“I remember your grandfather leaving the house in blackface to perform at the local Jewish community center,” my mom told me. “They just didn’t know what it meant back then,” she explained, “not until after WW II.” As an activist involved in contemporary solidarity work across racial lines, I was shocked to discover this racist history in my near past. As an Ashkenazi Jew* (of European descent) whose grandparents immigrated to the US around the turn of the century, I don’t always see myself implicated in the American legacy of slavery, but I was forced to reconcile the fond memories of my jovial grandfather with this haunting image of him performing racial minstrelsy. Trying to make sense of this image, I began researching the history of Jewish blackface between WWI and WWII and was surprised to discover a connection between my current activism and this history of blackface: When we are not rooted in our Jewish identities, we risk stereotyping, appropriating, and over-identifying with other cultures.

To understand the complicated history of alliance, disconnection, and overlap between Ashkenazi Jews and African Americans in between the world wars, I turned to Eric Goldstein’s The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity, which considers how Jews negotiated competing claims on their identities and Michael Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, which looks more specifically at the role of blackface in Americanizing Jews. As European Jewish immigrants arrived in the US, their presence intersected with the dominant black/white system of racial relations in various ways. At different times, Jews and African Americans were linked tightly together in American consciousness as evidenced by the case of Leo Frank (1913-1915), which sets the stage for Jewish-Black relations in between the wars. A Jewish factory manager in Georgia, Frank was accused of raping and murdering a white girl who worked in his factory. Frank was found guilty (in spite of flimsy evidence) and sentenced to death, but the Governor commuted his sentence to life in prison. A journalist warned in a headline: “The next Jew who does what Frank did is going to get exactly the same thing we give to Negro rapists” (Goldstein 43). Frank was then kidnapped from prison and lynched by a white mob.

In the wake of the Frank trial, Jews who followed the case became “increasingly sensitized both to the danger of comparing blacks and Jews and the possibilities of deflecting anti-Semitism by emphasizing their whiteness” (Goldstein 65). During the trial, Frank’s legal team repeatedly emphasized Frank’s whiteness by downplaying his Jewishness and tried to shift the blame onto a black janitor who was also implicated in the murder. Even as they tried to underscore their whiteness in this time between the wars, Jews were being held responsible for a variety of issues that troubled Americans including communism, immigration, and the rising tide of war in the 1930’s. Articles about “The Jewish Problem” proliferated in the press, and quotas and restrictions were enacted to limit the number of Jews allowed into universities, clubs, and neighborhoods.

Not surprisingly, Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants had a contradictory relationship to African Americans. On the one hand, identification with whiteness allowed Jews to experience “what it was like not to be the focus of national hostility and resentment” as they were in Europe (Goldstein 145). On the other hand, Jews identified with the suffering of African Americans and continued to display empathy for them. The most assertive statements of identification with African Americans in the US occurred in the Yiddish press where non-Jewish readers could not chance upon them. The Yiddish press roundly condemned segregation and racism by comparing race riots against African Americans to the pogroms against Jews in Europe. At the same time, the Yiddish press read Jewish blackface solely as a means of identification by saying about that Jews “knew how to sing the songs of the most cruelly wronged people in the world’s history” (Goldstein 154).

Blacking Out Jewish Identity in The Jazz Singer

In Blackface, White Noise, Rogin discusses how Jewish blackface plays out in The Jazz Singer, one of the first “talkie” films, which came out in 1927 and starred a Jewish actor, Al Jolson, whose life parallels that of the protagonist in the film. The film’s central character, Jakie Rabinowitz, the son of a cantor, is expected to follow in his father’s footsteps by becoming a cantor at their synagogue on Manhattan’s lower East Side. Jakie Rabinowitz, however, wants to sing jazz, which enrages his father, who, in turn, disowns him. (Al Jolson, also the son of a cantor, turned his back on tradition by performing in theater and film). After running away from home, Jakie changes his name to Jack Robin, finds himself a Christian girlfriend, and becomes a singing success on the stage, often performing in blackface. When his father is dying, Jack is called to take his place to sing Kol Nidre, a solemn song performed on the eve of Yom Kippur, the holiest of Jewish days. Forgoing an opening night appearance on the stage, Jack takes his father’s place in the synagogue, and his father forgives him before he dies. The film, however, ends with Jack performing “My Mammy” in blackface at the Winter Garden Theater (where Al Jolson often performed) with his mother and girlfriend in the audience. Singing directly to his mother, Jack gets down on one knee and sings a song about coming home to his “Mammy” in “Alabammy.”

In Rogin’s analysis, he argues that politically oriented Eastern Europe Jews in the US between WWI and WWII identified with African Americans as a persecuted, Diasporic people. While this identification often resulted in political solidarity, it also took the more problematic “form of either cultural or literal blackface as Jews attempted to become American by taking on black-derived music, along with the plantation myth of American belonging” (66). Witnessing anti-Semitism on the rise in both Europe and in the US, US Jews attempted to escape their shtetl pasts by using the mask of blackness. Thus their ability to re-make themselves in the New World as white came at the cost of African Americans, who had to remain immobile and fixed in stereotype.

In The Jazz Singer, Jakie leaves behind his immigrant past (represented by his dying father) through his performance of blackface. Interestingly, very few movies at this time made by Jews (and often starring Jews) actually represented Jewish themes; Jews in Hollywood generally succeeded by erasing Jewishness in their films. Jakie’s story, however, is definitely a Jewish story—one of assimilation. And as Rogin argues, Jack can only express his sadness about leaving his cultural motherland (the lower East Side and Eastern Europe) through a black-white racial lens by equating his Jewish mother with a Southern “mammy.” In the final “Mammy” scene from the film, the camera keeps cutting between Jack singing with great emotion and the face of his crying mother.

As Goldstein observes, Jewish blackface became a means to express emotions that could not be expressed as Jews; blackface obscures the performer’s Jewishness through stereotyping African Americans who became a mask for Jewish expression. This performance blends identification and admiration with racism. Many of the Jews, including Jolson, who performed in blackface, began their careers as Jewish comedians and turned to black material as their urge to assimilate made it less desirable to do comedy about Jewish themes and personas. Of course what they end up taking on isn’t actually African American material, but the white culture’s nostalgia for an even more racist past of very clearly defined racial roles. The “Mammy” stereotype grew out of the reality that African American mothers were often forced to nurse the master’s children during slavery (and then, post-slavery, forced to take care of them as servants) often at the cost of their relationships with their own children. This reality translated into the stereotype of the happy, loyal, desexualized “mammy” whose happiness made white people feel that slavery was a benevolent institution.

