, domestic violence, hunger, and unemployment caused by 500+ years of colonialism and federal policies aimed at erasing your existence. You don’t walk through life everyday feeling invisible, because the only images the public sees of you are fictionalized stereotypes that don’t represent who you are at all. You don’t know what it’s like to care about something so deeply and know at your core that it’s so wrong, and have others in positions of power dismiss you like you’re some sort of over-sensitive freak.

You are in a position of power. You might not know it, but you are. Simply because of the color of your skin, you have been afforded opportunities and privilege, because our country was built on a foundation of white supremacy. That’s probably a concept that’s too much for you to handle right now, when all you wanted to do was dress up as a PocaHottie for Halloween, but it’s true.

I am not in a position of power. Native people are not in positions of power. By dressing up as a fake Indian, you are asserting your power over us, and continuing to oppress us. That should worry you.

But don’t tell me that you’re oppressed too, or don’t you dare come back and tell me your “great grandmother was a Cherokee Princess” and that somehow makes it ok. Do you live in a system that is actively taking your children away without just cause? Do you have to look at the TV on weekends and see sports teams with mascots named after racial slurs of your people? I doubt it.

Last night I sat with a group of Native undergraduates to discuss their thoughts and ideas about the costume issue, and hearing the comments they face on a daily basis broke my heart. They take the time each year to send out an email called “We are not a costume” to the undergraduate student body–an email that has become known as the “whiny newsletter” to their entitled classmates. They take the time to educate and put themselves out there, only to be shot down by those that refuse to think critically about their choices.Your choices are adversely affecting their college experiences, and that’s hard for me to take without a fight.

The most frustrating part to me is, there are so many other things you can dress up as for Halloween. You can be a freaking sexy scrabble board for goodness sake. But why does your fun have to come at the expense of my well-being? Is your night of drunken revelry really worth subjugating an entire group of people? I just can’t understand, how after hearing, first-hand, that your choice is hurtful to another human being, you’re able to continue to celebrate with your braids and plastic tomahawk.

So I know you probably didn’t even read this letter, I know you’ve probably already bought and paid for your Indian costume, and that this weekend you’ll be sucking down jungle juice from a red solo cup as your feathers wilt and warpaint runs. I know you’re going to scoff at my over-sensitivity. But I’m telling you, from the bottom of my heart, that you’re hurting me. And I would hope that would be enough.

Wado,

Adrienne K.

PS- I wonder if you saw these posters? Because I think they illustrate my point really well.

UPDATE 10/27: Have a look at some of the costumes I’m talking about. I think it makes my arguments a lot clearer.

Earlier:
But Why Can’t I Wear a Hipster Headdress?
Nudie Neon Indians and the Sexualiztion of Indian Women
A Cowboys and Indians Party is just as bad as a Blackface Party 
Paris Hilton as a Sexy Indian: The Halloween Fallout Begins (includes lots of links about the costume issue)
Mid-Week Motivation: I am not your costume

Not long ago I had the pleasure of seeing a documentary released by California Newsreel entitled Blacking Up: Hip-Hop’s Remix of Race and Identity by filmmaker Robert Clift. The film opens by taking us on a kind of behind-the-scenes look at white american suburban culture in a way that mass media rarely does.

We see high school dance team routines that include bandanas and hip-hop-inspired choreography. We’re introduced to white people who have dealt with harassment from their white peers for allegedly  “acting” black. We hear from personalities of different occupations and opinions (from Paul Mooney to Russell Simmons) concerning their thoughts on race in hip-hop and the ways in which white participation plays into the racial history of music in America. It is basically an entertaining and very well-thought-out exploration of the racial, residential and historical aspects that influence how we begin to consider the complex and ever-enduring question of where to “draw lines” when discussing white enjoyment and/or consumption of black cultures.

One of the things that stood out to me about the documentary was that it historicizes white involvement in hip-hop in a way that many critics and commentators fail to do. White people have long had a fascination with black people, hence the whole “blackface” thing, and all of its earlier and later, sometimes-not-so-subtle manifestations. There was Amos ‘n’ Andy and Al Jolson, Elvis Presley and Benny Goodman — people who are not only well-known in their fields but even hold titles of “king,” for example, amongst a host of talented performers and in some cases, originators, of their styles. At one point in the doc, Amiri Baraka recites what he calls a “loku” that is something along the lines of, “If Elvis Presley is King, who is James Brown? God?”

It was only apt that I happened to see this documentary shortly before discovering this video of two girls imitating rapper Lil B’s video for “I Cook”. (For the Record, I found this while I was on Lil B’s website, which I frankly had no business being on and have henceforth concluded is brake fluid for brain cells. But I was there because this guy had a sold out show at the Highline Ballroom a few weeks ago and has been gaining a (cult-like) following with his puzzling balance of over-the-top vulgarity and endearing sincerity.) On his site, the rapper encourages people to submit videos of themselves remaking his videos. And while this can disguise itself as a harmless thing, there is something to be said about a figure such as Lil B, a black male rapper to say the least, encouraging people to perform him.

Upon being appalled at a couple of the Lil B fan videos — and since my very exciting meditation on white people and the blues —I began to reflect on these matters of white people and hip-hop, white people and the blues, white people and blackness. And it has crossed my mind that these matters, like many, have a lot to do with privilege and entitlement — neither of which is generally a conscious influence, but the fact is white people (at large) have the option to pick from identities.

As the black female lead said to her white lover in Memphis: A New Musical, “You can go back to being white whenever you want to.” And even the implication that one ever “leaves” their whiteness is a bit misleading, because truly, skin privilege is something that one cannot dress/sing/dreadlock/punk out of (although there are surely ways to consciously address it and perhaps even eschew it). In the documentary, there is a clip where pop singer Empire Isis, a blonde-haired girl with dreadlocks, laments on the rigidity of identity. She stresses how people always want things to fit into a box. The amusing thing is, the “box” she refers to hardly applies to her with the same strictness and consequences that it does Other people. She enjoys a kind of fluidity that comes with power: rebellion within a privileged class. Hippies, punks and “wiggers” all jiving on a thin line over the safety net of whiteness.

Then there is the entitlement,  which reveals itself in very profound ways. As a friend pointed out to me during a discussion about blues music, white people have a history of wanting to be able to enjoy certain parts of folks’ artistic and cultural production, while being reluctant (or downright unwilling) to engage other parts of their experiences. For example, many people may be comfortable buying certain CDs or hanging certain posters on their walls — typically because they feel a genuine connection to the expression — but are unlikely to attend a speech by a black intellectual or to have read works by black writers.

It’s an odd (and virtually impossible) endeavor to divorce a people’s cultural production from their *culture*, including their intellectual production, and the social and political climates that cradle it. And in a place where all of us are used to consuming art, people have a really huge problem with the notion that some art *may* not be produced for “public” (meaning their own) consumption. And what’s more, people are oftentimes adamantly adverse to educating themselves about the intellectual or political climates that shape the art they so easily enjoy.

This all to say that when we are looking at something as multidimensional as white involvement with black music, there are many, many particulars to ponder, raise eyebrows at, and in some cases, outright detest. Things like privilege and entitlement, which I consider two of the most common inhibitors to people understanding race, racism and their role in things, are just a couple of forces to keep in mind when contemplating the questions Clift poses and so carefully inspects in his illuminating film: When is it adoration and when is it mockery? What’s individuality and what’s stereotype? When is it fun, and when is it “blacking up“?

By Arturo R. García

As Angry Asian Man noted this week, the images of Warner Oland playing Charlie Chan are associated with a side of Hollywood’s “Golden Age” it would prefer nobody remember. Oland, who played Chan in was arguably the face of Yellowface in the 1930′s, playing not only the “Honorable Detective,” but Fu Manchu in another film series. But a forthcoming book has renewed interest in both the character and the men who brought him to both the printed page and the silver screen.

