“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.

Above is the trailer circulating for a game based on slavery – but it appears that this is fake, despite all the attention it’s been attracting.

As Jessica Conditt explains in her post for Joystiq:

These are lined up at the bottom of the site, right next to the overwhelming sense of relief we felt when we realized neither 360 nor PS3 release AO titles. Further, the ESRB doesn’t list a rating for anything called Slavery the Game and the proposed developer, Javelin Reds Gaming, doesn’t exist. One YouTube version of the trailer credits The Creative Assembly with making Slavery the Game, but it isn’t mentioned anywhere on The Creative Assembly’s site. We’ve contacted The Creative Assembly for clarification.

A lot of people are rightfully horrified at a game predicated on the slave trade from the slave master’s perspective – specifically glorifying the dehumanizing nature of slavery for cheap amusement. However, even though the game is fake, I hesitate to fully condemn the premise, probably because of one of my other favorite games: Age of Empires: The Conquerers.

A game can do anything we program it to do – and AoE:TC allowed me to rewrite history, by allowing the people of Tenochtitlan to defeat the Conquistadors.

AoE:TC is a civilization based game, one that bases the action on real historical events and allows players to recreate key battles in play. Along the way, you also essentially create a civilization from scratch and learn to defend your base. Now, in the wrong hands, it’s very easy for these games to revert to a standard colonialist/racist/imperialist view of history, as the fake slavery game did. The presentation of history there was very one sided – the game proposed no premise to question what was happening historically. The competition was solely from slavemaster to slavemaster, and the playability was set to revolve around violence toward enslaved people. And, to me as a player, totally boring. It’s the expected narrative story line – slave master rules pliable and silent masses of enslaved people. We’ve heard that narrative before, ad nauseam.

All the fun is in the subversion.

In AOE: TC, each civilization has it’s strong points and weak points. Depending on region and practice, some places have calvary units and some do not. Some have gunpowder technology, some do not. Some have advanced naval capabilities, some do not. So quite a bit of the fun in the game is figuring out in what circumstances your civilization would be successful at resisting invasion or conquering other nations. It was also a valuable lesson into history. For me, the fun of playing both the Spanish campaign and the Tenochtitlan campaign was hearing about the history and the need from both sides. When you play the Spanish campaign, the Conquistadors explain their goals, why they are doing it, and who they need to kill to get this done. You help them grow their army – and in some ways, watch history play out in a series of betrayals, accidents, and strategic alliances. (Or, as Jared Diamond called it, Guns, Germs, and Steel.) Then, you can flip the narrative – you play as the Tenochtitlan, and realize the vital need to resist invasion, to outsmart the Spanish, to understand their new technology and defeat it. Now, it’s been years since I’ve played – I can’t recall how historically accurate the campaigns actually are, and I can’t remember if there were other problematic elements in the game play. But, playing multiple sides of the same historical conflict gives you a tremendous amount of perspective – and I daresay, much more perspective than the average historical textbook.

Now, I haven’t kept up with how history is taught to K-12 students since I graduated high school in 2001. But back then, I remember history being a long line of domination and defeat, with the occasional black history facts thrown in to spice things up. (Crispus Attucks was the first martyr in the Revolutionary War! Black Dude Dies First: Historical Edition!) The only attempt to showcase a different view was my Modern World History class, taken in 11th grade, which would occasionally include a quick paragraph on the Igbo resisting slavery. But for the most part, Europeans came, saw, and conquered, and that’s the way it was. I had received some info that things weren’t quite that simple early in life – but it took accessing a lot more materials as an adult to realize that history is often a complicated mash as opposed to the linear narrative that we are taught.

Great civilization games not only explore history as it happened, but also the way it could have been. If Slavery: The Game was realized as it exists in the clip, it would be an epic fail. But if someone felt like working with the nuances and complications of the practice, it could also turn into something amazing. Many African American history museums have a permanent installation on slavery as part of the story of blacks in America. Most recently, when I visited the Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, I checked out their “And Still We Rise” exhibit. We started in an exhibit dedicated to the African continent, then walked through a recreation of a slave ship designed to explain the rigors (and horrors) of The Middle Passage. I couldn’t help wondering how we could create a game from this experience, something that is interactive on a different scale. What stories would we follow? Where do we start? What are the motivations of European slave traders and African slave traders? What types of betrayals occurred? How do we program to show the difficulty of surviving the middle passage? How does a person other someone else so completely as to sell them? How does one stoke the fires of an uprising? Could we play as a policy maker debating the merits of abolition? Of entry and escape? Is the main character Harriet Tubman or John Brown or Fredrick Douglass Game or Nat Turner?

Octavia Butler did an amazing retelling in Wild Seed; video games have the power to do the same thing. So this silly video may not have any redeeming qualities – but in the right hands, this could easily turn into something amazing.

I’m back, America.

I have been home, on U.S. soil, for the past 3 weeks, and it has given me some time to reflect on being a black woman in U.S. vs. being a black American woman in France. Living in France for the second time was rather colder than the first but a bit more illuminating in terms of race. That can be attributed to the fact that while Aix-en-Provence, the first city that introduced me to the entrancing world of French culture, is an international student-city in the sunny south, Vannes is situated in Bretagne, in the rainy north-west of the country. Aside from the nonstop rain, Vannes was whiter than white. Not to say I didn’t see black people – indeed, I noticed black women on my daily bus route to work, but many public spaces, like the port, the library, and the grocery store were lacking in color. Admittedly, there were actually two black hair stores and a café Afrique that shut down while I was there, but that was about it.

Binta, the young Senegalese woman who did my hair, broke it down for me one day, “There’s no black people here because it’s too small because there are no jobs. But a lot of them marry French.” By “French”, she meant white men, and her sister, the owner of Ebene Cosmetique, was one such example. I noticed, with a certain amount of chagrin, that many Europeans of color refer to their privileged compatriots as the standard of that country, while they are specifically marked by their race. “English” are white, but English blacks are, well, black. The same goes for conversations I have had with German blacks. I suppose we hold the same standard in America, but because of our sordid misdealings with the social construction, although blacks may not be considered true “Americans” we do not refer to our white counterparts as simply “Americans”. Indeed, we are obsessed with race but rarely given the proper tools to talk about, much less acknowledge, our race problems. And white Europeans know it, effectively allowing them to ignore their own issues, I discovered.

When I first arrived in Vannes, I befriended a couple of local boys, and we often went out to bars since there is little else to do in the city. Amazed at the utter whiteness of the venue, one night I asked my friend, “Do you ever notice that there are essentially no black people here – why is that?” and he said, “There are some, just not many. But it’s very different in France, we are much less conscience of race in France than Americans.” He smoothly side-stepped my question and turned the focus to America’s racism. Because America is a popular topic in the media, the nightly French news frequently reported breaking American news. Thus, the world beyond our borders is informed of how race issues are part and parcel to American culture.

While visiting Budapest, Hungary, a completely inter-ethnic group of us twenty-somethings went to smoke hookah – an American, two Portuguese, an Indian, and a Hungarian native to be exact. The inevitable subject of Barack Obama was broached and the U.S.’s fixation on race quickly followed. I mentioned how racist America truly is in its practices – on institutional and structural levels, as well as individual, and Pedro said, “Well of course this is because of your history with slavery, but it is absurd because America is a nation of immigrants.” Once again, we were able to discuss America’s hot-button issue, illegal immigration, without a mention of colorism in India or the Neo-Nazi march in Hungary last year.

Although I am the first to extol Europe’s interracial dating practices, it is no less difficult to have real discussions about xenophobia, racism, or Islamophobia as it is here in the U.S. And Europeans seem to have the ultimate trump card: America is the first and the worst of them all.

During a brief visit to Bordeaux, a beauteous, sparkling gem in the south of France, I paid a visit to the Museum d’histoire naturelle, The Natural History of Museum. I was pleasantly surprised to see there was an extensive exhibition of Bordeaux’s slave history. To my dismay, French historians downplay and minimize slavery parallel to American history. I have been to many history museums in the U.S., but none to my memory have put such a heavy emphasis on tribes selling their own into slavery.

Transcript:

Like many other civilizations, African societies practiced slavery. European demand boosted this practice and, from Senegal to Angola as well as in East Africa, African rulers and dealers made substantial profits from the slave trade. Most of those who were enslaved were captured in battles or were kidnapped. Some were the children of slaves, or were sold by their parents during times of famine. As demand in Europe increased, the African dealers carried out raids further into the interior and many of the captives died before reaching the coast. In time the slave trade moved to new areas and after 1780, the dealers from Bordeaux started buying slaves in Mozambique and Zanzibar. The slave shops spent 3 to 6 months traveling to different parts of the coast buying their cargo. Mortality rates were highest amongst those who were embarked at the start of the voyage.