Unmasking Jewish Histories

How, then, does my Grandfather fit into all this? His father Max (my great grandfather) came to the US from Poland in 1900 as a shoemaker because his house in Warsaw was burned down in pogroms. Enjoying his life in the New World, Max didn’t want to send for his wife Cecilia and six year old son (my Grandfather) back in Warsaw, but family pressure intervened. When his family did arrive, Max was embarrassed by his wife’s Old World Yiddish speaking ways and began isolating her. He wouldn’t give Cecilia any money, and he didn’t want her to learn English. He apparently refused to let her eat when she was pregnant. The family story is that he drove her crazy, and then put her into an insane asylum. It’s unclear how much English Cecilia could even speak and how much of her diagnosed “craziness” was a result of being an isolated immigrant with limited language skills. Max then put my Grandfather and his sister into an orphanage until he remarried years later.

During my mom’s childhood, her father Maurice–always quick with a joke–never spoke about his childhood, and told both my mom and my aunt that their grandmother (Cecilia) was dead. As an adult, my mom found out that her father and his sister used to go visit their mother at the asylum–a secret that only came out after Cecilia’s death. As part of his own assimilation, Maurice obscured his own sad family history by refusing to let his children meet their grandmother.

Although I don’t know the circumstances surrounding my Grandfather’s use of blackface, I wonder how or whether his own sadness about the loss of his mother and motherland played into it; was he singing to a “mammy” or was he just trying, like his peers, to become a white American? Given that my Grandfather came to the US as a child on a boat from Poland, he certainly didn’t have a plantation past in the South. Neither did Al Jolson, also an immigrant from Eastern Europe, who was known for performing with and fighting discrimination against African Americans on Broadway and later in Hollywood. Was Maurice taking on white America’s nostalgic imagination for a racist past that Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe had little part in? What is gained and what gets erased by swapping out these histories? Taking on the history of American racism, Jews also lost connections to our own history and culture.

History Lessons for Solidarity Work

The image of Jews doing blackface represents a sad and pivotal moment in Ashkenazi Jewish American identity. At various moments because of historical cycles of anti-Semitism, Jews have been bribed with material privileges and public positions of limited power to appear as the visible face of an oppressive system. What does it mean that this time the face that they put on was blackface? In these exchanges, Jews are often encouraged to take on a middle “buffer” position, and thus get pitted against other oppressed groups. With blackface, Jews occupied the middle ground once again, this time the ground between African Americans and white Christian culture. We both chose and were encouraged to choose whiteness that came at a cost to our relationships with African Americans and disconnected us from our own culture.

As an adult, disconnected from my own family history, I began asking more questions about my Grandfather and learned even more about sadness and loss in his history. Most of his father Max’s siblings stayed in Poland, and most of my Grandfather’s cousins died in Auschwitz, probably around the same time that he was performing in blackface. It’s hard to fathom how both these things could be happening at the same time; in the US, Ashkenazi Jews were being encouraged to assimilate into whiteness, a process they probably accepted, in part, because in Europe they were being killed as a “race.”

The image of my Grandfather doing blackface embodies a moment when Ashkenazi Jews exchanged our deep connection to our cultures, histories and families in order to gain whiteness. While I want to be clear that blackface has obviously been the most damaging to its targets, African Americans, there has also been a cost to Ashkenazi Jews as well. We have inherited the privileges of assimilation—class and race privilege—as well as some incalculable losses–of culture, community and solidarity/connection with other oppressed people.

Through my involvement in Jewish anti-racist organizing over the last decade, I have come to realize that as Ashkenazi Jews who identify as white, we still face the dual dangers of distancing ourselves from other oppressed groups or over-identifying and appropriating their struggles. Jews doing blackface is an extreme example of this tendency: Ashkenazi Jews moved toward whiteness at the expense of African Americans while using the mask of “blackness” to explore alternative ways to express their emotions from the dominant white Christian culture. Because Ashkenazi Jews have more or less “achieved” whiteness, there is clearly still a tendency to distance ourselves and ignore other oppressed groups’ struggles.

But I have also seen the opposite force at work among anti-racist Ashkenazi Jewish activists. When we do not have any grounding in our own culture, however we define it, it is easy to over-identify with others’ struggles, whether those of Palestinians or other oppressed groups. In our attempts to build alliances, we sometimes overreach and take over other people’s struggles as a way to find culture and meaning for ourselves. At anti-Occupation protests, I have seen many Jews wearing Palestinian symbols, such as keffiyehs as a sign of solidarity. There is nothing inherently wrong with this as long as we are simultaneously working to make space for Palestinian voices in this conversation and not filling up all the space ourselves. I personally find it even more effective to see Jews wearing traditional Jewish symbols at these protests, thereby insisting that we can be our full Jewish selves as we stand up against the Israeli Occupation. Even as we reach out to work in solidarity, it is important stay rooted within our own histories and cultures, as complicated and compromising as they may be.

So while there is no simple lesson to be taken from this messy history of Jewish blackface, I believe that our challenge is to remain connected to Jewishness, whatever that means to us, even as we use our privileges to work toward ally-ship with others. Although I still feel a sense of shame when I picture my Grandfather in blackface, I also try to remember the historical context surrounding his losses and choices. As someone who has reaped the benefits of my ancestors’ compromises, I am lucky that I have the choice to attempt reaching toward solidarity, and resisting appropriation as part of my modern Jewish identity.

–
*Throughout this essay, I am referring to Jews of European descent who “became” white in the US through a process of assimilation at a particular historical moment. I recognize that not all Ashkenazi Jews identify as white; some folks are both Jewish and African American; and finally that Jews of color, including Jews with Sephardic and Mizrahi heritage, may have very different experiences.

By Arturo R. García

A reader sent us this ad for what Duncan Hines is calling “Hip Hop Cupcakes.” Uh huh.