Yunte Huang’s Charlie Chan: The Untold History of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History tells the story of Chang Apana, a detective with the Honolulu Police Department who was the inspiration for Chan. As detailed in a review of the book by The New Yorker, Apana – son of a Chinese immigrant father and a native Hawaiian mother – was allegedly “discovered” in 1924, when novelist Earl Derr Biggers noticed his name in an arrest record in a Honolulu newspaper. Within two years after Chan’s first appearance, Huang writes, Chang was being called “Charlie Chan” around Honolulu. But the detective’s job went beyond the usual police beat:

One of Chang’s jobs was to capture lepers, for forced transport to a leper colony on the island of Molokai, to die. Hawaiians called leprosy mai pake, “Chinese sickness,” because it came to the islands in the eighteen-thirties, and appeared to have arrived with the Chinese. Chang got that scar above his right eye while trying to capture a Japanese man who had contracted leprosy and who, armed with a sickle, refused to be sent to Molokai, on a journey over what came to be called the Bridge of Sighs.

As the Chan book series became successful, movie adaptations were inevitable. Yet Chang, according to his nephew, Walter Chang, never profited from serving as the inspiration for the character, though Biggers did allegedly make at least one effort, trying to get Chang a part in a Chan film, which would have paid 500 dollars. Chang refused.

The book also explores the life stories of both Oland, who played Chan in 16 films before passing away in 1937, and Huang, who joked to The New York Times that he has “an alphabetic destiny,” which began unfolding with his journey to the U.S. from his native China: “I was pretty desperate to get out of the country,” he said. “And the University of Alabama was the first school I looked up.”

In revealing the history behind Charlie Chan, though, Huang’s book might revive interest in another character commonly associated with stereotypes, Fu Manchu, who was also played by Oland in four films. The Times article mentions that in a meeting with a Chinese publisher over possibly reviving Chan in that country, the publisher expressed more interest in a Fu Manchu project. And Phillip from You Offend Me, You Offend My Family offers up a scenario where both characters can return to the silver screen in modern times – but without Yellowface:

We all know that China is the emerging superpower of our time and that could provide the foundation of the story. Charlie Chan (a.k.a. Chow Yun Fat) is a modern Chinese detective using all the advanced technology and skills at his disposal to solve his cases while trying to mend his estranged relationship with his Chinese American son. Fu Manchu (a.k.a. Ken Watanabe — yes, I know he’s Japanese but he’d be perfect) is the head of a powerful Chinese corporation out to use his vast resources to destroy the Western civilization (while mourning the murder of his son by an American corporate rival which sets his plan for vengeance in motion) and the only person who can stop him is, of course, Charlie Chan.

Now that sounds like a film I’d watch.

Neon Indian is a hipster-indie band that has been gaining some notoriety as of late. They performed on Jimmy Fallon, and have been making the music festival circuit as well. Though the name annoys me, I hadn’t actually associated them with any cultural appropriation, since nothing I’ve read about the band references anything Native. I figured maybe they were talking about the other kind of Indian. Their name actually comes from (if you believe teh blogz) a make-believe band front man Alan Palomo (who is Latino) had in high school.

So, even if the name wasn’t a direct reference, and the band has avoided Native stereotypes (send me images if you find otherwise), you can’t control your fans (Clearly, as we saw with the Blackhawks and Flyers fans last week).

The fans in that picture above crashed the Neon Indian stage at the music festival Bonaroo (more music festivals and headdresses, of course), wearing headdresses, feathers, and pasties on their bare breasts. According to hipster runoff, this is how it went down:

And it got even stranger during a riveting, bulked-up version of “Deadbeat Summer,” when a crew of scantily-clad ladies wearing homemade feather headdresses (two of whom were fully topless with colorfully painted boobs) bounded onto the stage, seemingly by design, and cavorted around aimlessly, jiggling to the wistful musings about sunlit streets and a starlit abyss. Depending on your vantage point, it was either hilarious or pathetic, but Palomo just laughed and shrugged.

Apparently the girls jumped up there on their own, and it wasn’t actually part of the set at all.

Here’s another image of the girls:

Yes, the headdresses are wrong. But what gets me even more is the topless/feather pasties part. There’s a legacy and history there that many people don’t know or understand.

Native women have been highly sexualized throughout history and in pop culture. There are any number of examples I can pull from, the “Indian Princess” stereotype is everwhere–think the story of Pocahontas, or Tiger Lily in Peter Pan, or Cher in her “half breed” video, or the land ‘o’ lakes girl, seriously almost any image of a Native woman that you’ve seen in popular culture. We’re either sexy squaws (the most offensive term out there), wise grandmas, or overweight ogres. But the pervasive “sexy squaw” is the most dangerous, especially when you know the basic facts about sexual violence against Native women:

• 1 in 3 Native women will be raped in their lifetime
• 70% of sexual violence against Native women is committed by non-Natives

This Amnesty International study details, at great length, the gruesome truth about sexual violence in Indian Country.  Also, recently, Vanguard (a show on current TV) did a special called “Rape on the Reservation”. The show is about 45 minutes long, but so powerful, and so heartbreaking. Please watch it if you have time, even the intro is enough to shock you back to reality:

Now can you see why my heart breaks and I feel sick every time I see an image of a naked or scantily clad woman in a headdress? This is not just about cultural appropriation. This is about a serious, scary, and continuing legacy of violence against women in Indian Country. These girls probably thought they were just being “counter-culture” or “edgy,” but by perpetuating the stereotypes of Native women as sexual objects, they are aiding and continuing the cycle of violence.
Earlier:

But Why Can’t I Wear a Hipster Headdress?

Educating non-Natives at Lightning in a Bottle

The Hipster Headdress Abounds at Coachella

Headdresses and Music Festivals go together like PB and…Racism?

“The Sexiest Rain Dance Ever”

(Thanks Ben and Virtue for sending me the pics)

Award-winning graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang, author of American Born Chinese is a huge fan of Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender animated series. So when he found out the live-action movie adaptation would feature an all-white principal cast, he became one of the more vocal voices against the casting controversy.

With the movie’s release just over a month away, Gene has spoken out again against The Last Airbender (“the last stone from my slingshot on this topic”) — using a comic, of course — calling on folks to boycott the movie: Why I Won’t Be Watching The Last Airbender Movie. I’m re-posting it here:

Nicely done, Gene. To see more of Gene Luen Yang’s comic books (they’re great!) visit his website here. And for more information on The Last Airbender’scrappy casting choices, go to Racebending.com.

Last week, Frank Marshall released “original” casting documents for Paramount’s The Last Airbender film to UGO.com. He announced that a third-party “local extra casting entity” inserted the “Caucasian or any other ethnicity” casting breakdown language that was used in August 2008 on the production’s official audition materials–including the website and fliers–as well as on Actors Access and other casting call databases.

Marshall calls the casting language “poorly worded and offensive” and writes that Paramount and the production “take responsibility for not doing a more thorough job monitoring these frequently used third-party agents.” He also reports that Paramount has been “in regular dialogue” with Asian American advocacy groups “to ensure that such a mistake does not happen in the future.”

Almost a year ago, Marshall dismissed repeated fan concerns about a discriminatory bias within The Last Airbender’s casting process: “The casting is complete and we did not discriminate against anyone. I am done talking about it.”

A year later, comes Marshall’s justification: The production didn’t “intend” to discriminate–and these documents, pulled from the producer’s private files, are the proof.

Unfortunately, Marshall again misses the point. This isn’t about the “intentions” of the production – it’s about what actually happened: The production’s concrete actions.

We can absolutely discuss the production’s actions and the impact of those actions:

• Action:
  In 2008, regardless of who drafted the language, the production released casting sheets for the principal roles with a clear preference for Caucasian actors. “Wanted: Caucasian or any other ethnicity.”
  
  Impact:
  The language used varies from standard ‘colorblind casting’ breakdowns which typically read “please submit all ethnicities.” Despite the fact that the characters in Avatar: The Last Airbender were all ethnically Asian and Inuit, the wording choice otherizes “other ethnicities” and specifies one ethnicity above all others. The casting breakdown impacts what actors are submitted and vetted for the lead roles.