Slavery has been practiced by all civilizations down the ages [first written record in Mesopotamia]. Often, as in ancient Rome, ‘slave’ was a synonym for ‘foreigner’, since most societies were repelled by the idea of enslaving people who belonged to their culture. Slavery was therefore sustained by wars and since captives had to be displaced or transported, the slave trade was developed. The African and Arab slave trades pre-date the arrival of Europeans. However, the European demand for the slave labour to exploit the resources of the New World saw this trade in human beings rise to the unprecedented levels over a short period. In the New World, slaves were considered to be property, no more than a raw work force.

Although it was probably futile, I attempted to re-read these descriptions from the perspective of someone who was unaware of slavery in Europe. These re-made versions of history would have us believe that slavery happened because it has been happening and Africans wanted to make money from it. Europeans merely wanted to take advantage of what was already going on. To my chagrin, beyond in-depth diagrams of slave ships and maps of the trans-Atlantic, there was no mention of the extant racism embedded in French culture. Like the new ban on veils, which reeks of Islamophobia but is also the status quo for Nicolas Sarkozy and his administration.

While I did receive a few stares, and the same questions about ethnicity over and over again, I never had overt experiences with racism: being followed around stores, out of pocket remarks or foreign hands touching my hair. As before, I strongly encourage all people of color to travel or live abroad, if it is feasible. Just know that the racial ‘baggage’ you take with you will be greeted with a brand-new, dare I say it, exotic version: racism exists abroad, you know, just not as bad as it is in America.

This is the second installation of Pierre Bennu’s Black Moses Barbie series.  In this ep: Black Moses Barbie has to use her Motivational Freedom Rifle…but not on whom you’d think.

Black Moses Barbie commercial #2 of 3 from pierre bennu on Vimeo.

Transcript after the jump.

Music: Mmmmmmmm (woo woo woo)….Black Moses Baaaar-bieeeee.

(Doorbell rings)

Slave Catcher 1: Hey, Cat Lady.  Sorry to barge in unannounced, but we’re looking for some escaped slaves that may have popped through here. You know the type: big, brawny, built like a stallion–

(Cat meows)

—golden-brown skin, and they absolutely hate to do work.  We need them to build this country’s infrastructure, of course, but they can’t seem to get their savage minds around the concept of working for free under inhumanly brutal conditions. They hate it.

I hope you don’t mind if we take a look around, do you?

(Cat meows)

Cat Lady: Feel free to take a look around, boys. But there’s nobody here–

(Cats meow randomly)

–but me and my cats.

(Cat purrs)

Runaway Ken: (murmurs) Oh my gosh!

Runaway Christie: (murmurs) Oh my gosh!

Runaway Ken: Oh my gosh!

Runaway Christie: Oh my gosh!

Runaway Ken: Oh my gosh!

Runaway Christie: Oh my gosh!

Runaway Ken: Oh my gosh!

Runaway Christie: Oh my gosh!

Runaway Ken: Oh my gosh–

Black Moses Barbie: Sh!

Slave Catcher 1: You know, there’s one thing I loathe more than cats, and that’s the n-word: “non-truthtellers.”

(Cat purrs)

Now if I were to find you were harboring slaves on the premises, that would make you an nnnnon-truthteller.  And the penalties would be quite severe. Quite!

(Cat hisses)

Slave Catcher 2: Hey, boss, I think I smell something.

Slave Catcher 1: Nyeah, I smell somebody.

Slave Catcher 2: Yeah, or maybe three-fifth of somebody. Heh heh heh.

Black Moses Barbie: Kiss three-fifths of this!

Slave Catcher 1: Why, it’s Black Moses herself!

Slave Catcher 2: (simultaneously) Harriet Tubman!

(Rifle cocks. Cat screeches. Gun shots.)

Slave Catcher 1: Nyeah.

Cat Lady: Ahhh, Harriet? What is that scent you’re wearing, dear? I absolutely love it.

Black Moses Barbie: It’s the sweet scent of freedom.

(Black Moses Barbie and Cat Lady laugh)

Black Moses Barbie: You really need to change that kitty litter.

Music: Mmmmmm mmmm mmmmmm.

Announcer: Black Moses Barbie Underground Dream House comes complete with Cat Lady Abolitionist. Scent of Freedom fragrance sold separately.

Full disclosure: I met Loretta Ross at a Women’s Media Center’s media workshop for progressive women last summer, and we’re connected through the New York City chapter of SisterSong, which reshaped the reproductive-rights fight to reproductive justice. And I just think she is an incredible activist and living historian.

I saw this clip of her explaining to another generation of feminists where the term “women of color” came from and wanted to share.

Transcript after the jump.

Loretta Ross: Y’all know where the term “women of color” came from?  Who can say that?  See, we’re bad at transmitting history.

In 1977, a group of Black women from Washington, DC, went to the National Women’s Conference, that [former President] Jimmy Carter gave $5million to have as part of the World Decade for Women.  There was a conference in Houston, TX.

This group of Black women carried into that conference something called “The Black Women’s Agenda” because the organizers of the conference—Bella Abzug, Ellie Smeal, and what have you—had put together a three-page “Minority Women’s Plank” in a 200-page document that these Black women thought was somewhat inadequate.

(Giggles in background)

So they actually formed a group called Black Women’s Agenda to come [sic] to Houston with a Black women’s plan of action that they wanted the delegates to vote to substitute for the “Minority Women’s Plank that was in the proposed plan of action.

Well, a funny thing happened in Houston: when they took the Black Women’s Agenda to Houston, then all the rest of the “minority” women of color wanted to be included in the “Black Women’s Agenda.” Okay?

Well, [the Black women] agreed…but you could no longer call it the “Black Women’s Agenda.”  And it was in those negotiations in Houston [that] the term “women of color” was created.  Okay?

And they didn’t see it as a biological designation—you’re born Asian, you’re born Black, you’re born African American, whatever—but it is a solidarity definition, a commitment to work in collaboration with other oppressed women of color who have been “minoritized.”

Now, what’s happened in the 30 years since then is that people see it as biology now.

(Murmurs of understanding, agreement)

You know? Like, “Okay…” And peopleare saying they  don’t want to be defined as a woman of color: “I am Black, “I am Asian American”…and that’s fine. But why are you reducing a political designation to a biological destiny?

(Murmurs of agreement)

That’s what white supremacy wants you to do. And I think it’s a setback when we disintegrate as people of color around primitive ethnic claiming. Yes, we are Asian American, Native American, whatever, but the point is, when you choose to work with other people who are minoritized by oppression, you’ve lifted yourself out of that basic identity into another political being and another political space. And, unfortunately, so many times, people of color hear the term “people of color” from other white people that [PoCs} think white people created it instead of understanding that we self-named ourselves.  This is term that has a lot of power for us.

But we’ve done a poor-ass job of communicating that history so that people understand that power.

I guess I’m not the only one who found the solemnity-yet-randomness of the Black History Month Minutes in my youth a tad ridiculous.  I understood why the segments were needed and learned a lot from them–and still found my hand in front of my giggling mouth.  The comic troupe Elite Delta Force 3 may have felt the same way.

This is their send-up of some of the women–and a couple of the men–who helped shape the civil rights movements in the US and South Africa as well as the foolish tropes of the Real Housewives franchise; the troupe is more directly spoofing Real Housewives of Atlanta. Check out The Real Housewives of Civil Rights (RHOCR).

Yes, that’s Wayne Brady as “The Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King.” Yes, that’s “Coretta Scott King” (Robin Thede) admitting “Malcolm X” fathered the youngest King kid.  (As much as we know about Dr. King’s marital infidelities, as far as I know, all King’s children were sired by him.)  Yes, that is Marilyn Monroe (Angela Yarborough), who The Root says is supposed to resemble RHOA‘s Kim Zolciak. (Other sources say that Monroe was actually pro-racial equality, so her inclusion has some historical basis.)  And yes, that is a rotary car phone.

I’d put this webisode in the same humor section as Black Moses Barbie: both are taking the piss out of the the near-deified images we have of critically beloved Black heroes. Like using Barbie dolls to encapsulate the story of Harriet Tubman, Elite Delta Force uses the “oh no they didn’t” frisson of placing these women and men–often seen as paragons of righteous Black folks who did their damnedest to uplift The Race in their own ways–in situations and saying things that would get their Righteous Black Folks’ Cards yanked.   Viewers like me–deeply ingrained with love for what these people did that allowed me, the Altanta housewives, and Elite Delta Force to be here and be our Black female selves in 2011–can both raise our eyebrows and laugh out loud.