I couldn’t embed it because the coding’s wonky, but as you might expect, the commercial for these cakes takes its’ cue from the old California Raisins ads, which adds another layer of weirdness: if you’re going to call them hip-hop cupcakes, then shouldn’t at least one of them at least do a verse? Or was “Beatboxing Biscuits” already taken? At least some folks on the ad campaign’s YouTube page have caught on to its’ problematic nature and pointed it out.

Meanwhile, in Indiana …

Thanks to Tami for pointing this story out: a defense attorney in Noblesville, IN was found to be selling soaps with names like “Darkie,” “Monkey Brand” and “Kolored Kids” at a store he and his wife own, and wastes little time pulling out all the stops in defending the merch to WXIN-TV: the Historical Value card (they’re “nostalgic” and stored in a “joke drawer”); the Victim Card (“You politically correct people can dance to your own tune”); the I’m Not Racist card (both of them note they defend black clients) and, in a partial transcript of their conversation with reporter Kimberly King, the C.R.E.A.M. Card:

You’re making money off of racism.
Gary: Racism? Our country was built on racism. If it didn’t sell we wouldn’t sell it. People buy it.

But should you be the middleman to make a profit off racism?
Gary: Racism?

People are going to be appalled at this.
Gary: They are? Then people are just too politically correct. How about gay people in our country. Would they be offended by “Gay Johnny” and “The Fairy soap.” (Gary then showed the soaps labeled “Gay johnny” and “The Fairy soap”). This is free publicity and I hope it makes every channel, because people will come in here.

People will think you’re a racist because you’re selling this soap.
Gary: I’m a businessman selling a product people buy

Why would you want to be making a profit off of racism?
Gary: Because it’s a legal product

But don’t you have a moral principle not to promote something like this?
Gary: In our country the almighty dollar says it all, ma’am

Can’t wait to see the grand opening at their new store.

Via Claire at the Fashion Bomb, French fashionistas are boycotting the beauty brand Guerlain due to racist comments made by Jean Paul Guerlain. The Fashion Bomb explains:

When talking about working on a fragrance, he said “I put myself to work like a [n-word]. I don’t know if the [n-words] have always worked hard, but…” ["Je me suis mis à travailler comme un nègre. Je ne sais pas si les Nègres ont toujours tellement travaillé mais enfin..."]
The actual word he used was nègre, which, translated, could mean anything from negro to coon to the n-word.

Also, in fashion faux pas, Threadbared points out yet another ad featuring a white model in blackface:

Stylite notes:

Numero’s issue #117 features an editorial starring fair-skinned and typically tow-headed model Constance Jablonski — except, in this case, she’s wearing afro wigs that vary in shades from chocolate brown to blonde and her skin has been decidedly bronzed, if not entirely darkened. The most eye-catching accessory in the shoot might be her co-star: a young, diaper-swaddled black child.

The spread has a late ’60s, early ’70s vibe, with no shortage of nods to hippie culture and style. We’re no experts, and we can’t decide if we’d categorize this spread as an example of blackface. Jablonski’s skintone and hair vary several different shades throughout the editorial, but one thing is for sure: if they wanted, at any point, to use a black model, then Numero should have hired one.

Via reader Sarah, we find out “ethnic” is the new color of the season, according to Fabric Trends magazine:

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 trailer for the new Ben Stiller comedy we discussed last week, starring Robert Downey Jr. as a white actor who puts on blackface to play a role originally written for a black man, is out. (Hat tip to Undercover Brother.)

What do you think?

Fatemeh and reader Nae tipped us off to this upcoming Ben Stiller comedy, in which Robert Downey Jr. appears in blackface.

But wait – his character is a white actor who dons blackface to play a role that was originally written for a black man. So… is this a way of skewering the Angelina Jolie’s of the world?

Here’s a piece from Entertainment Weekly:

If you don’t recognize that African-American actor standing between Jack Black and Ben Stiller, there’s a good reason: He’s white. In Tropic Thunder, an epic action comedy co-written and directed by Stiller, Robert Downey Jr. plays Kirk Lazarus, a very serious Oscar-winning actor cast in the most expensive Vietnam War film ever. Problem is, Lazarus’s character, Sgt. Osiris, was originally written as black. So Lazarus decides to dye his skin and play Osiris, um, authentically. Funny? Sure. Dangerous? That’s an understatement. ”If it’s done right, it could be the type of role you called Peter Sellers to do 35 years ago,” Downey says. ”If you don’t do it right, we’re going to hell.”

…For starters, Hollywood satires have a rocky box office record. And then there’s that little issue of a white guy playing a black guy. Stiller says that he and Downey always stayed focused on the fact that they were skewering insufferable actors, not African-Americans. ”I was trying to push it as far as you can within reality,” Stiller explains. ”I had no idea how people would respond to it.” He recently screened a rough cut of the film and it scored high with African-Americans. He was relieved at the reaction. ”It seems people really embrace it,” he says.

Paramount is hoping so: The studio plans to debut the trailer online March 17, and Downey is all over it. (In one scene, he tries to bond with a real African-American castmate by quoting the theme song from The Jeffersons.) Downey, meanwhile, is confident he never crossed the line. ”At the end of the day, it’s always about how well you commit to the character,” he says. ”I dove in with both feet. If I didn’t feel it was morally sound, or that it would be easily misinterpreted that I’m just C. Thomas Howell in [Soul Man], I would’ve stayed home.”

Huh. Funny that Downey would invoke Peter Sellers.

Okay, the idea of mocking white actors who put on blackface in this day and age seems like a good one, if this whole movie is satirizing Hollywood. But dude, it’s a Ben Stiller movie. As much as I enjoy catching cable reruns of Zoolander (“one look??”), I can’t see this movie doing anything but bungling the race issue.

What do you all think?

by Carmen Van Kerckhove

Today’s WTF moment for you. (Thanks Dorothy!) From Yahoo! News:

“The Great Debaters,” a film based on the real-life victories of a black debating team in the 1930s, topped the list of nominees announced Tuesday for the 39th NAACP Image Awards…

Nominated for outstanding actress: Jurnee Smollett for “The Great Debaters,” Angelina Jolie for “A Mighty Heart,” Halle Berry for “Things We Lost In the Fire,” Jill Scott for “Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married?” and Taraji P. Henson for “Talk To Me.”