• Action:
  In December 2008, the production announced an entirely Caucasian lead cast to play Asian and Inuit characters.
  
  Impact:
  This casting decision emphasized to actors of color and the communities they represent that even when there are roles for lead characters of color in a film like The Last Airbender, productions will cast actors who are white to portray them.
• Action:
  In January of 2009, the production actively ignored hundreds of letters from fans concerned about the casting–going so far as to send mail back unopened. The production also ignores an industry professional petition submitted by Derek Kirk Kim and Gene Yang.
  
  Impact:
  These actions demonstrate the production of The Last Airbender clear disregard for public concern regarding the film’s casting processes.
• Action:
  From February 2009 onward, the production of The Last Airbender cast actors of color are cast in villainous, secondary, and background roles.
  
  Impact:
  Regardless of the production’s intentions, their actions reinforce a Hollywood glass ceiling where people of color can play secondary roles in films – but white actors are preferred for heroic leads, even if the characters were created to be Asian/Inuit.
• Action:
  The production of The Last Airbender advised applicants for background roles to look more ethnic. Casting directors: “We want you to dress in traditional cultural ethnic attire. If you’re Korean, wear a kimono,” and “it doesn’t mean you’re at a disadvantage if you didn’t come in a big African thing.” A casting director is also quoted as describing the background extras being cast as “authentic Asians.”
  
  Impact:
  Despite the casting controversy and widespread critique over the wording of breakdowns, the production continued to demonstrate a stunning lack of cultural competency.
• Action:
  In February and March 2009, the production refused to respond to Asian American advocacy organizations repeated requests for a meeting. These advocacy groups received a canned letter weeks later–after filming started it was logistically impossible to change the casting–signed simply: “The Producers.”
  
  Impact:
  The production displayed and continues to display a lack of interest in communicating with Asian American advocacy groups over their concerns about The Last Airbender. In their response to the Asian American community, the producers of The Last Airbender did not even bother to sign their own names.
• Action:
  When the groups responded to the producers’ letter in April 2009, again requesting a meeting, they were completely ignored.
  
  Impact:
  The production ignored advocacy groups, taking no action to address the Asian American community’s concerns over the language of the casting breakdown, the resultant cast, the production’s cultural competency, and cultural appropriation, etc.

The production of The Last Airbender was made aware of the biased casting language and the discriminatory impact of their casting decisions over a year ago.

Finally responding to concerns over specific casting language is a start, but the production has yet to demonstrate that their actions are anything more than damage control. We hope the production will begin to address the impact of the casting decisions as well.

Although more than a year has passed since Asian American advocacy groups and members of the public began expressing concerns, the production of The Last Airbender has yet to speak to the impact of their decisions and actions.

In this way, the off-campus party, dubbed the “Compton Cookout” and designed as a deliberate mockery of Black History Month at the University of California, San Diego, aptly demonstrates the terrible legacy of this politics of beauty. (If you’re not sure what this event and the resulting furor are about, please see here and here.) The Facebook invitation featured detailed instructions to party-goers on how to enact caricatures of black racial deviancy via “ghetto” dress and a performance of ugliness-as-subhumanity:

February marks a very important month in American society. No, i’m not referring to Valentines day or Presidents day. I’m talking about Black History month. As a time to celebrate and in hopes of showing respect, the Regents community cordially invites you to its very first Compton Cookout.For guys: I expect all males to be rockin Jersey’s, stuntin’ up in ya White T (XXXL smallest size acceptable), anything FUBU, Ecko, Rockawear, High/low top Jordans or Dunks, Chains, Jorts, stunner shades, 59 50 hats, Tats, etc.

For girls: For those of you who are unfamiliar with ghetto chicks-Ghetto chicks usually have gold teeth, start fights and drama, and wear cheap clothes – they consider Baby Phat to be high class and expensive couture. They also have short, nappy hair, and usually wear cheap weave, usually in bad colors, such as purple or bright red. They look and act similar to Shenaynay, and speak very loudly, while rolling their neck, and waving their finger in your face. Ghetto chicks have a very limited vocabulary, and attempt to make up for it, by forming new words, such as “constipulated”, or simply cursing persistently, or using other types of vulgarities, and making noises, such as “hmmg!”, or smacking their lips, and making other angry noises, grunts, and faces. The objective is for all you lovely ladies to look, act, and essentially take on these “respectable” qualities throughout the day.

The “Compton Cookout” continues in the American theater tradition of blackface minstrelsy. As nineteenth-century free blacks used dress and clothing to distinguish themselves as also human, blackface minstrel performances subjected this self-fashioning black person to ridicule and loathing. In this, and as evidenced by the above, the defamation of black style is absolutely crucial to the racist imagination. (And we can see in the above that particular revulsion is directed at black femininity as irrational, uncivilized and ugly.) The statement from UCSD’s Ethnic Studies Department explains this history:

This “monstrosity” (as some of the organizers called it) has a violent and racist history that began with blackface minstrel shows in the U.S., starting in the early 19th century, heightening with popularity during the Abolition Movement, and extending into 20th century theater and film. Both blackface minstrel performances and parties such as the “Compton Cookout” reinforce and magnify existing material and discursive structures of Black oppression, while denying Black people any sense of humanity, negating not only the actual lives that exist behind these caricatured performances but the structural conditions that shape Black life in the US. Far from celebrating Black history, events such as this one are marked celebrations of the play of power characteristic of whiteness in general and white minstrelsy in particular: the ability to move in and move out of a racially produced space at will; the capacity to embody a presumed deviance without actually ever becoming or being it; the privilege to revel in this raced and gendered alterity without ever having to question or encounter the systemic and epistemic violence that produces hierarchies of difference in the first place. Moreover, like their blackface minstrel predecessors, the organizers and attendees of the “Compton Cookout” demonstrate the inextricability of performances of white mastery over Black bodies from structures of patriarchy: by instructing their women ‘guests’ on how to dress (“wear cheap clothes”), behave (“start fights and drama”), and speak (“have a very limited vocabulary”), these young men not only paint a degrading and dehumanizing picture of African American women as so-called “ghetto chicks,” but offer a recipe for the objectification of all women—made permissible, once again, through the appropriation of blackness.

Because of this terrible history, the “Compton Cookout” cannot be viewed as an isolated incident. Every year there are more college campus parties that depend upon a dehumanizing politics of dress to enact racist caricatures for entertainment; for instance, the 2006 “Tacos and Tequila” Greek party at the University of Illinois saw sorority sisters in tank tops, hoop earrings,and fake pregnancies, and fraternity brothers dressed as gardeners and agricultural workers. (With regard to the ethics of performance, the statement from the Theater and Dance community is also well worth the read.)

Both dress and beauty bear the weight of much ideological management in its racial classifications of humanity, through which some persons are guaranteed the principle of human dignity and other persons are denied it. In which some are invited to “play” at blackness-as-savagery, blackness-as-degeneracy, and some Others are trapped by this image, this event and others like it foster and perform dehumanization through a frighteningly cruel, and terribly effective, politics of ugliness.

For more background and context, read or listen to this KPBS report about both institutional and “popular” racisms at UCSD, featuring our former classmate (Berkeley Ethnic Studies, represent!) and immensely fierce and formidable colleague Sara Clarke Kaplan, an assistant professor of Ethnic Studies and Critical Gender Studies at San Diego.

Reader Carleandria sent us this link to an article from the Times Online, discussing a controversy that is gaining ground in France after the release of a biopic on French writer Alexandre “The Three Musketeers” Dumas starring Gérard Depardieu:

A fuss over race has soured the release of the latest film in which Gérard Depardieu takes on one of the giants of French history. Black actors and anti-racism campaigners are upset that the white star is cast as Alexandre Dumas, the country’s biggest national hero with mixed blood.

The blonde, blue-eyed Depardieu sports curly hair and darker skin in L’Autre Dumas [trailer here], directed by Safy Nebbou. Dumas, who is still probably the world’s best-loved French author, was an exuberant, high-living celebrity — like Depardieu. His paternal grandmother was a former Haitian slave. His father, a Napoleonic-era general, was deemed to be a Caribbean “negro”. In his lifetime, the novelist was mocked for his African features and he called himself ”un nègre”.