Where the troupe goes off-point for me is with Winnie Mandela and Malcolm X. The chracterization doesn’t seem so specifically and historically based on Mandela so much as I got an affable Earth Mother Africa stereotype with a generic “African” accent and generic “African” gear.  I felt the same about how El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz is portrayed: I understand that he is a man rendered inelegant due to dealing with the fallout from a tryst with his wife’s friend, but I think it would have been funnier if the actor played with Shabazz’s well-known fiery eloquence, even if he has to Denzel it.

I also know some people are feeling some kind of way about RHOCR, as witnessed in the comment section on YouTube.

while there was some humor; I thought it was in poor taste for the most part. It belittled the true ladies who were in their own right important in the struggle for equal and human rights.

…

Wow somehow this seems wrong cause its Black History month . Sorry none of it was funny to me . Those people lives has now been rendered a joke . This is a mockery . But you wanna know what’s funny? They suffered gaining us Civil Rights only for somebody to call something like this humor? If white people would have did this I wonder if y’all would be laughing . This is a slap in the face coming from us our pride is gone.

…

wow ..the late Coretta Scott King is referred to as a b!tch, and a “baby’s Mama”, to someone Martin once was at odds with ..and ya’ll just think we should laugh at it? That’s the problem …blacks folks laugh at a lil’ too much of everythang, and what’s even sadder, is that we’ll laugh along w/ whites at this kinda shit..(people who are just laughing AT us) *smDh*

…

Coonery!!!!

I can respect that–it seems that we young(er)bloods are laughing at people who died tragic or vicious deaths or are still alive. Our laughter seems to be disrespecting our elders.  But it begs a couple of questions: when does it become “safe” to laugh about the ancestors and our own current ridiculousness?  Does every conversation about Black heroes have to be a Teaching Moment? Would this be the kind of comedy Dr. King would come back and yell at us for?

I’m not sure.  I just plan to keep my hand in front of my mouth.

Image credit: granemporium.com

Who exactly is Jean Toomer?

Scholars, academics, and American literature buffs know him as the author of Cane, one of the landmark works to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance.

And yet, Toomer’s legacy is a bit more complicated than just his work. Back in the 1920s, in spite of segregation, Toomer articulated a vision of multiracial identity that was rejected by the norms of the time. Splitting time between exclusively white and exclusively black environments, Toomer decided that he was neither – he considered himself an American, a mixture of several different races and nationalities. However, he grew increasingly frustrated with the restrictions placed upon him due to his identification with black literature – in later life, he allegedly denied having any “colored blood.” As a result of this, Toomer’s legacy and the meaning of Cane has been left open for wide open for interpretation – and a new release of Cane has done just that, with scholars Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Rudolph P. Byrd, asserting that Toomer wasn’t pioneering a new identity – he was trying to pass for white.

Felicia R. Lee sums up the controversy neatly in the first two paragraphs of her article in the New York Times:

Renown came to Jean Toomer with his 1923 book “Cane,” which mingled fiction, drama and poetry in a formally audacious effort to portray the complexity of black lives. But the racially mixed Toomer’s confounding efforts to defy being stuck in conventional racial categories and his disaffiliation with black culture made him perhaps the most enigmatic writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

Now Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard scholar, and Rudolph P. Byrd, a professor at Emory University, say their research for a new edition of “Cane” documents that Toomer was “a Negro who decided to pass for white.”

This charge actually reflects quite a bit about our current conversations on race. Lee speaks to both Gates and a different biographer of Toomer, Richard Eldridge, and comes away with very different takes on Toomer’s identity:

“I think he never claimed that he was a white man,” Mr. Eldridge said. “He always claimed that he was a representative of a new, emergent race that was a combination of various races. He averred this virtually throughout his life.” Mr. Eldridge and Cynthia Earl Kerman are the authors of “The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness” published in 1987 by Louisiana State University Press. [...]

Archival research reveals a clearer picture, said Mr. Gates, the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard: “Everyone on his family tree was black and didn’t claim to be anything else. Only Jean tried to cross over.”

The conversation swirling around Cane is fascinating, because it reveals how long we have been grappling with the same issues around race. As Toomer points out in his own words, race is a shifting social construct – people viewed him differently depending on their own conception of who he was. But Gates and Bryd interpret Toomer’s actions as a way of fleeing from blackness.

“He was running away from a cultural identity that he had inherited,” Mr. Gates said. And this came with consequences: “He never, ever wrote anything remotely approaching the originality and genius of ‘Cane,’ ” Mr. Gates said. “I believe it’s because he spent so much time running away from his identity.”

“I feel sorry for him,” he added.

(Thanks to Carmen for the tip! You just can’t quit, can you? )

These men and women call themselves “Indians.” They are members of “tribes,” with names like “Yellow Pocahontas,” “Geronimo Hunters,” and “Flaming Arrows” (a complete list of the tribes is here). They wear over-the-top, elaborate costumes based (very) loosely on American Indian powwow regalia–with headdresses, feathers, and beading (there is a slideshow on nytimes.com that can be found here):

They have an anthem called “Indian Red” whose lyrics include:

Objectively, out of context, this is by-definition cultural appropriation. Imagine if these were white men and women. I should be offended…right?

But it’s complicated. The history of Mardi Gras Indians comes out of a history of shared oppression and marginality between the Black and Native residents, or some stories point to a desire to honor Native communities who took in escaped slaves. Wikipedia (again, the academic cringes, ha.) notes, of the history:

Mardi Gras Indians have been parading in New Orleans at least since the mid-19th century, possibly before. The tradition was said to have originated from an affinity between Africans and Indians as minorities within the dominant culture, and blacks’ circumventing some of the worst racial segregation; laws by representing themselves as Indians. There is also the story that the tradition began as an African American tribute to American Indians who helped runaway slaves.

I still see some problems with that, the “honoring” argument is what many proponents of Indian mascots use, but what it boils down to, for me, is the question:

Can one marginalized group appropriate another?

Inherent in the concept of cultural appropriation is the notion of power. The group in power takes cultural aspects of a subordinate community out of context and uses them how they see fit. These Mardi Gras Indians are African American, and arguably at the lowest economic strata of society (the nytimes article talks about copyrighting as a means to recoup money for these performers). They are by no means in a position of power over Native communities in Louisiana or elsewhere. The Mardi Gras Indian culture does not appear to come out of a desire to “play Indian”, and in many ways, it has moved outside of the realm of cultural appropriation into a distinct culture and community of it’s own. But above all, it seems the history comes not out of a relationship of power, but out of a shared position of marginality and discrimination.

So, in this sense, I find it hard to write my usual rant on an insensitive appropriation of Native culture, but, on the other hand, it still makes me uncomfortable.

Thoughts?

Want To Use My Suit? Then Throw Me Something [NY Times]

Slideshow: In New Orleans, Getting Serious Over Suits [NY Times]

Mardi Gras Indians [Wikipedia]

(Image Credits: Duke University, New York Times)

In the current edition of Newsweek[1], President Obama claims to tell Americans why Haiti matters. Unfortunately, his claims reflect the racism, dishonesty, and denials of history that surround the way the “First World” frames Haiti and Haiti’s earthquake. Haiti does indeed matter to a variety of people and entities for reasons both good and ill – but not for the reasons Obama gives in Newsweek.

First, Haiti matters to the American government and American society because it gives us a chance to rewrite history. This tragedy provides us with the opportunity to expiate our crimes and portray ourselves as Haiti’s saviors. Due to America’s and the First World’s extensive financial and media resources, we get to determine the story that is told to the world about Haiti’s past and present. Thus, Obama’s version of the story claims, “… in times of tragedy, the United States of America steps forward and helps. That is who we are. That is what we do. For decades, America’s leadership has been founded in part on the fact that we do not use our power to subjugate others, we use it to lift them up…” However, in terms of our relationship with Haiti (and other non-white or non-Western countries) the opposite is true.

As Randall Robinson pointed out in his works Quitting America and An Unbroken Agony, the U.S. has been sabotaging Haiti ever since the country’s independence. I could write an entire essay on the U.S.’s crimes against Haiti, but I’m just going to give a few of the examples Robinson offers on pages 200 and 201 of Quitting America.

The U.S. sided with France against the slave rebellion that brought Haiti independence. We then destroyed Haiti’s economy by forcing the country to pay 150 million francs in reparations to French slave-owners for their loss of property (slaves.) We occupied Haiti for nineteen years beginning in 1915, re-enslaving Haitians and leasing over 200,000 acres of land to American corporations – land stolen from tens of thousands of peasants. President John F. Kennedy gave military aid to Dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier. We even provided the murderous post-Duvalier National Council of Government with millions in aid.