I’m not a fan of Sarah Silverman. I find her humor juvenile and often offensive. She will stoop to the lowest level possible to try and get a laugh. Yet I was still shocked to learn that a recent episode of her show, titled “Face Wars,” went so low as to contain (oh yeah…you guessed it…the hip trend of last year hasn’t gone away yet) Silverman in blackface. Take a look:

Yep, she went there.

Now, I’m a big fan of comedy, especially subversive comedy, and so I understand that many comedians exploit stereotypes to get their point accross. Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, Sacha Baron Cohen, among many others have all to varying degrees of success exploited racial/ethnic/religious stereotypes to get a point across. The difference, for me, is that they all exploited racial/ethnic/religious stereotypes in order to expose the ignorance of those stereotypes. In Silverman’s episode, it seems to me that she is revelling in stereotypes and trying to be as offensive as she possibly can. When I saw the bit where a black man is wearing a big nose and a t-shirt that reads “I love money” (the black man and Silverman attempt to switch places so that Silverman can prove that Jews have it worse than blacks, as if that’s a question worth asking) I almost threw my computer monitor out the window.1 Really? Did she need to go there? If you haven’t seen the episode you probably don’t get where I’m going here, but in the context of the show it is nothing but offensive to me and serves no purpose other than to perpetuate the faux black/Jewish divide.

What really gets my goat about this episode is that it’s all played off as “starting a dialogue about race.” Um no. All I see is the worst stereotypes about black folks and Jewish folks being perpetuated with little to no actual commentary on why these stereotypes are messed up in the first place. It’s all shock. No commentary. And when it has all ended, she has painted herself as the most “open-minded.” To wit, this little supposedly funny bit from the show:

“What do we want?”

“The freedom to explore issues of race in American culture through the use of post-modern dramatic irony.”

“When do we want it?”

“We think it’s fairly obvious.”

That could be funny in a lot of comedic situations, but here, I find it all too telling.

A Mighty Heart has gotten a lot of play on this blog (see here and here).

We’ve debated everything from the motives in selecting the lead actress to Marianne Pearl’s experiences to neo-blackface.

Personally, I’ve been keeping an eye out for an answer. In last month’s Glamour (or it could have been the month before – I only read Glamour every so often), Marianne Pearl discussed her experience and indicated that she sought out Angelina Jolie. She initially sought her out in friendship, and later asked for her to take on the role.

This month, I’m paging through Esquire and start reading Tom Junod’s extremely thorough and researched interview on Angelina Jolie. On page 85, Junod shone some light on the making of the film:

A year later, Mariane Pearl published a memoir of her marriage to Danny and the terrible circumstances of his death. Called A Mighty Heart, it was not a bitter book nor a book of broken faith. It was, indeed, a book that put forth the notion that Danny and Mariane Pearl did not lose to unimaginable evil but rather triumphed over it by living as citizens of the world to the very end. Brad Pitt bought it while it was still in manuscript and started to develop it as a vehicle for his wife, Jennifer Aniston; and when Brad left Jennifer for Angelina after the filming of Mr. and Mrs. Smith,it was Mariane Pearl who suggested Angelina Jolie for the role of Mariane Pearl, for, as it turned out, Angelina Jolie and Mariane Pearl were not just kindred spirits. They rather startlingly drew the same meaning from their different experiences after 9/11. They rather startlingly both believed that the story of Daniel Pearl’s death was about good people coming together to fight evil rather than evil guys coming together to destroy good. They rather inevitably became close. “I read the book,” Angelina says, “and Mariane and I got on really well as women, and we’ve since become really great friends, and our kids have become friends.” And in A Mighty Heart, they joined forces on a movie that, far from bemoaning the fact that some people are worse than others, celebrates the fact that some people are just better.

A couple notes:

1. That was copied straight from the magazine, long sentences and one block paragraph intact.

2. In the Glamour article, Mariane Pearl indicates that she initiated the friendship with Angelina. They became friends first, and then things moved forward on the movie.

So, after reading this account, what do you think?

Personally, I’m kind of shocked that the movie was going to be a Jennifer Aniston vehicle. I think that blows my mind. What were they going to do with her to transform her into Mariane Pearl?

On a gossipy note, that kind of blows for Jennifer Aniston – Angelina got her man AND her film!

I also wonder how Mariane Pearl self-identifies. I find it interesting that no one of color was tapped to play her – even though this would have been a no-brainer choice based on looks for Halle Berry or Thandie Newton or maybe a new undiscovered actress. I am not sure how much control Pearl had over the process initially, but she did recommend Angelina for the role. Did she just want someone she knew and trusted to portray her correctly? Or is there something more behind this?

What do you think? Regular readers, does this change your opinions expressed in the comments on the previous threads?

Wow. Now it’s not only college students playing with blackface, faculty and staff members are getting in on the act too. This Fresno, CA Christian school even played a game of “catch the runaway slave!” From Fresnobee.com:

Members of Fresno’s black community said they were stunned this week to see pictures of adults in blackface poking fun at slavery during a recent graduation celebration for Riverdale Christian Academy.

The photos, which were posted on the Internet shortly after the June 1 event, show staff and faculty of the small private Christian school dressed as slaves with captions describing activities at the party in Hanford.

“The slaves served lemonade — it was a riot,” read one caption beneath a photo of five women and a man at a lemonade stand. Each had dark face makeup and wore 19th century clothing.

“Someday we gonna be leavin’ when a workin’ day is done,” read another caption posted with a photo of three women holding gardening tools.

A third picture showed a white man in a Yankees jersey and top hat escorting another in blackface with the caption, “bringing home the runaway slave in the Senior skit.”

By now you know the drill with these blackface parties.

Step 1: Declare that you did not mean to offend anyone.

Step 2: Point to the fact that black people were at the party too, so obviously it wasn’t that racist!

Nice to see that Doug Spencer, the school’s principal, has been taking notes:

Spencer, who said he was sorry for the controversy, said his school, with a student body of 150, has “three or four” black students. One of those students attended the party. Spencer said that while he is willing to apologize to anyone offended by the skits, he has not apologized to the unnamed student.

“It was not offensive,” Spencer said. “And she hasn’t asked for an apology.”