…Non-white celebrities, some Dumas experts and black organisations are angry because they say that the producers missed a chance to celebrate France’s ethnic diversity and remind the world of the writer’s part black origins.

“There is a mechanism of permanent discrimination by silence,” said Jacques Martial, a black actor who made his name playing a television police detective. Patrick Lozès, President of the Council of Black Associations (CRAN) wondered: “In 150 years time, could the role of Barack Obama be played in a film by a white actor with a fuzzy wig? Can Martin Luther King be played by a white?”

…In a protest on the internet, the CRAN said that the casting of Depardieu was fresh evidence of France’s failure to promote non-white stars in its cinema and media. “Very few of our compatriots know that Alexandre Dumas was mixed race and considered to be a black in his lifetime,” it said.

The film commits a double sin in the CRAN’s eyes because its plot, adapted from a successful play, discredits Dumas’ genius by depicting his white assistant as the true creator of his works. “Possibly for commercial reasons, they are white-washing Dumas in order to blacken him further,” it said.

…Dumas’ Wikipedia entry (yes, sorry) contains a quote in which Dumas replied to a taunt about being black. “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”

Personally I had no idea that Dumas was black.  This makes me wonder how many famous people of colour – especially those of mixed heritage – are white-washed by history.   I also recently learned (through another reader tip!) that the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin was black too.

POC reclamation project, anyone?

From time to time, we at Racialicious discuss the stickiness of trying to talk about race in the context of cultures we are not familiar with.  It’s easy for us to talk about the U.S. and Canada, since members of our team live solely in these two countries. But when it gets to trying to talk about other countries, it’s hard for us to do that with as much right, or sensitivity.  Because there is nothing worse than getting xenophobic while you are trying to be anti-racist; in other words making assumptions or presumptions about a racial culture that you know nothing about.

So when reader Frida sent us in a tip about Carnival in Germany (roughly equivalent to Mardi Gras in the U.S.) I wasn’t quite sure how to handle it.   Frida noted that snide and politically satirical floats were par for the course at Carnival, and this year was particularly rife with floats mocking “fallen saviour” President Obama.  Nonetheless, this float caught her eye:

Frida did a good job of interpreting this bizarre float, explaining:

On this particular parade float, Obama and Hu are depicted in bed together, with Obama handing Hu cash– a remark on the tremendous loan debt America owes China. Note how Hu, dressed in yellow, is depicted as wearing a yellow stereotypical “coolie” hat.

I know very little about Germany’s racial culture that is informed by real, on-the-ground knowledge.  Out of context, this image is maddening for so many reasons.  Like the sex for cash motif: how much do the races of each leader play into the choice of this image?  Both African Americans and Asians have been target of distressing sexual stereotypes to do with sex work for eons, in a way that also dehumanises sex workers.  But perhaps there is no history of that in Germany, which makes this image more difficult to dissect than if it was an American image.

But then there is the drawing of John Lennon and Yoko Ono in a heart on the side of the float (yes, whaaa’?).  Frida writes:

In the picture above, there seems to be a painting of John Lennon and Yoko Ono (?) on the side of the float, bordered by a heart. Representing what exactly? Is it some remark on the relationship between “Orientals” and Westerners? What do John and Yoko have to do with Obama and Hu?

Uh, interracial pairings involving Americans and East Asians all look same?

And of course, there is the dreaded coolie hat, that universal indicator of Chinese culture; everyone except Obama and  Uncle Sam are wearing coolie hats.

Sigh.

But we’re not just dealing with German culture here, we’re also dealing with Carnival/Mardi Gras culture.  And the point of this culture is inversion.  It’s a time for adults to invert sexual and racial mores without consequence, even though this float seems loaded up with racial stereotypes that are very much grounded in the uninverted status quo.

Every year at Mardi Gras and Carnivals worldwide, racism comes to play.  For example we can look at the ubiquitous Voodoo floats featured at almost any U.S. Mardi Gras (Grases?), and be troubled by the reductive and inaccurate representation of “voodoo.” For example, I recently saw a Voodoo float staffed by white people, where everyone was dressed like the cast of Flintstones, with bones in their hair and leopard print loincloths.  I imagine that that representation of Voudou, which is an important part of Louisiana culture and history, is about as respectful as the coolie hat.

At the same time, I recognise that there is a huge tradition behind these representations, one that people of colour or black folks are often active in. As much as the representations trouble me, as a total outsider to both Louisiana and Mardi Gras culture, there is some racial playing there that is way over my head, connected to the fraught racial history of black and white people in the south.

Still, it seemed worthwhile to write up Frida’s tip.  And I have to admit that I have an ulterior motive: this isn’t the first time this Mardi Gras season that I’ve seen a coolie hat at a Mardi Gras parade, and I’m fishing for someone to explain to me why vague East Asian culture is being plonked down in the middle of the racial minefield of Mardi Gras.

About two weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending a Galveston Mardi Gras parade.  We watched countless marching band and floats of every variety imaginable – 60′s music, 20′s gangsters, a frat float made solely of couches, and that sorry Voodoo float I described earlier.  And then came some lion dancing.  Nice, I thought, there must be a sizeable Chinese community in Galveston.  And it was also one week to Lunar New Year, so the lion dancing didn’t seem totally incongruous.

Except that right after the lion dancing, came an “Oriental” float.  And everyone on the float – apart from one woman, as far as I could tell – was a non-Asian person with a Geisha wig, fu manchu moustache, or “oriental” robes.  Now, if there is a big enough Chinese community in Galveston to warrant a Chinese float, why not let the Chinese people do their own float?

Again, in the inverted context of Mardi Gras, this float definitely was not as bad as going to something like the St Paddy’s Day parade and seeing a bunch of leprechauns wearing coolie hats (or leprechauns dressed up as “voodoo”).  While there is a precedent for the voodoo float, it was still cringe-worthy.  The lack of discernable precedent for the Mardi Gras yellow face got me even more puzzled.

We can try to hold our tongue, give the benefit of the doubt, and not scream bloody racism when confronted by images that are troubling but have meanings we do not know, because they are a part of cultures unfamiliar to us.

Nonetheless, all those white folks in colour face put a bit of a damper on this yellow person’s parade.

]]> http://www.racialicious.com/2010/02/22/race-in-the-carnival-and-mardi-gras-colour-face/feed/ 16 http://www.racialicious.com/2010/01/04/defending-mr-wasabi/ http://www.racialicious.com/2010/01/04/defending-mr-wasabi/#comments Mon, 04 Jan 2010 12:00:02 +0000 Guest Contributor http://www.racialicious.com/?p=5099 By Guest Contributor lisa, originally published at Sociological Images

Kirsti McG. sent us her correspondence with the manufacturer of these:

Kirsti, who saw these on the grocery store shelves in Scotland, wrote to complain that the company mascot, Mr. Wasabi, “pack[s] together practically every stereotype about East Asians possible, from wooden toe sandals…

Several days ago, Karl Lagerfeld, head designer and creative director at Chanel, debuted Paris-Shanghai: A Fantasy, a short film made to accompany the Chanel pre-Fall runway show. The 22-minute short was projected on an outdoor screen amid the Shanghai cityscape. (The film clip is below.)

Cross-overs between fashion and film are nothing new. Indeed, Paris-Shanghai isn’t Lagerfeld’s first foray into filmmaking either. Last year, he made his directorial debut with a 10-minute silent film called Paris-Moscow. Another designer/filmmaker is Tom Ford who just released his first film, A Single Man, a feature-length adaptation of a novel (with the same name) by Christopher Isherwood. And while The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover was not produced or directed by a fashion designer, Jean-Paul Gaultier’s contribution to the 1989 acerbic comedy film on the pleasures and perils of (all manner of) consumption undeniably exceeded his role as head costume designer.