But the story doesn’t end there. As Paul Street has noted [2], “A reformist priest named Jean Bertrand Aristide threatened Washington’s vicious neoliberal regime when he won Haiti’s first free election in 1990… Aristide was removed in a U.S.-supported coup in 1991 but returned amidst popular upheaval in 1994. The Clinton White House initially backed the coup regime even more strongly than did George Bush I. Thanks to its rhetoric about ‘democracy’ at home and abroad, the militantly corporate-neoliberal NAFTA-promoting Clinton administration felt compelled to pretend that they backed Aristide’s return to power in 1994. The Clinton Pentagon and State Department delayed that return for two years and made it clear that Aristide’s restoration to nominal power depended upon him promising not to help the poor by offering any further challenges to Washington’s ‘free market’ economics.”

The story continued in 2004 when the U.S. government ousted President Aristide and sent him to the Central African Republic, although as Colin Powell notes, “We did not force him onto the airplane.” [3] I give this lengthy excerpt from a far lengthier litany of crimes to show that Obama’s claim that America doesn’t use power to subjugate others, but rather to lift them up, is untrue. But while America has overwhelmingly been a negative force towards Haiti, Haiti played key positive roles both in the development of the United States and in the worldwide quest for liberty that is as old as humanity itself.

Therefore, the second reason Haiti matters is that in contrast to the image the First World seeks to create for it as pathetic, backward, and incompetent, Haiti is a nation of heroism. When Haiti formed a free republic after the world’s only successful slave uprising, France’s economy was so weakened that it could no longer afford Louisiana (which at the time included Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska, as well as parts of Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and present day Louisiana, and parts of what is now currently Canada.) Thus, the United States was able to buy 828,000 square miles of land at three cents an acre (a low price even for the era) doubling America’s size. In other words, we benefited from the very revolution we opposed. While we have oppressed and impoverished Haiti, Haiti enriched us. While we claimed to represent freedom, we sided with French slave-owners against the Haitian slaves liberating themselves. While we declare ourselves a force for democracy, we support Haitian dictators and undermine or remove their democratically elected leaders. Haiti matters because the nation has never ceased to fight for freedom – despite the huge opposition it faces from us. Haiti matters because the nation shows us the immense gap between who we are and who we claim to be – a hypocrisy they pay for with their suffering.

A third reason Haiti matters is that the country’s most recent tragedy allows the First World to play with language with the audacity of an Orwellian villain. So in Newsweek Obama can say, “it is particularly devastating that this crisis has come at a time when—at long last, after decades of conflict and instability—Haiti was showing hopeful signs of political and economic progress” instead of saying, “it is particularly devastating that this crisis has come at a time when—at long last, after decades of the U.S. causing conflict and instability—Haiti was showing hopeful signs of political and economic progress.” Let’s be clear, if you’re running a race I repeatedly trip you, it’s a bit rich for me to claim you’re “progress-resistant”— to use the words of David Brooks. [4] If I break in your house and steal all your possessions, it would be inaccurate for someone to say that your house is empty because you’re simply poor instead of that you’ve been robbed. If I repeatedly burglarize your house because I’m stronger and it profits me and you can’t fight back, I have no grounds to wonder what innate failing you have that leads to your house being perpetually empty. Nor can I legitimately tell others that if they want to help you have a furnished house they should ignore my past and continued plundering and focus on changing what’s allegedly wrong with you. If I regularly rob you, and those robberies are a matter of public record, it would be silly, to say the least, for your neighbors to wonder, perplexedly, why you don’t have any furniture. If I steal a fortune from you and then give you pennies, it’s ridiculous for me to claim that I’m giving you aid.

A fourth reason Haiti matters is that its earthquake, like all tragedies in heavily black places (see New Orleans), become free-for-alls for racists. Bigots get to ignore all the reasons listed above for Haiti’s suffering and blame anything that comes to mind – from the nation’s religion to its values – for its poverty, sometimes bolstering their arguments with specious sources. They can explain that black peoples from urban U.S. cities to islands in the Western Hemisphere to Africa just can’t rule themselves as though neo-colonialism, globalization, military industrialism, First World backed violence and wars, theft of resources, political sabotage, unjust and illegitimate debts, structural adjustment programs, farm subsidies in Western nations, aid tied to brutal conditions, and other forces are imaginary. People such as the aforementioned Brooks can even claim that what Haiti needs a culture of “No Excuses” – conveniently excusing our culpable nation. Racists can pass on Katrina-style fears of rioting, rampaging blacks, ignoring evidence to the contrary [5] – since, you know, black people get barbaric in a crisis. The benevolent racists get to disseminate or pore over images of helpless black victims and wonderful white heroes. Haiti matters to the prejudiced because the Haitian tragedy allows them to be as paternalistic, cruel, or imaginative with their prejudice as they want to be. They can even blend charity with contempt like Pat Robertson and accuse Haitians of deals with the devil while offering aid.

Speaking of wonderful white heroes, Haiti matters to Bill Clinton. He gets to advocate for Haiti despite his administration’s role in brutally harming the country through its actions towards President Aristide. Despite a résumé that includes helping Chiquita to wreck the economies of black Caribbean banana farmers and suppressing news of the genocide in Rwanda so as not to have to help[6], Clinton has still managed to portray himself as a friend to blacks. Haiti allows him to polish up that illusionary image. Rudyard Kipling would be proud.

Haiti matters to investors. As Naomi Klein explained in her bookThe Shock Doctrine and Jerry Mander and Victoria Tauli-Corpuz observed in Paradigm Wars, what is called “aid” is often promised to poor and desperate governments while tied to terrible conditions. Those conditions include structural adjustment plans and other conditions that force aid receiving nations to, among other things, privatize their resources and infrastructure – so First World corporations can profit from them, remove protections for workers and the environment – so First World corporations can exploit them, spend less on health and education – in order to redirect that money where the lender says it should go, and remove trade barriers – so that First World corporations can export into “Third World” countries, undermining Third World farmers and industry in the process. As you might imagine, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization have aided eighty countries right into worse poverty, damaging their environments and wrecking the health of their populations in the process. [7] These organizations really aid First World nations and their business. So Haiti matters to investors in the guise of aid-bearers now because both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have each promised $100 million loans to Haiti. As Klein has remarked,[8] Haiti is ripe for some disaster capitalism. She gives an example of what to expect by posting some facts on the specifics of post-Katrina disaster capitalism here: Pro-Free-Market Ideas for Responding to Hurricane Katrina and High Gas. What will happen in a country as vulnerable as Haiti is bound to be worse.

On her website Klein quotes The Heritage Foundation as saying, “In addition to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, the U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti earthquake offers opportunities to re-shape Haiti’s long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the public image of the United States in the region.” When The Heritage Foundation, known for putting business before morals when it comes to international relations,[9] realized how blatantly evil it sounded to use another country’s disaster as a PR opportunity and to take advantage of an earthquake to mold a vulnerable nation for the economic and political benefit of America, it quickly changed its internet posting.[10] The new post is entitled “Things to Remember While Helping Haiti.” It was originally called, “Amidst the Suffering, Crisis in Haiti Offers Opportunities to the US.”

In Obama’s article, “Why Haiti Matters,” he says, “In the aftermath of disaster, we are reminded that life can be unimaginably cruel. That pain and loss is so often meted out without any justice or mercy. That ‘time and chance’ happen to us all.” What happened in Haiti was not a matter of “time and chance.” It was a “classquake.” Classquakes are earthquakes exacerbated by poverty. Street quotes Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums, as saying, “”Even more than landslides and floods, earthquakes make precise audits of the urban housing crisis…seismic destruction usually maps with uncanny accuracy to poor-quality brick, mud, or concrete residential housing…” Haiti’s earthquake was a matter of time and chance. The devastation the earthquake caused was not. The devastation that is occurring is due to the country being too poor to have buildings that can stand up to a hurricane and too poor to have the resources to deal with the resulting trauma. Time and chance didn’t make Haiti poor. America did.

Ultimately, Haiti matters for the same reason it has since 1804 – Haiti is our teacher. Haiti teaches us that a group of slaves can take on one of the world’s most powerful empires and win. Haiti teaches us that like peoples, histories are vulnerable to distortion and destruction. Thus Haiti teaches us not to consume media uncritically. And since everyone from the slave-owners to the conquistadors have approached non-white nations claiming they only intend to do good, Haiti teaches us to be vigilant in the face of claims of benevolence. Haiti teaches us to look more deeply. And if we benefit from the lessons Haiti has taught us, as have from the enrichment we have procured from it, from the land its revolution enabled us to acquire, from the unparalleled example of courage it has set for us, then we are responsible to Haiti. We are responsible for overwhelming the television programs, newspapers, internet websites, and other forms of media that twist the story of Haiti with letters of protest and correction until the tale of the island is accurately told. We are responsible for sending resources to Haiti responsibly – and recognizing such transfers of resources as small payments on a very large debt – not aid. We are responsible for standing in watchful solidarity with Haiti as governments and investors seek to profit from its misery. It is not for our nation to tell Haiti what it should become – Haiti has never had a poverty of vision. We are responsible for helping the dream of those tortured and daring slaves who attained an improbable freedom, that dream that now belongs to the descendants of those slaves who elected a humble priest as president, to come true. At a time when the powerful will suggest that further domination of Haiti will actually mediate the damage that First World domination of Haiti has heretofore caused, we are responsible for ensuring respect for the nation’s sovereignty and dignity. Haiti is bravery and resistance and majesty and strength. That’s why Haiti matters.