Hat tip to Tate Hill at Urban Knowledge and Resist Racism

Racialicious has been tracking “A Mighty Heart” since last July, when we first heard that Angelina Jolie would be cast to play the biracial Mariane Pearl. Well, the film debuted at Cannes and the trailer for is out now. Hat tip to Stereohyped. Check it:

I’m a fan of thrillers, but this movie looks kinda awful, judging by the trailer (thanks to Kimberly for the tip!). Here’s a summary from Slant Magazine:

The wackest film of 2007 stars James Todd Smith—LL Cool J if you’re nasty—as Luther, a record store employee who walks into a police station to defend the honor of his dead homie, Isaac (Mekhi Phifer). Luther claims to have some “short in his brain” that messes with the way he processes smell. This is meant to explain why he is prone to saying such lovelies as, “First night she walked in, I still remember it. City smelled like grapefruit.” But what explains his propensity for stretching out his metaphors? Later, when he relates how mixed-blood assistant DA Nora Timmer (Jolene Blalock) walked into a room stinking of tangerine—”ripe and ready to be peeled.” It gets worse: At some bourgie party where Isaac is confused for someone else, Nora (whose daddy was the cocoa and whose mama brought the milk) fills the room with her scent of mashed-potato, which doesn’t stop any of the men from wanting to be her—wait for it—gravy!

I could be wrong, but this looks to me like another blackface performance, right? It’s possible the actress Jolene Blalock is mixed, but they are definitely slathering on the bronzer here and it looks fake as hell.

[If you’re reading this in an RSS reader or Feedblitz email and can’t view the video, please click on the post title.]

It seems like college students across America were really busy on January 15th coming up with ways to mock the memory of Martin Luther King. Not only did students at Tarleton State University, University of Connecticut School of Law, and Clemson University throw “ghetto parties” on MLK Day, now comes word that students at the University of Arizona did the same (thanks for the tip, Kynn).

Only this party didn’t even go with the vague “ghetto” theme. They actually asked attendees to dress up as their “favorite black person.” From The Wildcat Online:

An image posted on the social networking Web site Facebook shows partygoers dressed in do-rags and fur coats with black-painted faces.

After being invited, pre-business freshman Brianna Tarleton and a friend inquired as to the meaning of a “black” party.

“My friend asked, ‘How would you do that?’ (Kuechel) said, ‘You know, dress up like gangsters, pimps and hos,’” Tarleton said.

You gotta love the justification given by Kuechel, the kid who threw the party:

While many UA students condemned the party, the UA student who threw the party, agricultural education sophomore Kyle Kuechel, said the party was not intended to be offensive.

“In order to come, you had to dress as your favorite black person,” Kuechel said. “Two people were dressed as lawyers, and two from ‘Family Matters.’”…

Kuechel said four of the 15 partygoers were black and were not offended by the party.

Oh, my bad! If those 15 four black people (thanks, Colin) thought it was all good, then I guess it was.

The latest in the rash of racist incidents sweeping across college campuses come from William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri (hat tip to Rachel) and Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

From KMBC-TV:

Last Wednesday night, one student at William Jewell College is accused of painting his face and hands black, and then jumping from doorways at Eaton Hall and shouting racial slurs for about 30 minutes, officials said. A total of seven students are believed to have been involved.

From The Mac Weekly, Macalester’s student paper:

A party hosted by Macalester students on Tuesday, Jan. 16 is under investigation by the Macalester College Harassment Committee (MCHC). The costume party, themed “politically incorrect,” was hosted in one of the college’s cottages on Macalester Street.

A particular costume choice by two students caught the attention of Paul Maitland-McKinley ’09, president of the student organization Black Liberation Affairs Committee (BLAC). Maitland-McKinley learned of the party last Friday, Jan. 26, from an anonymous student who was present at the party. The costume involved one student dressing as a Ku Klux Klan member, with a second student wearing face paint to appear dark skinned. The costume also included a simulated noose, one end in the hand of the Klan-costumed member, the other end around the student with the blackface’s neck.

A brand-new episode (No. 58) of Addicted to Race is out! Addicted to Race is New Demographic’s weekly podcast about America’s obsession with race.

Carmen is joined by guest co-host Liam McGrath in this episode. Liam is a long-time listener of the show, and is the man responsible for the voiceovers in our intro and outro.

They discuss the recent rash of “ghetto” or “gangsta” parties on college campuses, as well as the phenomenon of both Superbowl teams having black coaches this year. Carmen also interviews Sarita Malik, author of the book Representing Black Britain: Black and Asian Images on British Television about the recent controversy surrounding the UK reality show Celebrity Big Brother.

This episode features the songs “Pop Rocks” by Junk Science and “Truth Is” by Brother Ali, courtesy of Spectre Entertainment Group.

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by Carmen Van Kerckhove

I’m with Philip on this. These pictures make me want to vomit. As if the head-to-toe blackface wasn’t enough, some girl had to stuff the seat of her pants to give herself an exaggerated butt?

According to this article, the students did not realize their “gangsta theme” party would coincide with MLK day and shocker, they did not realize this would be offensive to anyone:

Students who organized the party have come forward to school officials to express a desire to reach out to those who were offended by the event and the pictures posted of it, said Robin Denny, the university news services director.

“The students said this was not intended to be offensive to anybody at all and (they) did not realize it would be,” Ms. Denny said.

I’d like to hear from students of color at Clemson or any of the other universities that have thrown these “ghetto” or “gangsta” parties. I can’t imagine what it would be like to know that my classmates are indulging in this kind of racism.

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I knew I should have put a bet in for when we’d hear about college kids throwing ghetto parties on Martin Luther King Day. Absolutely despicable:

Authorities at Tarleton State University said they plan to investigate a Martin Luther King Jr. Day party that mocked black stereotypes by featuring fried chicken, malt liquor and faux gang apparel.

“I feel like there is no excuse for this type of ignorance,” said Donald Ray Elder, president of the Stephenville school’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Photographs posted on social networking Web site Facebook.com showed partygoers wearing Afro wigs and fake gold and silver teeth. One photo showed students “mocking how African-Americans do step shows,” Elder said. In another picture, a student is dressed as Aunt Jemima and carries a gun.