Lagerfeld’s latest film has Lithuanian model Edita Vilkeviciute playing a very tightly-wound Coco Chanel who travels to 1960s Shanghai in her dreams. (Vilkeviciute also played Chanel in Paris-Moscow.) There, she meets two “Chinese” youth in Mao-style suits, played by Danish supermodel Freja Beha and Lagerfeld’s French male muse, Baptiste Giabiconi. Both are adorned with Mao-style outfits and heavy kohl-lined eyes. While the Beha character admits that she doesn’t “know much about Western designers,” she admires Chanel’s jacket and is soon invited to try it on. Chanel then offers the Giabiconi character a men’s jacket to try on. As Beha and Giabiconi happily embrace each other in their new jackets and hurry to admire themselves in the mirror (speaking fake Chinese), Chanel beams smugly at the camera, “You see, everyone in the whole world can wear Chanel.”

As with French Vogue‘s earlier blackface editorial featuring Dutch model Lara Stone, yellowface and other dominant forms of racial masquerade highlight and reaffirm white thin female bodies as the signification of universal beauty. Despite defensive assertions by, among many others, Carine Roitfeld (with regard to the French Vogue editorial), Tyra Banks (in her “apology” for the racial drag photo shoot on America’s Top Model), and now Lagerfeld that racial performances by white models/actors is “avant-garde” and “post-racial,” such performances are ridiculously retrograde and reproduce historical racial hierarchies in which white bodies (imagined as racially-unmarked and thus universal) are superior to racially-marked bodies. It is from this location of universality — what Nirmal Puwar calls “the universal empty point” — that white female bodies like Beha’s and Stone’s “can play with the assigned particularity of ethnicized dress without suffering the violence of revulsion.”

Lagerfeld seems to anticipate this critique when he argues that his short film represents “the idea of China, not the reality. It has the spirit of, and is inspired by, but is unrelated to China.” Without meaning to, Lagerfeld describes precisely one of the core truths of Orientalism (a system of Western knowledge that, as Edward Said explains, “had since antiquity [imagined the Orient as] a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences”). Lagerfeld’s China, like the Orient Said discusses, is a European/American invention.

More from Said’s groundbreaking book, Orientalism:

“[The] Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture.”

In the example of Lagerfeld’s film and its accompanying runway show, the material effects of the cultural enterprise of Orientalism is clear. Lagerfeld’s production of an idea about China, articulated through Western epistemologies and white bodies, sells both Chanel fashions and the Chanel brand. As Vilkeviciute/Chanel puts it: “You see, everyone in the whole world can wear Chanel.” The implication being that if “Chinese” people who are imagined as located in a time, place, and culture so far removed from (and thus alien to) fashion’s modern Western cosmopolitan center can desire Chanel fashions then anyone can. Thus, Chanel’s dream is the neoliberal dream of increased global markets for Western commodities.

Orientalism is distinctive in the Western cultural archive of racial projects because it operates not simply through the hatred of but also the fantasies about the other. Orientalist objects — and this includes Oriental people like the yellowfaced characters in Lagerfeld’s film and those in so many of Hollywood’s classic films — are, to quote Homi Bhabha, “at once an object of desire and derision.” The writers Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan have also described this racial ambivalence in terms of “racist love” and “racist hate.” The desire for the other and the desire to consume otherness are subtle forms of “genteel racism” that have become preferred modes of cultural representation in this multicultural or post-racial historical moment. I want to note that while genteel racism is specific to this historical moment, it emerges from a legacy of patrician Orientalism (the production of otherness through its exoticization and eroticization) that has always been an integral part of U.S. history. Jack Tchen observes in his book, New York Before Chinatown, that George Washington and other founding figures sought distinction and respectability through the consumption and display of Chinese and Chinese-style goods like porcelain, tea, and silk.

It may be difficult for Lagerfeld and others in fashion who practice and endorse blackfacing or yellowfacing (as well as their supporters) to accept that these cultural modes emerge from and reproduce histories of racism, Orientalism, and xenophobia because Lagerfeld does not fit our image of the virulent racists we remember from sensationalist talk shows like Jerry Springer. Also, aesthetic practices seem far afield from more recognizably racist practices like cross-burning, for example. And it is not my contention that genteel racism and overt racism are the same thing.

What we have been seeing in fashion magazines and on runways are cultural practices of “boutique multiculturalists,” to borrow a phrase from Vijay Prashad: “boutique multiculturalists like the faddishness of difference . . . they reduce different ways of life to superficial tokens that they can harness as style, but refuse to engage with those parts of difference with which they disagree.” Prashad argues (and I would agree) that boutique multiculturalism is more pernicious than overt racism because it covers over or “occludes the structures and practices of actually existing racism” by aestheticizing their histories.

While Lagerfeld stumbles upon the truth of Orientalism, it is clear that he doesn’t understand its material and political effects. Locating Paris-Shanghai among classic Orientalist productions like The Good Earth (in which Luise Ranier won an Oscar for her yellowface portrayal of O-Lan) and Madame Butterfly (Mary Pickford famously played the Japanese geisha Cho-Cho San in the 1915 silent film), Lagerfeld explains, “People around the world like to dress up as different nationalities.”

What Lagerfeld misses, though, is that yellowfacing (as with blackfacing) is not simply about playing at difference but about reaffirming and securing traditional meanings about racial difference that are constituted by their asymmetrical and contrasting relationship to the universal ideal of whiteness.

Controversy over the casting of white actors for the film version of The Last Airbender, a show filled with Asian characters, and the producers’ sketchy decision to re-cast one evil character as Asian in response to the protests, inspired Claire at Hyphen to put together a trajectory of the whitewashing of Asian characters through U.S. history.

There’s a lot of examples, so I’ve placed them after the jump.

Warner Oland plays Charlie Chan in Charlie Chan Goes to Shanghai (1935):

The Good Earth (1937) didn’t have a single Asian person in a lead role:

Jennifer Jones as Han Suyin in Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955):

John Wayne as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror (1956):

Tony Randall as Dr. Lao in The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964):

David Carradine beats out Bruce Lee for the starring role in the TV series Kung Fu (1972):

Linda Hunt won an Oscar for her portrayal of Billy Kwan in The Year of Living Dangerously (1982):

Peter Weller as Buckaroo Banzai in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (1984):

Claire argues that around this time yellowface became unacceptable, so producers just started re-racing Asian characters as white. Some examples:

In the book, A Wizard of Earthsea, Ged is described as having red-brown skin. In the TV series, Earthsea (2004), he’s white:

In the movie 21 (2008), based on a true story involving Asian Americans, several Asian characters are changed to white:

Finally, in Dragonball: Evolution (2009), a Japanese character Son Goku is rewritten as a white character:

Jen S. alerts us to a Disney movie in development based on a comic called The Weapon (2012).  According to the Hollywood Reporter, the main character, a Chinese American named Tommy Zhou, will be played by a white actor named David Henrie.

The character:

The kid:

See also our post, by guest blogger Dustin Collins, on Ming the Merciless.

Colourface fatigue, I haz it.  Who here is tired of reading about blackface? Because I sure am tired of writing about it. And at this point I don’t know what more there is to say.

Well, come to think of it, there was never much to say in the first place.  Because here we tend to deal more in the subtle nuances of racism; when something is as out and out wrong as painting yourself black for a lark, you don’t need us to deconstruct it for you.

But I ask this: why is a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader who colourfaced it up as Lil Wayne for Halloween causing so much of a ruckus? It might just be because I live in Texas, but all day Monday I heard reports about white cheerleader Whitney Isleib and her poor choice of costume.  The team even received a request from a Texas media outlet for an interview.

News, by definition is (among other things): a person, thing, or event considered as a choice subject for journalistic treatment; newsworthy material. This is pretty elementary: there has to be something spectacular about your behaviour for it to make headlines.  Simply behaving badly or cluelessly – which Isleib most certainly was – is not enough to get you in the news.  You have to behave badly in some kind of unusual way.