[1] “Why Haiti Matters,” Newsweek

[2] http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/23640

[3] Ibid.

[4] “The Underlying Tragedy,” New York Times

[5] “Surprising calm as Fort Bragg troops begin patrols in Haiti,” Fay Observer

[6] “US chose to ignore Rwandan genocide,” The Guardian

[7] “EDITORIAL – Criticism of World Trade Organization, World Bank and International Monetary Fund,” BNet
[8] “Haiti Disaster Capitalism Alert: Stop Them Before They Shock Again,” Naomi Klein.com

[9]“Think Tank’s Ideas Shifted As Malaysia Ties Grew,” The Washington Post

[10] “Heritage Foundation Covers Up Its Opportunistic Hopes in Haiti,” Governnmentality

In 1906 Kelly Miller stated, “All great people glorify their history and look back upon their early attainments with a spiritual vision.”

Because the half century of transgender history so far has been predominately written by people who don’t share my ethnic heritage, it has only covered one facet of the story.

We know for example that Lili Elbe was the first person to undergo gender transition in the 1930′s, that Christine Jorgensen in 1953 was the first post-war one that garnered huge media attention, and about the exploits of other transwomen from Coccinelle to Renee Richards to Dana International.

But it’s only in the last few years that the stories of pioneering non-white transpeople have been coming to the forefront. Fortunately, some of those stories were recorded in the pages of our iconic magazines JET, EBONY and Sepia. Thanks to the Johnson Publishing Company agreement with Google that resulted in JET and EBONY being digitized and placed online in their book search feature to peruse, some of those stories are now coming to light.

As a transperson of African descent who comes from a family of historians, I want to know and revel in my history. Just as I’m keenly aware of the varied historical accomplishments of my people, I want to know the same things about Black transpeople as well.

I am one of three African-Americans who has won the IFGE Trinity Award. Dr. Marisa Richmond is the first African-American transperson to be elected as a major party convention delegate for her state. I know that Avon Wilson was the first African-American and first person to go through Johns Hopkins gender program in 1966.

But what irritates me at times is that I don’t definitively know (yet) who was the first African-American person to transition.

I’ve been encouraged lately to see some tantalizing clues surface pointing to an answer to that question.

About the same time that the media was fixated on Christine Jorgensen, an article appeared in the June 18, 1953 issue of JET magazine.

It began following the story across several JET issues of Pittsburgh’s Carlett Brown. Because Denmark’s laws restricted the surgery to Danish nationals, Carlett took the drastic step of renouncing her US citizenship in order to be able to have SRS done in Denmark and have her HRT supervised by Dr. Christian Hamburger, Christine Jorgensen’s endocrinologist.

I’ll have to write up her fascinating story in another post since I’m still reading through more than a few issues of JET to find out how the story ended.

A Sepia magazine article and two 1965 National Insider tabloid articles claim New Orleans born Delisa Newton, who was 31 when she transitioned is that person.

Sepia magazine was a Fort Worth, TX based competitor of EBONY/JET similar in style to Look magazine that published from 1948-1983. The African-American Museum in Dallas, TX has the picture files of Sepia Magazine in its archives.

It seems appropriate that one of the contenders was born in New Orleans. Delisa was billed as ‘The First Negro Sex Change’ in that 1966 article, but they probably weren’t aware of Avon Wilson yet. I’d also have to check with what’s left of the New Orleans transgender community to see if Delisa is still alive.

These are the articles in question pointing to Delisa Newton. I have yet to find those Sepia magazine articles online or see them.

* Delisa Newton. “My lover beat me”. National Insider, June 20, 1965: 4-5.
* Delisa Newton. “Why I could never marry a white man!”. National Insider July 18, 1965: 17.
* Delisa Newton. “From Man to Woman”. Sepia. 1966.

JET also had a small blurb in its March 16, 1967 issue about 28 year old Philadelphian Carole Small. She was working as a female illusionist-singer in Germany and was reported to be in Denmark getting SRS. Assuming she’s still alive, she’d be approaching her 70th birthday.

Carole was quoted as saying in that article, “Black women in America are among the luckiest on the face of the earth and it will be marvelous to be one.”

Your late 20th century-early 21st century sisters echo those sentiments as well. It would be nice for us to know exactly who was our first and hear about how their lives progressed post surgery.

In order to continue progressing toward our glorious future, we must know about our past in order to get a better understanding of our present.

As I keep perusing these older issues of EBONY/JET, I’m discovering they did a much better job of covering gender issues back in the day than I’d been aware of.

We all do it. 

We fall in love with the beautifully enchanting portrayal of the past that we  encounter in novels, historical fiction, and on the big screen. We get lost in the  dashing gentry, the voluminous hoop skirts, the lazy Sunday evenings. This fantasy past, however, is quite far from the reality most of us would have encountered in the “good old days.”

In fact, if I were alive during the long lost past, I would probably be an incredibly unhappy camper.

But there was a time when I could not see the forest for the trees. I would sit there with my classmates penning my “If I were to travel in time…” essays for English class or fantasizing about the Baroque period in Humanities class. I would travel to the deepest, darkest Africa with Cecil Rhodes in my History class. Yet as I got older and became more seasoned in the realities of global race relations, the beauty of the past faded. I knew for sure that no matter how beautiful an outfit, hairdo, or even lifestyle may have seemed, my participating in the nostalgic longing to return to the past was, in fact, an art I had picked up from the privileged.

If I were to go back to any time in American or European history, even the 1980s (Reaganomics….) or 1990s (LA Riots, anyone?) at my present age, I would face considerable challenges as a result of my race. As a black person, I would not be provided the same access to a happy life. It would most likely be thwarted by systematic oppression or social alienation. And with the rights I presently possess, I would not be willing to give those up for even a minute of sipping mint juleps in the antebellum South or listening to a live concerto in 19th century France. The reality is that I would not be welcome.

Nor would many of my friends. My Chinese friends would have been entirely banned from the United States (Chinese Exclusion Act). My Japanese friends would have been suspected terrorists (Japanese Internment). And anyone with a drop of black blood…well, get to hoeing, folks!

I suppose that is the magic of history. We can imagine it as we wish. We can simply ignore the facts in their entirety and craft an imaginary, historical fantasy world catered to our specific interests, in complete ignorance of the plight of well, just about everyone except for wealthy, white, male, straight, Christian landowners.

But, for now, I’ll stay right here in the present and imagine a better future to come.

This weekend, I received the following breathless entreaty through a listserv that I subscribe to:

Ebony/Jet Magazine on The Verge of Financial Collaspse (J P)
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 07:45:31 -0400

One of the most notable permanent fixtures in every black household (back in the days), was the Ebony and Jet magazine. If you wanted to learn about your history, the plight of Black America, current issues facing Black Americans, how the political process of America affects you, how politics works, who the hottest actors were, what time a particular black television show aired, who got married recently, who were the most eligible bachelors and bachelorettes in your town, what cities had black mayors, police chiefs, school superintendents, how to register to Vote, what cars offer the best value for the buck, who employed black Americans, how to apply for college scholarships, etc., more than likely, Ebony or Jet magazine could help you find answers to those questions.

We have recently been informed that the Johnson Publishing Company is currently going through a financial crisis. The company is attempting a reorganization in order to survive. Many people have already lost their jobs with a company that has employed thousands of black Americans during the course of its existence.

In order to support this effort to save our magazine, my friends and myself have pledged to get a subscription to both Ebony and Jet magazine, starting with one year. We are urging every other club member who comes across this plea to do the same. Please post, repost, and post again, to any blog that you may own or support.

Please email this to every person that you know, regardless of their background. Let them know that Ebony and Jet magazines have been part of the black American culture for three quarters of a century, and that there is a lot that they can learn about black American culture from reading them.

We are currently discussing the idea of throwing an Ebony/Jet Party, where people can eat, drink, and sign up for their subscription on the spot. Please spread this idea around to all that you know. Your Sororities, Fraternities, Lodges, VFW Posts, Churches, Civic Groups, Block Clubs, Caps Meetings, Book Clubs, etc.