“That upsets me,” Elder said. “That’s someone who knows nothing about Dr. King, because Dr. King was totally about nonviolence.”

You can find photos from the entire event over at The Smoking Gun. Thanks so much for the tip, Rachel.

Speaking of white kids and gangster parties, The Smoking Gun has yet another story about some University of Connecticut Law students throwing a party of their own:

Seems that questionable parties were not limited this month to a Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration at a Texas college. Turns out students at the University of Connecticut School of Law also opted for do-rags, gang signs, gold teeth, malt liquor, and a fake machine gun during an off-campus gathering last weekend, just days after the civil rights leader’s January 15 birthday. One future attorney even wore fake tiger claw tattoos on her chest, an apparent homage to the rapper Eve.

I don’t want to make wild conclusions from all of this, but one thing that comes to mind is the reality that the legal system will one day be run by these people. Would it be a stretch to say, then, that the legal system is racist? Because these parties surely are.

Find more photos at The Smoking Gun, and stay the hell away from Facebook.com if you plan on being a racist party boy.

This is the last in my series breaking down the top trends in race and pop culture of 2006. If you missed it, check out Monday’s trends 10 through 8 and yesterday’s trends 7 through 4 . Here’s the final list:

10. Race-swapping undercover experiments
9. Hipster racism
8. The continuing obsession with interracial relationships
7. The new minstrel show
6. Racism on college campuses
5. Fear of a Latino takeover
4. The return of the white man’s burden
3. Colorface everywhere!
2. Celebrity racial slurs
1. Race baiting

3. Colorface everywhere!

It seemed like blackface, brownface and yellowface was everywhere in 2006, even in the most unexpected places. Some of these blackface incidents we’ve already covered. For example, Kate Moss in blackface for The Independent’s Africa issue, the many “ghetto parties” and blackface incidents included in racism on college campuses and the Tyra Banks Show episode where she had Angela Nissel go on dates with three men both as a black woman and as a white woman .

Liberal blogs Firedoglake and Billmon (who has since stopped blogging) both decided to use blackface images to mock people they didn’t like/respect. Firedoglake blacked up a photo of Joseph Lieberman in a post accusing him of race-baiting. Billmon blacked up a photo of CNN’s Wolf Blitzer after he complained about Lynne Cheney being uncooperative during an interview. Both issued the standard “I’m sorry you’re offended but I’m just so brave and un-PC” apologies, leading ebogjonson to create a flowchart for those bloggers asking themselves if they should use blackface on their blog. In case you were wondering, if you answer yes to being white, the answer is “STOP! You CANNOT use blackface EVER under any circumstances.” Also, be sure to check out Kai Chang’s series on racism in the liberal blogosphere .

A movie based on the 1970s TV series “Kung Fu” is in the works. As you probably know, biracial Asian/white protagonist Kwai Chang Caine was played by David Carradine in the series. And he’s been milking the virtual yellowface gig ever since, from his role in Kill Bill to his stupid Yellowbook.com commercials. The question is, which white guy are they going to get to play Kwai Chang Caine in the movie version? Who has enough “Asian flavor?” I’m putting my money on Steven Seagal.

Eddie Murphy will be engaging in some yellowface in his new film, Norbit. Jenn from Reappropriate summed it up thus: “In it, Murphy plays a dorky, meek Black man adopted as a child by an old Asian man and, in adulthood, who is dominated by a fat black woman stereotype. The catch? Murphy plays Norbit, Norbit’s girlfriend, and the Asian man who adopts him. As the Asian man, not only does Murphy wear yellow-tinted skin, but plays up the old Asian male stereotype, complete with poor Chinglish accent.” By the way, I hope now that he’s won a Golden Globe, he’ll stop making these god-awful movies.

And of course, the most talked-about colorface incident of 2006 has been Angelina Jolie playing Mariane Pearl in the new film “A Mighty Heart.” It’s still unclear why they decided it was necessary to pile on the bronzer and wig when Mariane’s race plays no role whatsoever in the film.

2. Celebrity racial slurs

Making racist remarks in 2006 rivaled nipslips and pantylessness in its ability to garner press attention for celebrities and public figures.

The Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger was caught on tape debating the spiciness of Latinos: “I mean Cuban, Puerto Rican, they are all very hot…They have the, you know, part of the black blood in them and part of the Latino blood in them that together makes it”. And of course, George Allen was caught on tape calling an Indian-American man a “macaca.”

Miss Jones, a DJ at New York hip hop station Hot 97, called New York City Transit Workers Union president Roger Toussaint a “dumb coconut who probably don’t even have a green card.” New York’s other big hip hop radio station Power 105′s DJ Star made all kinds of disgustingly racist and violent remarks about the wife and children of a rival DJ, threatening to “do an R. Kelly” on his daughter and calling his wife a “whore,” a “lo mein eater” and far worse anti-Asian slurs.

Kanye West told Essence magazine that “If it wasn’t for race mixing, there’d be no video girls.” As if that wasn’t offensive enough, he went on to say: “Me and most of my friends like mutts a lot … Yeah, in the hood they call ‘em mutts.”

Michael Richards was caught on tape in a racist tirade at Los Angeles’s Laugh Factory, repeated calling a black hecler the n-word and saying: “Fifty years ago we’d have you upside down with a f***ing fork up your ass.” It was interesting to see how mainstream media outlets focused exclusively on Richards’ use of the n-word, when really the most offensive thing about the tirade was his overt reference to lynching .

Rosie O’Donnell decided to mock Chinese people on The View with a long “ching chong” joke. The most depressing thing about this incident was how the Asian American community had to explain, and even prove, that yes, “ching chong” is indeed a racial slur and highly offensive. O’Donnell’s eventual non-apology was perhaps even more insulting than the original joke.

1. Race baitingIt seems like ever since Crash won the Oscar for Best Film, everyone has felt like race is the best way to get attention for their projects. Unfortunately, people also felt like it was necessary to use race in the most exploitative ways possible.

We’ve already discussed reality show Black.White, Tyra Banks’ sending biracial writer Angela Nissel on dates as a black woman or a white woman (as if she isn’t both anyway), Oprah’s voyage on The Human Race Machine, Dr. Phil’s “curing” of the racist white man, Trading Spouses’ race-swapping episode, and all the hoopla over interracial relationships as a result of the movie Something New. But that was just the beginning.