But colourface is not unusual. It is reprehensible and grotesque, but it’s not unusual. Who here was out and about on Halloween, and saw some colourface? *raises hand*

So. Why the attention for Isleib’s dressup? Yes, Isleib is sort of a public figure. But that’s just it: she’s only sort of a public figure. I can’t imagine her getting this much attention for anything else.  Isleib’s situation is markedly different from biracial colourface on ANTM, Vogue painting white supermodel Lara Stone black, and Harry Connick Jr putting his foot down at Australian blackface.  These are all examples of public performances of blackface.  Isleib on the other hand was at a private party. Why is this news? Why is it even local Texas news?

A minute ago, I said that in order to get on the news, you have to behave badly in some kind of unusual way.  I should correct that: you have to behave badly in some kind of way that is perceived to be unusual.  Or further, you have to behave badly in some kind of way that we like to perceive as unusual – regardless of the truth.

Partly Isleib is news because it’s an amusing “quirky” newspiece.  Uh oh! Another example of Facebook Fail! And partly Isleib is news because there are still some lucky souls who think that blackface is unusual – clearly they haven’t been following the colourface epidemic.

But I do think that there is something deeper here than just a slow news day.  What do we get out of perceiving Isleib’s blackface to be newsworthy or shocking?  What cultural function does shock fulfill?

Consider this: violence against women is incredibly common, yet when a serial killer kills multiple women, media outlets go to town.  Cases get blown up, and the 24-hour news cycle analyses every grisly detail of an individual case – instead of turning an eye to the broader culture that engenders such violence. And people react with shock and horror – How could this happen here? Can you believe this? – to something that happens every single day, something that is terrifyingly ordinary.  Definitely we should report terrible murders.  But acting shocked about them is an inappropriate response when violence is such a way of life for us.  There is something very hypocritical about shock.

As a culture, we go out of our way to express shocked disapproval, when we want to demonstrate distance between ourselves and some extreme act of hatred.  It’s a smokescreen that masks the hatred we carry out everyday.

As a culture, we pay attention to the most heinous – or most clueless – examples of patriarchy and racism in order to ignore the daily insidiousness of oppression and suffering.

We pay attention to Isleib’s stupidly ordinary costume because it allows us to pretend that blackface and all its disturbing connotations are out of the ordinary.  But they’re not.  While publicly we feign surprise, on anonymous internet message boards people are talking about how awesome Isleib’s costume is.

So again. I’m not saying that what Isleib did is no big deal.  It’s just that I hate that it’s news.

–
Incidentally since the writing of this article, some of the news pieces I was looking at of Isleib have disappeared. If you enter “dallas cowboys cheerleader blackface” into Google News, the service tells you that there are 14 related articles. But when you click “More”, there are only 3. Damage control?

I suppose it is a good sign that we can still be shocked speechless by the racism in pop culture, right? Because it means that we aren’t totally cynical and embittered. Right?

This morning we received a tip from reader Cassandra, letting us know about last night’s episode of America’s Next Top Model, where contestants flew to Maui to do a photo shoot where they were supposed to be biracial.

Blink.

We don’t usually quote directly from tipsters, but I am too stunned to paraphrase right now. Cassandra reports:

Each girl was given two ethnicities: Tibetan/Egyptian, Greek/Mexican, Moroccan/Russian, Native American/East Indian, Botswanan/Polynesian, Malagasy/Japanese. Five girls are white, one is Asian, and a few are donned in black face and all in “ethnic” outfits (a combination of an aspect of each culture, evident in the photos), which Tyra explains, “Every outfit is not necessarily what people of that culture are wearing now, it might not even be a necessary exact of what they’ve worn in the past, it’s a fashion interpretation of it.” Nicole, assigned to look Malagasy/Japanese, remarks how she’s always wondered what she looked like as a different race and that she felt she looked “exotic.” The girls had to somehow embody what people of those ethnicities were like i.e. Tyra saying, “Think Egyptian, think [insert ethnicity], think of what those people were like, etc.”

INSERT SCREAMS OF HORROR AND FOAMING AT THE MOUTH NOW.

I have to outsource further analysis. I’m not capable of forming coherent words right now.

From Jezebel (where you can also see more photos), a much gentler approach to Tyra Banks that wonders why a black woman initiated this shoot:

As a black woman working in fashion, Elizabeth Gates wrote for the Daily Beast that she was not surprised by the French Vogue blackface, saying: “I would be fooling myself if I thought the draftsmen behind fashion’s most beautiful things were ever going to be sensitive to race, black women, or how they represent our cultural history. In fact, I’m not exactly sure why this was a shock to anyone.”

But this ANTM shoot was put together by Tyra Banks: Black model, creator, host, head judge and executive producer of the show. You’d think that she would be sensitive to racial issues. I have to assume her intent was probably to showcase bi-racial beauty. Is this a case in which the action can be forgiven if the motive comes from a good place?

Or you can also visit any of the growing number of posts we’ve put up recently dealing with blackface:

Blackface and the Violence of Revulsion

Convo about Blackface on Episode 121 of Addicted to Race

And then share your comments. Y’all are going to have to do the deconstructing for me today.  I will return when I regain control of language.

Well, it’s almost Halloween.  And every day that we get closer to Halloween, the more our intrepid readers point out for us some of the season’s most ghoulish examples of racism. Sigh.

Reader Joel sent us a link to this Illegal Alien costume being sold by Walgreens and Target (though word on the street is that the costume has been yanked after complaints).

Carleandria sent us this link that shows you how to make your own dreadlocks wig so that you can be crafty and culturally tone-deaf at the same time.

And Brooke sent us a link to her open letter to those who would dress up as Natives on Halloween, (illustrated by a dazzling array of exquisitely racism “Native” Halloween costumes):

but when did the Native American enter the realm of Wizards, Fairies, Super-heroes, Goblins, or Ghouls? When did it become ok to reduce the diversity, language, and culture of nearly 500 different Indigenous tribes into a tacky “costume” of cheap suede, colored feathers, plastic beads, and fringe? Who decided that the history, identity, and lineage of Native Americans could be easily put on and taken off like greasy Halloween face paint?

In fact, it’s become an extremely unenjoyable October Racialicious tradition to post angry articles dissecting the politics of Halloween.  In 2007 Fatemeh wrote “Reasons I Hate Halloween“:

["Orientalist" costumes] reinforce the eroticized and/or dangerous stereotypes associated with Muslim and Middle Eastern men and women. Plus, it’s doubly insulting because (usually) white people will “play dress-up” in these costumes, to supposedly “live like we do” for one night. The only missing detail is: none of the institutional oppression that we face as Muslims and Middle Easterners comes with the costume.

In 2008 I wrote “Take Back the Halloween” (incidentally one of my most commented-upon posts ever, holla!):

So how do people who are often made to feel visually different – you know, like people of colour – experience Halloween?…those of us who are made to feel like we are visually different, or those of us who feel culturally marginalised by mainstream North American culture feel uncomfortable, guilty, angry or just plain sad at Halloween…

People of colour – especially those who grew up or live racially isolated – have a fear of being conspicuous. As much as I like attention, I also devote massive energy to trying to blend in. This effects my personality and how I present myself on a fundamental level. The regular attempt to neutralise your race is a basic part of living as a person of colour in a racist culture…the holiday where you’re supposed to stand out gives me a serious case of the heebiegeebies.

As you can see, Halloween is an exhausting time for us wee anti-racist critics.  When everyone else gets to dress up and have a good time, we wind up at home, either sifting through online images of people dressed up as racists – and growing more bitter and gnarled by the minute – or we try to pretend that it is not Halloween. Usually by drinking.

But wait. I should speak for myself.  I happen to know at least one Racialicious correspondent who is beside herself with excitement about a certain Mad Men themed costume.  And I know of another one who blows all the racists out of the water with an amazing “Dark Captain Morgan” costume.  That’s right. Look to your right.

So you can take Wendi and Arturo’s lead and find a way to enjoy Halloween in spite of the haters.  Or just eat the pain away with chocolate covered marshmallows – you’ll be in good company.