It would be a crying shame, to lose our historic magazine, during the same year of such an historic event as the election of our first black President of the United States.

Now, like a lot of other black people, I grew up with Ebony and Jet magazines on the family coffee table. I remember fondly sitting in the brown recliner in my grandparents’ back room reading a then-oversized Ebony with Billy Dee Williams, James Earl Jones and Richard Pryor on it. (Don’t know why I specifically recall that issue of the magazine, but for some reason it is one that remains etched in my mind.) I say this to illustrate that these magazines are part of my cultural history. Nevertheless, when I read the missive above, my first thought (after wondering if the message-writer understands that subscriptions generally account for far less of a publication’s revenue than advertising does) was…”Meh.” I’m not so sure that Ebony and Jet, as they stand today, are institutions worth going to the mat for.

To be sure, John H. Johnson, founder of the Johnson publishing empire that produces Ebony and Jet, represents an inspiring success story. When the 27-year-old entrepreneur launched Ebony in November 1945 (Jet was founded in 1951.), he did so in a climate of mainstreamed racial injustice. Black GIs, like my grandfather, were returning from fighting for “freedom” in World War II to find they were less than free at home in America. Real black voices and black life were obscured by stereotype in American media. Local black newspapers, such as another iconic Chicago publication, The Defender, and Johnson’s magazines were among the few places where black people could see their lives and culture reflected and read news important to them. We mattered to these news and lifestyle outlets. Forget the New York Times, these were our publications of record.

Today, Ebony enjoys a circulation of more than 1.4 million, while Jet reaches nearly 1 million people each week. But I suspect neither magazine is as ubiquitous in the homes of my generation of black folks (GenX) as they were for my parents and grandparents. The truth is, like many Civil Rights-era institutions, both publications began feeling irrelevant a long time ago. Yes, black people still need someplace to see their lives and culture reflected and to read news important to them. (Today’s media is much better in covering people of color, but far from perfect.) But are Ebony and Jet the go-to places for that anymore? No, because while black America has changed over the last 60-some years, these publications have seemed largely the same–like museum pieces. I think of them fondly (like my grandparents’ old recliner in the back room), but emphatically not as publications-of-record.

An example of Johnson Publishing’s out-of-touchness? Sunday at the neighborhood Wal-Mart, I picked up a Jet for the first time in forever, in preparation for this post. I wanted to know if it was still there. In an age when black women are fighting stereotyped images of ourselves as Jezebels, playthings and acoutrement for the latest hip hop star whose cuts are banging in the whips of white, teenage suburbanites–it couldn’t still be there. But, yeah, centerspread, there it was–that paean to black woman thickitude–the Jet Beauty of the Week, a young, black woman in a teeny swimsuit giving sexy face. Is this what I’m supposed to rush to the battlements to save?

The forefront of the black communications revolution is now on the Web, where brothers and sisters are breaking news (Jena 6), championing causes and serving up provocative opinions. Ebony and Jet, I think, have failed to keep pace with a world where there is Ta-Nehisi Coates and What About Our Daughters and Racialicious and Aunt Jemima’s Revenge and Womanist Musings and TransGriot and Something Within and Color of Change and Pam’s House Blend and The Root and Black and Married with Kids, and, hell, Bossip. Today, black readers can get superior writing about politics, black life, marriage, parenting, sexuality, pop culture, identity, racism, sexism, spirituality, finance and a host of other issues, for free, everyday, all day, online. The topics covered (or not covered) by Ebony and Jet, the lack of depth in writing, the formats, the frickin beauty of the week, make these publications seem frozen in time, while the world speeds up around them.

Beyond all that, how is Johnson Publishing going to adjust to the new digital age? It’s not the only print purveyor facing this question. Local newspapers across the country need to answer it too. America has changed the way it consumes information, and so far, print media hasn’t found a profitable way to adapt. That’s a shame, because we desperately need the Fourth Estate. We need in-depth reporting. Marginalized folks need these things more than most. God knows that black folks could use the shot to our collective self-esteem that Johnson Publishing’s products offer. But taking extraordinary life-saving measures to rescue publications like Ebony and Jet is merely stalling the inevitable unless ailing publications put strategic plans in place to innovate and evolve.

Look, the older I get the more pieces of my past mean to me. (That’s probably why I spent the weekend watching old episodes of “Columbo,” “Quincy” and “MacMillan and Wife” on Netflix.) But nostalgia isn’t enough reason for me to join the charge to save Ebony and Jet. All the Ebony/Jet parties in the world won’t make a difference if these black cultural icons aren’t making the changes necessary to save themselves.

When Frank Miller’s “300″ film was released, I was absolutely outraged by the racist content of the film and more so at the insensitivity of movie-goers who simply argued “it’s just a movie.” Later on, I would hear these same individuals say, “The movie makes you want to slice up some Persians.” I wrote an article about the film almost immediately after it was released, and now that I’m still noticing people quoting the movie or listing it as their “favorite movies,” I’ve decided to update my original post and discuss some points that will hopefully shed some new light.

“300” not only represents the ever-growing trend of accepted racism towards Middle-Easterners in mainstream media and society, but also the reinforcement of Samuel P. Huntington’s overly clichéd, yet persisting, theory of “The Clash of Civilizations,” which proposes that cultural and religious differences are the primary sources for war and conflict rather than political, ideological, and/or economic differences. The fact that “300” grossed nearly $500 million worldwide in the box office may not be enough to suggest that movie-goers share the film’s racist and jingoistic views, but it is enough to indicate how successful such a film can be without many people noticing its relentless racist content. As Osagie K. Obasogie wrote in a brilliant critique of the film, “300” is “arguably the most racially charged film since D. W. Griffith’s ‘The Birth of a Nation’” – the latter being a 1915 silent film that celebrated the Ku Klux Klan’s rise to defend the South against liberated African-Americans. Oddly enough, both films were immensely successful despite protests and charges of racism.

Media imagery is very important to study. Without analyzing and critiquing images in pop culture, especially controversial and reoccurring images, we are ignoring the most powerful medium in which people receive their information from. A novel, for example, may appeal to a large demographic, but a film appeals to a much wider audience not only because of recent video-sharing websites and other internet advancements, but also because the information is so much easier to process and absorb.

According to the Cultivation Theory, a social theory developed by George Gerbner and Larry Gross, television is the most powerful storyteller in culture – it repeats the myths, ideologies, and facts and patterns of standardized roles and behaviors that define social order. Music videos, for example, cultivate a pattern of images that establish socialized norms about gender. In a typical western music video, you may see female singers like Brittany Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Beyonce wearing the scantiest of clothing and dancing in erotic and provocative ways that merely cater to their heterosexual male audiences. These images of women appear so frequently and repetitively that they develop an expectation for women in the music industry, i.e. in order to be successful, a woman needs to have a certain body type, fit society’s ideal for beauty, and dance half-nakedly. Stereotypical images of men in music videos, on the other hand, include violent-related imagery, “pimping” with multiple women, and showing off luxury. Such images make violence and promiscuous sexual behavior “cool” and more acceptable for males. As we can see from two studies by Greeson & Williams (1986) and Kalof (1999), exposure to stereotypical images of gender and sexual content in music videos increase older adolescents’ acceptance of non-marital sexual behavior and interpersonal violence.

Cognitive Social Learning Theory is another social theory which posits, in respect to media, that television presents us with attractive and relatable models for us to shape our experiences from. In other words, a person may learn particular behaviors and knowledge through observing the images displayed on television. A person may also emulate the behavior of a particular character in a film or television show, especially if a close-identification is established between the viewer and the character. Both theories – Cultivation Theory and Cognitive Social Learning Theory – apply in my following analysis of “300.”

In order to deconstruct “300,” I will start by (1) discussing its distortion of history, then (2) contrast the film’s representation of Persians and Spartans, (3) correlate Frank Miller’s Islamophobic remarks on NPR with the messages conveyed in “300,” and (4) conclude with the importance of confronting stereotypical images in mainstream media and acknowledging the contributions of all societies and civilizations.

Distortion of History

Initially a graphic novel written and drawn by Frank Miller, who is best known in the comic book industry for reinventing Batman in his critically acclaimed “The Dark Knight Returns,” the inspiration for “300” stems from true historic events, although Mr. Miller states that it was never intended to be a historically accurate account of the Battle for Thermopylae. In any case, the information we have about the Battle for Thermopylae comes from the classical Greek author, Herodotus, who lived in the Persian city of Halicarnassus. His book, “The Histories,” became part of Western folklore in 1850, when America embraced it as the leading authority on Persian history. Interesting enough, and many people may not know this, is that prior to 1850, the West had a very favorable impression of the Persian Empire, particularly because its main source for Persian history was rooted in the Bible and the “Cyropaedia,” which was written by another Greek author named Xenophon. The “Cyropaedia” glorifies the rule of Cyrus the Great, a benevolent Persian king who will be discussed later. In respect to the Battle of Thermopylae, the events may have occurred, but it was far different than the famous myth explains: 300 Spartans held Thermopylae for three days against over a million Persian soldiers.