Survivor played the ultimate race card when it announced that its idea of diversity was to have four racially segregated tribes: black, Hispanic, Asian and white. Jen and I went around doing our talking head thing, speaking out against this very bad idea. Jen also wondered, where would she and I end up if we were on this show? Would we have to double-team? Play for both the Asians and the whites? In the end though, something positive did come out of this whole ordeal. Yul Kwon won the competition, and we’re excited to see what will come from this very politically-minded Asian-American man. Also, the next season of Survivor appears to have another very diverse cast because the powers-that-be apparently realized that America is willing to watch non-whites on TV too. Shocker!

We’re always railing against oppression olympics on Racialicious – the way different communities compete with each other over who’s more oppressed. But Tyra Banks apparently decided it would be a good idea to find out once and for all who has it the worst when it comes to racism and discrimination! The show was just as absurd as you’d imagine it would be. And if memory serves, the episode ended with audience members holding hands and swaying. Oh that Tyra, she’s such a healer.

The dirtiest race-baiting tactics, however, were definitely found in the political sphere in 2006. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but just some of the incidents we covered on Racialicious. Florida congressional candidate Mark Flanagan aired a commercial promoting racial profiling and was quoted as saying “We’re at war, and if we’re going to win, we are going to have to abandon all political correctness.” Illinois’s Bob Flider went with a TV spot that had Indians and Chinese endorsing his opponent because he would outsource American jobs and benefit them. Minnesota’s Jeff Johnson ran a commercial warning people against identity theft, and apparently decided that the big bad identity thief was an American Indian man. Anti-affirmative action activist Ward Connerly was caught on tape singing the praises of the KKK: “If the Ku Klux Klan thinks that equality is right, God bless them. Thank them for finally reaching the point where logic and reason are being applied instead of hate.” But Harold Ford Jr.’s bid for the Tennessee Senate was by far the most racialicious ride of all: from the kerfuffle surrounding his revelation that his grandmother was white, to the New York City public relations firm that called Ford a “Southern sellout” who had a severe case of “jungle fever,” from Corker darkening up a photo of Ford, to the now-infamous miscegenation TV spot .

I’m continuing my series breaking down the top trends in race and pop culture of 2006. So here we go with numbers 7 through 4 of my list. Check back tomorrow for the top 3, and if you missed it, check out yesterday’s trends 10 through 8.

7. The new minstrel show
6. Racism on college campuses
5. Fear of a Latino takeover
4. The return of the white man’s burden

7. The new minstrel show

North Carolina hip hop group Little Brother titled its late 2005 release The Minstrel Show, and they couldn’t have been more prescient because minstrelsy made a huge comeback in 2006 in all forms of media: movies, television, music and even the internet.

• MOVIES: Tyler Perry made a killing by cashing in on the public’s love for black men in dresses. Diary of a Mad Black Woman was nominated for an NAACP Image Award (yeah, I know) and its sequel, Madea’s Family Reunion, opened No. 1 at the box office with $30 million.

• TV: Flava Flav, the new millenium’s Stepin Fetchit, ruled reality TV in 2006. The March finale of his VH1 show Flavor of Love drew 6 million viewers, making it the highest-rated show ever for the cable channel. And when the show returned in early August, 3 million people tuned in for the premiere. But Flavor of Love is just the tip of the iceberg in Viacom’s not-so-classy depictions of black folks, as I outlined in this post. In November we heard a rumor that BET was going to start a reality show starring Bobby Brown and Karrine “Superhead” Steffans (author of Confessions of a Video Vixen). And TV commercials continued to rely on the archetype of the big black sassy mammy for humor.

• MUSIC: Byron Crawford really nailed it when he wrote: “Flush with revenue from the likes of Mike Jones’ Who Is Mike Jones?, the Ying Yang Twins’ “Wait (The Whisper Song),” Three-Six Mafia’s Academy Award-winning theme to Hustle and Flow, and D4l’s “Laffy Taffy,” record labels are rushing out to sign the most coon-like negros they can find.” Cases in point: DJ Webstar and Young B’s Chicken Noodle Soup, Ms Peachez’ Fry That Chicken, but perhaps the most egregious example is Jibbs’ Chain Hang Low, which is set to an actual minstrel tune known as “Zip Coon” or “Turkey in the Straw.” No subtlety there. And don’t forget the ongoing tradition on The Maury Show known as the Not a Baby Daddy Dance. Of course, rapper NYOIL tried to address the minstrelsy problem in hip hop with his problematic and controversial video, Y’all Should All Get Lynched. See varying analyses of this video here and here.

• INTERNET: Not content with minstrelsy on television, in movies and music, the same knucklehead who brought us the god-awful movie Soul Plane decided to launch a social networking site named CrackSpace, because “MySpace is great but it doesn’t even come close to fully satisfying the hip-hop generation.” Not to be outdone, some genius decided to take it a step further by launching NiggaSpace: “We just want to embrace the black culture that continues to innovate and strive!”

6. Racism on college campuses

It seemed like a wave of racist incidents swept across college campuses all over the country in 2006. Just between October 1 and January 4 I bookmarked no less than 19 items relating to campus racism. Of course, it’s impossible to know whether racism is on the rise, or if we’re just hearing about it more often. Here are just some of the incidents we covered on Racialicious. See my del.icio.us page and this post from Rachel for even more stories.

• The Duke Lacrosse rape case has turned into a total mess, but right from the get-go it shone a spotlight on the many dicey issues surrounding race and class on the Duke campus.

• Two white students at Colorado University sent a Latino student an email calling him a “river rat” and “border hopper” and “bean eating peace of (expletive).” The message suggested O’Neal would drag Castro behind his car, an apparent reference to the 1998 dragging death in Texas of James Byrd Jr., a black man.

• The Asian American Students Alliance at Yale University issued a formal complaint against student publication Rumpus for two supposedly satirical articles they ran chock-full of racist statements about Asian-Americans and interracial couples. Like this one: “Asian girls are like SARS — they take my breath away…”

• One of Rice University’s student papers, The Rice Thresher, ran a “humor” column which declared that Asian people’s “eyes are so squinty that it is difficult for our friends from the Orient to see the page, so they must stare longer.”