Update:

The subject of one of the tips listed in this post wrote in, saying she wanted to clarify her costume, the second picture in this post. She pointed out that her wig was not intended to imitate anyone’s culture, heritage, or hairstyle, and sent in images of the full costume. The dreadlocks are actually a deep green, not black as they appeared in the picture:

And the full costume was supposed to evoke the idea of a dark fairy.

But the real reason we are posting this update is because the writer seemed to understand the basics of what we were describing in the post: that dressing up as a person of another race or with cultural markers is not ok, and she sought advice on how to convey these sentiments on her craft page. Since the picture was related to a tip, I’ll leave it up, but a better example of what we are talking about looks like this:

-LDP

This post is supposed to be about the latest occurrences of blackface in fashion — specifically, the 14-page editorial featuring Lara Stone, a white Dutch model, painted black and shot by Steven Klein for the October 2009 issue of French Vogue and also Carlos Diez‘s show at Madrid Fashion Week (September 22, 2009) in which models walked in blackface and, at times, with bared breasts.

There is indeed quite a lot to say about both events. To begin, fashion’s seeming ineptness for dealing with race in ways that do not accommodate and/or supplement the already too long histories of racial objectification and commodification. We’ve discussed much of this history on Threadbared (see especially here, here, here, here, and here) already and will no doubt continue to, as there seems to be an inexhaustible amount of material. Second, these events (and others like it) are revealing of the ways in which multiculturalism and multiracialism –under the guise of postracialism, postmodernism, or just artistic edginess– enables the continuation of white supremacy. For example, some are defending French Vogue for its provocativeness (“creative images . . . can sometimes [be] off-putting”) and for its postracialism (arguing that it is “sort of beautiful in that having a person of one ethnic background look convincingly like she might be of another race shows the interconnectedness of us all”). But what is on display in French Vogue and on Diez’s runway is not beautiful black bodies, but what Nirmal Puwar describes as “the universal empty point” that white female bodies are able to occupy precisely because their bodies are racially unmarked: “[Thus] they can play with the assigned particularity of ethnicized dress without suffering the ‘violence of revulsion.’”

The “violence of revulsion” that women of color generally, and black women particularly in the cases of this issue of French Vogue and Diez’s show, experience is not mediated by postracialism. In fact, the violence of revulsion is redoubled here. Blackface highlights the privileged universal empty point that white bodies continue to occupy even in this so-called postracial moment, and in so doing, it positions racial difference against whiteness, as the other to whiteness. Moreover, blackface and other performances of racial commodification produce a different kind of “violence of revulsion” — an everyday violence of revulsion like I experienced when I discovered Klein’s editorial and Diez’s fashion show.

By this second order of “violence of revulsion,” I mean the assault of racism and the assault of colonialism’s traces on what was for me, until that moment of violence, a relatively mundane workday at home. Violently interrupting this scene of banality is not simply these images of racial arrogance, but my own visceral response of anger, exasperation, disappointment, and a feeling I can only describe as racism fatigue. Such images and their inevitable postmodern, postracial, freedom-of-artistic-expression discourses and apologists are not only tired, today they are tiring.

by Guest Contributor J Chang, originally published at INIT_Moving Pictures

I think I overestimated my capacity for brevity and so what was supposed to be a three part series will probably end up spreading out further as I try to unpack and look into the long relationship between race and cinema.

Last time, I established the tension that existed between the actual craft of the actor and the need for verisimilitude in mainstream entertainment cinema. Obviously, this interacts with race in that, while as actors, by craft, should be able to portray characters not their own race, the demands of needing what is seen to match consistently with the reality unfolding on the screen, the actor portraying the role should actually appear to be same race as the character.

While this might seem rather common sense, we find that, in the history of cinema, the actual representation of race in film doesn’t necessarily hold to the demands of cinematic verisimilitude. Ultimately, in film (and later, television history), there is actually a long history of casting of characters of color with white actors and ignoring, eliminating or marginalizing characters of color. The former is a rather extensive topic and so I’ll be focusing on that first.

One of the main mechanics by which (usually) white actors would perform characters of color is using makeup and prosthetics to approximate stereotypical racial characteristics, the most famous applications of which is called blackface. However, as the racial spectrum was rather wide and the ideas of whiteness morphed and changed over time, not only were black characters subject to this process, but characters of any ethnicity not considered white at the time were. Hence, due to the rather broad range of colors used to describe this technique, I’ll be calling it colorface here.

A Little Mixing

Early cinema was actually more of an amusement than actual entertainment, featuring little clips played in black boxes for people to watch. Moving pictures enabled people to see replications of real life, but it wouldn’t necessarily be so real, because a lot of it was set up. In that sense, reality television draws from one of the oldest traditions in cinema history. However, at some point, filmmakers became more ambitious and started recording stories with their movie cameras. These films started quite simply with basic stories like Life of an American Fireman (1903) and The Great Train Robbery (1903). However, as filmmakers realized the potential for storytelling in the nascent medium, like the theater before them, they also started looking into other sources for inspiration.

Obviously, being the closest analogue to cinematic presentation, much of what worked for the stage also found its way into the lexicon of filmmaking.

As cinema was birthed in the age of industry and quickly found its calling, the pursuit of the almighty dollar (or nickel, as it would be at the time), many of the places that it looked to for inspiration included what was popular at the time. Two things that were in wide existence in entertainment at the time were minstrel shows and vaudeville, which also often included minstrel shows. These shows are a form of theater and the former, and sometimes the latter, brought forth the use of blackface.

Being popular theatrical traditions, they also found their way into cinema, as vaudeville entertainers found their way onto the screen and enterprising filmmakers adapted the newest rages onto the screen.

All People Appear to Be White People

Still, it remains a logical wonder that white actors almost exclusively got cast as characters of color, if the part was of any considerable relevance. That is, if you consider logically casting without factoring the immense racism present in society. Just as this racism prevalent throughout society prevented people of color from owning land, getting work, marrying who they wanted, or… you know… living at all, it prevented actors of color from working in film. After all, making film costs a lot of money and most people of color didn’t have the means to make them. As (wealthy) white people controlled filmmaking, because they controlled capital, their racism, or at the very least, the overarching racism that they were beholden to, denied actors of color work in film.

But then who would play all those villainous colored people? Need I answer the question?

As white actors took up the work of portraying characters of color, many of them if not most of them probably had little actual meaningful interaction with people of color. Combine that with the prevailing notion that races were actually fundamentally different, these white actors would have to turn to safe places from which to draw their characters, Stanislavsky be damned. And that source would be, of course, minstrel shows and vaudeville, which had a history of portraying black characters, even if it was terribly racist–after all, the racism of yesteryear was actually the common sense of those that perpetuated it. (Although more than a thing or two could be said today about how a slightly more subtle racism still masquerades as common sense today.)

One of the significant problems of colorface at the time, beyond just keeping actors of color out of work, and being a tool of widespread proliferation of racism, was that, because of racism, it also impeded the actor’s craft. Due to the segregated society and the limited meaningful interaction of people between races, people of color were likely mysterious to the white actors, and believing what racism would be telling these actors, they consequently restrained themselves from actually performing anything more than a series of stereotypes. In that sense, people of color watching these films would immediately be able to point out that, “that black person is nothing like an actual black person!” (using the vernacular of the time, of course). Unfortunately, also because of this racism, I’m pretty certain that the vast majority of the audience (likely white), also would not be fazed by these ridiculous portrayals of people of color.

(As an aside, small pockets of cinematic resistance did exist in the US, as the Harlem Renaissance, as well as some resourceful black people, did end up providing a space for a few black films to be made. Also, in other countries, filmmaking did take root and there still are many surviving films featuring non-white people in all sorts of roles.)

The Undying Tradition

Although blackface suffered a tremendous loss in the social upheavals in the mid-1900′s and was significantly reduced, other forms of colorface continued, in addition to blackface to a lesser extent. And we have to look no further than the “Hey Hey It’s Saturday” debacle of just five minutes ago to see that colorface, even if naive, is still alive and well today.