This version of history is portrayed in the Hollywood adaptation of “300” in heavily stylized fashion that remains faithful to the comic book. The film’s director, Zack Snyder, said during an MTV interview, “[t]he events are 90 percent accurate. It’s just in the visualization that it’s crazy.” And yet, the film hardly mentions that the 300 Spartans were allied with over 4,000 Greeks on the first two days of the battle, and over 1,500 on the final day (other sources mention that there were 7,000 to 10,000 Greek allies). The battle was fought in a narrow mountain pass of Thermopylae where not even two chariots could pass through side by side; the choice of using this terrain benefited the Spartans and their Greek allies immensely against the Persians. Many historians agree that the massive Persian army would have obliterated the Spartan/Greek forces without much difficulty if the battle were fought on an open battlefield. Also worth mentioning is the fact that the Spartans were heavily armored and wore armor that weighed 30-40 kg, while the Persians were lightly armored.

Ephraim Lytle, assistant professor of Hellenistic History at the University of Toronto, states that “300” selectively idealizes Spartan society in a “problematic and disturbing” fashion, which would have seemed “as bizarre to ancient Greeks as it does to modern historians.” Touraj Daryaee, Baskerville Professor of Iranian History at the University of California, Irvine, criticizes the film’s use of classic sources:

Some passages from the Classical authors Aeschylus, Diodorus, Herodotus and Plutarch are spilt over the movie to give it an authentic flavor. Aeschylus becomes a major source when the battle with the “monstrous human herd” of the Persians is narrated in the film. Diodorus’ statement about Greek valor to preserve their liberty is inserted in the film, but his mention of Persian valor is omitted. Herodotus’ fanciful numbers are used to populate the Persian army, and Plutarch’s discussion of Greek women, specifically Spartan women, is inserted wrongly in the dialogue between the “misogynist” Persian ambassador and the Spartan king. Classical sources are certainly used, but exactly in all the wrong places, or quite naively.

As I wrote in my post on “The Truth About Thanksgiving: Brainwashing of the American History Textbook,” omitting and ignoring an entire race of people in historical accounts is a form of racism because it negates the achievements and stories of the “Other.” In the film, Persians constantly threaten Spartans with slavery, and yet, any honest historian knows that the Persian Empire, particularly the Achaemenid Empire, was built on a model of tolerance and respect for other cultures and religions. According to the documentary, “Persepolis Recreated,” the Persian Empire is the first known civilization in the history of humankind to practice international religious freedom. Images carved on the walls of Persepolis testify how Persians interacted and conversed with nobleman of other nations respectfully and without enmity. Denying another civilization its own accomplishments and contributions to the world is like blotting them out from history altogether and rewriting one’s own prejudice version. As we will learn later, any mentioning of Persian valor, compassion, and sophistication, would have resulted in a potential backfiring to the film’s agenda.

At one point in the film, the Spartan protagonist, King Leonidas, describes the Athenians as “boy lovers,” which, according to Paul Cartledge, professor of Greek History at Cambridge University, is ironic, since “the Spartans themselves incorporated institutional pederasty [erotic relationships between adolescents and adult men] into their educational system.”

The fact that Frank Miller and Zack Snyder stripped the Spartans of homosexual relations and, instead, made them accuse the Athenians of being “boy lovers” in order to reinforce their masculinity, shows us a distortion of history that favors a heavily masculinized and homophobic take on the Spartans. In modern society, homosexual males are frowned upon the most because society discourages men to behave in ways that are contrary to their expected gender traits, i.e. a man must be strong, emotionless, and courageous – and of course, these play into stereotypes about homosexuals since it suggests they cannot possess any of those traits. Therefore, if a man is a “boy lover,” he can never be as great of a fighter as a heterosexual Spartan. It’s obvious that mentioning the facts about Sparta’s institutional pederasty would not have made a connection with the film’s directed heterosexual male audience. This is evident from Oliver Stone’s “Alexander” film, where many expressed their outrage of Alexander engaging in homosexual relations, therefore never developing a close-identification with the character.

Distorting the history in “300” merely fulfills one component in glorifying the Spartans and vilifying the Persians. In the next section, we will see how the film’s visual representation of Spartans and Persians accompany its biased history for the sake of reinforcing the divide between West and East.

Spartans and Persians: Glorification, Demonization, and Tokenism

Perhaps the most noticeable offense in the film is how the Persians are horrifically depicted as monsters. It is not hard to notice the punctuated differences in skin color: the white-skinned Spartans versus the dark-skinned Persians. The Persian King, Xerxes, is shown as an abnormally tall, dark-skinned, and half-naked madman with facial piercings, kohl-enhanced eyes and, as Dana Stevens from Slate writes, “[has] a disturbing predilection for making people kneel before him.” The rest of the Persians are faceless savages and demonically deformed. This demonization of the Persian race extends to malformed characters, including Persian women, who are depicted as Lesbians and concubines. Even the elephants and rhinoceroses look like hell spawns. Stevens also adds:

Here are just a few of the categories that are not-so-vaguely conflated with the “bad” (i.e., Persian) side in the movie: black people. Brown people. Disfigured people. Gay men… Lesbians. Disfigured lesbians. Ten-foot-tall giants with filed teeth and lobster claws…

Also noticeable is how the Spartans wear no body armor; instead they are bare-chested and wear only a helmet, cape, and underwear. This is common in comic books where physical attributes of male characters such as muscles are magnified and exaggerated to symbolize strength, power, and heroism. In sheer contrast, the Persians are dressed in typical Middle-Eastern attire in pure Orientalist fashion, which only degrade them into invisible and insignificant characters without stories. We have seen these contrasting images of West and East cultivated before, and we still see them today. Whenever a crisis in the Middle-East is covered by the mainstream Western media, we tend to see the images of garbed Middle-Eastern men burning flags and shouting like barbarians, but rarely ever see scholarly and intellectual Middle-Easterners who are treated with respect and credibility. As Jack G. Shaheen discusses in his book, “Reel Bad Arabs,” Hollywood is guilty of vilifying Arabs and Muslims; repeating images of light-skinned and attractive Western (mostly American) counter-terrorist heroes blowing away dark-skinned, unattractive, and “rag-headed” Middle-Easterners. These images have been repeated so much in the mainstream media that they become the socialized norm: Arab/Muslim = Evil, oppressive, terrorist, and uncivilized, etc. Although the ancient Persians in “300” are neither Arab nor Muslim, they are confined into the same group through modern-day Orientalism.

Throughout the film, for instance, the constant emphasis on “The Clash of Civilizations” is not just limited to the manner of visual representations, but rather extends to what the Spartans and Persians stand for. Early in the film, we see the Spartan King, Leonidas, resist against the Persian call for “submission” by bellowing about freedom and liberty. Just like the visual depictions of Persians in “300” are no different than Hollywood’s stereotypical and insulting representation of Arabs and Muslims, neither are the themes. As adolescents and fans alike eccentrically shout the film’s most memorable quote, “This is Sparta!” – a line that Leonidas says right before kicking an African man down a well – they knowingly or unknowingly establish a close-identification with the Spartan characters and, subsequently, the heroism they are meant to epitomize. As a result, Persians get perceived, in modern terms, as “terrorists” – monstrous beings that are mysteriously driven by an innate desire to conquer, slaughter, and oppress.

These differences between Spartans and Persians ring eerily similar to modern-day tensions between the West and the Middle-East. As Obasagie writes, “this racialized depiction of freedom, nation, and democracy becomes central to “300’s” take home message,” but what remains even more unnoticed is the film’s “unapologetic glorification of eugenics.” In the very beginning of the film, for example, we see the newborn Spartans being inspected for “health, strength, and vigor,” while the weak and disabled are hurled off a cliff onto a large pile of dead babies. Obasogie further elaborates:

The film suggests that this rather crude form of eugenics is put in place for military reasons: every Spartan child should either be able to become a soldier or give birth to one… Initially shocked, audiences are quickly reassured that this is all for the greater good: nation, freedom, and the Spartan family. How else can Sparta defend itself – and inspire modern democracies – unless it reserves scarce resources for the strongest?