• The University of Michigan’s College Republicans decided to plan a “Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day.”

• A video surfaced made by two white Texas A&M students. One of them is in blackface, playing the role of the “slave” and is put through a mock whipping and sexual assault.

• I commended Whitman College for their reaction when photos were found of students putting on blackface at a party to mimic the racially segregated cast of Survivor: Cook Islands. Instead of merely denouncing this act, Whitman College cancelled classes for an entire day and organized a full-day symposium on race relations which every single student had to attend.

• And of course, conservatives continued to the win the war against affirmative action. From Inside Higher Ed: “Michigan voters on Tuesday approved a ban on affirmative action at the state’s public colleges and in government contracting. The vote came despite opposition to the ban from most academic and business leaders in the state — and the history in which the University of Michigan played a key role in preserving the right of colleges to consider race as a factor in admissions.”

5. Fear of a Latino takeover

Immigration reform was all over the news last year. And though it was rarely addressed openly, racism often reared its ugly head when it came to anti-immigrant sentiments.

• Jenn at Reappropriate summed it up nicely when she wrote “this is not a controversy about laws, about immigration, or about border security reform. This is a controversy about race. This is a countroversy surrounding White nationals who insist that the American Dream should be reserved for their White bretheren who “deserve it” more.”

• Fox News openly called for white people to outbreed minorities. From Media Matters: On the May 11 edition of Fox News’ The Big Story, host John Gibson advised viewers during the “My Word” segment of his program to “[d]o your duty. Make more babies.” He then cited a May 10 article, which reported that nearly half of all children under the age of five in the United States are minorities. Gibson added: “By far, the greatest number [of children under five] are Hispanic. You know what that means? Twenty-five years and the majority of the population is Hispanic.” Gibson later claimed: “To put it bluntly, we need more babies.”

• The Los Angeles Times asked if New Orleans, with its influx of Latino immigrants, would become the new Los Angeles: “No matter what all the politicians and activists want, African Americans and impoverished white Cajuns will not be first in line to rebuild the Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast and New Orleans. Latino immigrants, many of them undocumented, will. And when they’re done, they’re going to stay, making New Orleans look like Los Angeles.”

• The Alderman of Springfield, Tennessee proposed banning Latinos from the town’s public parks because they cause crowds on weekends: “When asked to comment on the possibility that not every Hispanic using the park was an ‘illegal immigrant’, Alderman Cherry responded, ‘If they’re speaking Spanish, I tend to think they are illegal.’”

4. The return of the white man’s burden

A couple of you remarked on this trend and you were right on the money. Jason suggested the topic of “transracial adoption (re: white saviour/white man’s burden complex a.k.a colonial benevolence)” and Nina wrote: “All things Africa. Adoption in Africa (Madonna), AIDS in Africa (The I Am African and RED campaign), war in Africa (Darfur), lack of potable water in Africa (Jay Z and Beyonce) even disfugured smiles in Africa (Jessica Simpson. All of it brought to you in the vein of ‘wealthy (primarily) white Westerners must save poor black Africans.’”

From the absurd “I Am Africa” campaign to Kate Moss rocking blackface on the cover of The Independent’s Africa issue, from Bono’s (PRODUCT)RED campaign to Oprah’s $40 million school for South African girls, from Angelina Jolie birthing Shiloh in Namibia to Madonna adopting baby David from Malawi, Africa was everywhere in 2006.

• Dr. Marc Lamont Hill did a great job explaining why all these campaigns shouldn’t be uncritically celebrated: “My worry, however, is that such acts are prompted by a paternalism (in Pitt’s case, a literal one) that undermines African agency and prosperity. Instead of advocating the development of infra-strutures for increased self-governance and self-reliance, these acts reinforce the dominant notion that Africa needs to be saved by White heroes. Additionally, much of the philanthropic work being done obscures more profound and causal structural factors such as globalization, neo-liberalism, and environmental racism.”

• Richard Kim, writing for The Nation blog, suggested an alternative to buying one of the (PRODUCT)RED items: “Here’s my DIY solution that still involves shopping and branding. A red Sharpie marker costs about a $1. Go get one and mark up something you already own. A giant red A will suffice, I suppose, but don’t be afraid to stretch your imagination. Then send $198 (or $149 or whatever you can afford) to the Global Fund.”

• Adam Elkus drew a comparison between celebrity do-gooders and turn-of-the-century colonialist missionaries: “This brand of moral grandstanding suggests that Africa has become a kind of plaything for some campaigners, a backdrop against which they can make themselves feel good and ‘special’. They are searching for personal meaning and purpose in the deserts and grasslands of Africa, not kickstarting a meaningful debate about how to take Africa forward. There is little new about this. The 19th century missionaries and explorers who established European control over the continent saw it as an exotic and forbidding land in which a similar kind of personal meaning could be found (or lost). The actual thoughts and desires of the inhabitants mattered little.”

• Hannah Pool, herself adopted from an orphanage in Eritrea, also likened Madonna and co. with missionaries: “It’s arrogant to assume the only way to deal with poverty in the developing world is for westerners to adopt a few “lucky” children. Adoption can be a wonderful thing, but when it comes to inter-country adoption it’s easy to confuse what the parents want (a nice shiny, new baby) with what’s best for the child. Inter-country adoption might seem well-intentioned but when white people from rich countries adopt black children from poor countries it smacks of missionary-like behaviour.”

• With the Madonna adoption, we again saw people react to the complex issue of international and transracial adoption by saying things like “what, would you rather have the children die in orphanages?” I encouraged people to move beyond this simplistic either/or mindset by posing a series of questions that never seem to be addressed in media coverage of adoption: “Can a better standard of living, healthcare, education and loving adoptive parents ever make up for what is lost when a child is removed from his or her country and culture? Shouldn’t every effort be made to try and keep families together? Shouldn’t adoption be a final resort?”

• We also saw shades of White Man’s Burden in the resurgence of depictions of indigenous people as dumb savages. From the awful Bud Light Steve and Zagar ad campaign to the insulting Virgin Trains commercial with American Indians attacking the train, to Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, the underlying message was that these savages needed to be saved from themselves.