But more obvious cases of colorface are still largely present, even if face paint isn’t a part of the picture. Take, for example, the casting of Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl, a French journalist who clearly has some African lineage (amongst other genes), in the adaptation of her memoir, A Mighty Heart or the well mentioned The Last Airbender casting.

I think there are several factors feeding the continued acceptance of colorface. First, I think the audience’s ignorance is playing a big factor here. In some cases, the audience just doesn’t know that the characters are supposed to be characters of color, so when they see a white actor playing a character of color, they just assume that they character is white too. Second, producers often will choose bigger name actors to headline their film because it creates a greater chance at profits and well, there aren’t many A-list actors of color to choose from (which itself proves that societal racism is still very active today)–this also helps ease investors into joining a film. Third, I think that the notion of colorblind casting, from theater, has made its way into film, but in a rather selective form which disregards the abstraction of the theater and often, but not always, to the favor of white actors.

Finally, I think that, for the large part, the mainstream audience has largely bought the Mighty Whitey myth. Part of that also includes this concept that white equals neutral, as opposed to a distinct race, and can consequently fill any role. Which is why I think the public response to characters getting actors of the wrong race cast can often be so minimal. Well, that and the cynic in me screaming that the mainstream audience (as well as the majority of people) tend towards apathy when it comes to more “invisible” issues like systemic racism that don’t obviously impact their daily lives in a tangible way.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that racism hasn’t found a way to get around our consciences yet again. Although colorface is almost on life support, actors of color (and correlatively characters of color, discounting cases of colorface) are still largely underrepresented in mainstream film and television. It turns out that the way around colorface not being acceptable and still getting white actors is to just erase the color and change the characters to white.

Next time, I’ll go into erasing color and possibly also talk about cross-ethnic casting and representation of actors of color.

But, before I go, I do want to mention that colorface isn’t inherently racist. Just as an actor taking on the role of a character that doesn’t look like them isn’t inherently racist. Rather, the history of film, the history of colorface and the continued use of colorface as a tool to (even if not intentionally) limit opportunities for actors of color, are what attaches racism to colorface. Should true society-wide racial justice ever be achieved one day, we might possibly find it more acceptable, since it will be going equally in all directions.

However, colorface is just bad practice when it comes to non-abstract filmmaking and cinematic verisimilitude. And for that, I hope it dies a horrid unmerciful death.

The Racialicious inbox has been flooded this week with emails about this race scandal from Australia:

A comedy act involving five men in afro wigs and black make-up on their faces during an Australian variety show has been criticised by Harry Connick Jr.

The US singer and actor, who was serving as a judge on Wednesday’s Hey Hey It’s Saturday, scored the act based on the Jackson Five a zero.

Watch the video, it’s painfully fascinating (…and look out for Connick Jr’s face at 1:49, it’s pretty fantastic):

But what’s more fascinating is how the whole scandal has prompted a conversation about…(drumroll please)…the Least Racist Country!

Witness the battle to be the Least Racist Country! on this Gawker comment thread (sent to us by reader Carleandria): “In Australia, Blackface Is Still Only Slightly Offensive”. The article is basically about how America must be waaaay better than Australia, and its comments section is rife with anxious Australians trying to defend their country:

To Americans, blackface is particularly abhorrent because of the cultural background to it – beyond being culturally insensitive, it is a signifier of all kinds of problems in America’s past.

While you would hope that all educated Australians would know about this background and understand that the cultural insensitivity goes beyond the superficial, American history is not our own, and you can’t expect all Australians to appreciate the nuances that you see in the performance.

Australia doesn’t have the same racial issues and past with Africans as we do in the US. For them (and Europeans too) this is a non-issue.

So… America has its own history, it kidnapped africans and tortured them. Hang on a sec, up until 6 months ago, America as government policy kidnapped people and tortured them, or is that not racist cause it wasnt against african americans, they were just Arabs! Yet America still tries to take the moral high ground and lecture the world on how to behave!! Simply breathtaking! Americans need to stop bombing everyone and lose some weight.

But it was this comment that really kicked off the battle to be the Least Racist Country!:

You don’t know what your talking about. Racism in Australia and Europe is pretty horrible. Where do you think the racist skinhead movement came from?…Racism in the US is bad and in the rest of the world it is worse. The players may change but the game remains the same.

Canada, as in most things, is probably the exception.

(Sidebar: as a Canadian who actually had to move to an American blog in order to get in on a decent online conversation about race, I find that last line totally redonculous. But that’s for another post.)

It never fails to amaze me that, despite the panoply of racist cultures across the globe – including the one we live in – one of the worst things you can call someone is racist. Hence, as soon as anyone is caught out as a racist, be it an individual, an organisation, or a country, an elaborate dance ensues wherein the major players desperately try to prove that they are not racists. Anybody else remember Michael Richards insisting that he was not a racist, while giving an apology for screaming racial slurs?

Again, people desperately try to prove that they are not racists. Rarely do people respond to accusations that they are racist by desperately trying to not be racist.

Which is why the battle to be the Least Racist Country! is not about actual quality of life or evidence of equal access across different racial groups – instead it is about who appears to be the Least Racist.

That’s also why apologies for racist acts are rarely real apologies. Instead they tend to focus on being sorry that someone interpreted or viewed something as racist – in other words, they’re sorry that something looked racist.

This is what Daryl Somers, the host of the variety show, said to Connick Jr in apology:

I know that to your countrymen, that’s an insult to have a blackface routine like that on the show, so I do apologize to you.

Again, sorry that you Americans perceive blackface to be insulting. To which of course the audience gave rousing applause, pleased to have the chance to appear unRacist, when earlier they had been killing themselves laughing over the blackface skit.

Consider Harry Connick Jr’s statement at the end of the show (emphasis mine):

I just want to say on behalf of my country, I know [the blackface skit] was done humorously, but we’ve spent so much time trying to not make black people look like buffoons, that when we see something like that we take it really to heart. And I know it was in good fun and the last thing I want to do is take this show to kind of a down level. Because you know how much I love this show and this country.

But I feel like I’m at home here and if I knew that [blackface] was going to be part of the show I probably, I definitely wouldn’t have done [the show].

Thank you for the opportunity [to speak], I’ve got to give it up because I told [Somers how I felt] at the break and he said ‘Man, you need to speak as an American.’ Not as a white American or a black American but as an American I need to say this.

Yup, it’s also about appearance. He didn’t say “We take racism against black folks very seriously,” but we try to not make black people look like buffoons.

I can’t help but get the sense that the Americans on the Gawker thread are delighted that for once, they don’t look like the only racist a-holes, the Australians are trying to invent new strategies to look less racist (either by insisting that American and Australian history are too different for blackface to have the same significance in Australia, or by being overly apologetic on behalf of an entire nation…a move that doesn’t make much sense), and the Canadians are feeling smugly pleased by their excellent appearance of unRacism.

People don’t want to talk about racism, they want to talk about the looks of racism.

But.

I have to say that I like what Harry Connick Jr. did. And that I don’t think that he just did it because he doesn’t want to look like he is going along with racism. I think that he actually did not want to go along with racism. There were two things that he said that I liked:

that when we see something like that we take it really to heart.

Unless the whole thing was staged and scripted to boost Connick Jr’s career (seems quite unlikely to me) you have to guess that he was just talking off the top of his head. From the look on his face in the video, and the words “we take it really to heart,” you get the sense that he had a real, visceral reaction to the blackface thing. Not a superficial reaction about the looks of things, but a real feeling in his gut (or heart I guess) that it’s just not right for folks to wear black make-up on their faces.

And you know, for white folks it is that real feeling in your gut – not an advanced degree in anti-racism studies – that is the foundation of being an ally.

And then I also liked this:

‘Man, you need to speak as an American.’ Not as a white American or a black American but as an American I need to say this.

Because sincere or not (and like I said I do think he was sincere) real allyhood is also about realising that racism sucks, not just for POCs, but for everybody.

–
Thanks to Emily and Carleandria for the tip!