Strongest men, that is, which brings me to my next point: the exploitation of female characters. A blog post written at FirstShowing.net explains “Why Women Should Go See ‘300.’” The list, which is not even written by a woman, reads: 1. Gerard Butler, 2. Gerard Butler Naked, 3. Empowered Women, 4. Strong Relationships, and 5. 300 Nearly Naked Men with 8-Pack Abs. The author apparently thinks that male eye-candy, romantic relationships, and a dash of “feminism” constitute a “good film” for all women.

At first glance, the Spartan Queen Gorgo may look like an empowered woman, but she is a token character, at best. In a predominately White male film, she serves as the only central female character and assumes a pseudo-feminist role of flaunting her femininity for the sake of reinforcing the film’s racism and singular image of masculinity. For instance, early in the film, the Persian messenger angrily responds to her, “What makes this woman think she can speak among men?” She responds proudly, “Because only Spartan women give birth to real men.” Yes, real men, i.e. the one-sided view of masculinity: aggressive, violent, dominating, muscular, etc. It seems that any man who doesn’t meet these characteristics is not a “real man.” It also seems that Spartan women are treated as merely “manufacturers” of these “real men.”

The mentioning of women occurs enough times in the film to establish that Spartans treat their women “better” than the Persians. The only Persian women we see are sex slaves and disfigured lesbians. In actuality, there were Persian Empresses such as Azarmidokht, who ruled Persia under the Sassanid Empire. Ancient Persian women not only engaged in political matters, but also served as military commanders and warriors. One of the great commanders of The Immortals was a Persian woman named Pantea (pictured left), and during the Achaemenid dynasty, the grand admiral and commander-in-chief for the Persian navy was a woman named Artemisia. Persian women also owned property and ran businesses. Unfortunately, we do not see any such representation in “300.”

A counter-argument may state that Queen Gorgo actually plays a pivotal role in the film since she convinces the council to send more soldiers to aid the Spartans. But her success could never have been accomplished if she did not do what stereotypical female characters usually do: use her body to get what she wants. Queen Gorgo initially tries to convince a corrupt Spartan politician, Theron, but then realizes that she has no choice but to submit herself sexually to him.

As we have seen in this section, the glorified violence, racism, and erotic imagery of the Spartans, as well as the use of women, accentuates their superiority over the Persians, but perhaps nothing can drive the point home more than Frank Miller in his own words.

Frank Miller and Islamophobia

It should be in the interest of those who may disagree with my analysis of “300” to listen to Frank Miller’s interview on National Public Radio (NPR) on January 24th, 2007 (or read the transcript). The interview followed former President Bush’s State of the Union address and is pasted below (emphases added):

NPR: […] Frank, what’s the state of the union?

Frank Miller: Well, I don’t really find myself worrying about the state of the union as I do the state of the home-front. It seems to me quite obvious that our country and the entire Western World is up against an existential foe that knows exactly what it wants … and we’re behaving like a collapsing empire. Mighty cultures are almost never conquered, they crumble from within. And frankly, I think that a lot of Americans are acting like spoiled brats because of everything that isn’t working out perfectly every time.

NPR: Um, and when you say we don’t know what we want, what’s the cause of that do you think?

FM: Well, I think part of that is how we’re educated. We’re constantly told all cultures are equal, and every belief system is as good as the next. And generally that America was to be known for its flaws rather than its virtues. When you think about what Americans accomplished, building these amazing cities, and all the good its done in the world, it’s kind of disheartening to hear so much hatred of America, not just from abroad, but internally.

NPR: A lot of people would say what America has done abroad has led to the doubts and even the hatred of its own citizens.

FM: Well, okay, then let’s finally talk about the enemy. For some reason, nobody seems to be talking about who we’re up against, and the sixth century barbarism that they actually represent. These people saw people’s heads off. They enslave women, they genitally mutilate their daughters, they do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us. I’m speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture, and I’m living in a city where three thousand of my neighbors were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built.

NPR: As you look at people around you, though, why do you think they’re so, as you would put it, self-absorbed, even whiny?

FM: Well, I’d say it’s for the same reason the Athenians and Romans were. We’ve got it a little good right now. Where I would fault President Bush the most, was that in the wake of 9/11, he motivated our military, but he didn’t call the nation into a state of war. He didn’t explain that this would take a communal effort against a common foe. So we’ve been kind of fighting a war on the side, and sitting off like a bunch of Romans complaining about it. Also, I think that George Bush has an uncanny knack of being someone people hate. I thought Clinton inspired more hatred than any President I had ever seen, but I’ve never seen anything like Bush-hatred. It’s completely mad.

NPR: And as you talk to people in the streets, the people you meet at work, socially, how do you explain this to them?

FM: Mainly in historical terms, mainly saying that the country that fought Okinawa and Iwo Jima is now spilling precious blood, but so little by comparison, it’s almost ridiculous. And the stakes are as high as they were then. Mostly I hear people say, ‘Why did we attack Iraq?’ for instance. Well, we’re taking on an idea. Nobody questions why after Pearl Harbor we attacked Nazi Germany. It was because we were taking on a form of global fascism, we’re doing the same thing now.

NPR: Well, they did declare war on us, but…

FM: Well, so did Iraq.

Iraq declared war on the United States? Not only are Frank Miller’s words filled with incredible absurdity and ignorance, they’re also plagued by disgusting prejudice that should raise questions about his underlying messages in “300” and other recent works of his. One of the things I found really disturbing in Miller’s interview was how he suggested that “teaching all cultures are equal” and “every belief system is as good as the next” is a bad thing! What is he implicating here? Are we to teach that certain cultures and belief systems are better than others?

In his next response, he essentially calls Islam “sixth century barbarism,” and then lumps the entire Muslim world into one stereotype. Then he says “I’m speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture, and I’m living in a city where three thousand of my neighbors were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built.” Perhaps someone should educate Mr. Miller that the Islamic empires preserved the beloved Greek philosophical texts by Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras, Ptolemy, Aristotle, and many others. He should also be informed that algebra was invented by a Persian Muslim, Mohammad Al-Khwarizmi. The word English word for “algorithm” actually comes from “Al-Khwarizmi” and the significance of algorithms in computers, programming, engineering, and software design is immensely critical. As stated by Michael H. Morgan, author of “Lost History: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers, and Artists,” Al-Khwarizmi’s new ways of calculating “enable the building of a 100 story towers and mile-long buildings, calculating the point at which a space probe will intersect with the orbits of one of Jupiter’s moons, the reactions of nuclear physics… intelligence of software, and the confidentiality of a mobile phone conversation.” Ironically, the Western achievements that Frank Miller boasts about could not have been possible without the collaboration of civilizations.

Conclusion

As I have written many times in my previous essays, racism is most dangerous when it has been made more acceptable in society. When the Nazis dehumanized the Jews, they did so in cartoons and propaganda films so that the rest of the country didn’t feel sorry about killing them. When early American cartoons and cinema depicted African-Americans, they drew them with ugly features and had White actors wear blackface makeup, respectively. At the time, these obviously racist acts were acceptable. In modern times, when the insulting Danish cartoons of Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, were released, many non-Muslims were too shocked at the Muslim world’s reaction than actually taking the time to realize that the cartoons were drawn out of hate and sheer Islamophobia. Rather than seeing the cartoons as racist or prejudice, many defended it as “freedom of expression.” The manner in which certain people in the Muslim world reacted to the Danish cartoons is another subject altogether, but it’s worth mentioning that their response represents a sensitivity that the West has made very little efforts to understand. For Islamophobes, demonizing the Prophet of Islam wouldn’t be such a bad idea since dehumanizing the enemy is an essential process of war. Vilifying the “Other” makes racial slurs acceptable – slurs like “rag heads,” “camel jockeys,” “towel heads,” “dune coons” among much worse things.

Although the Persians in “300” are not Muslim (the movie takes place in the Pre-Islamic and Pre-Christian era), the visualization of Persians are identical to the stereotypical images we see of Muslims in other media representations. Demonizing the Persians during a time when Middle-Easterners and Muslims are already being vilified simply makes dehumanization of the “Other” acceptable and more recognizable. I remember having one odd conversation with a young man who started his argument by saying, “Xerxes and his Muslim army were a bunch of tyrants.” I stopped him immediately and told him that his ignorant comments are precisely the reason why I raise awareness and accuse “300” of being a propaganda film. Xerxes and his Persian army were not Muslim, yet I saw many people correlating the film with present-day tensions between the United States and Iran. Joseph Shahadi recently informed me, the right-wing party of Italy even uses images of “300” in their campaign posters! It’s sad how many don’t seem to realize that dehumanization of certain groups has dangerous consequences; after all, before the Holocaust, Jews were dehumanized.

“300” may look like a visual breakthrough in cinema “art”, but that doesn’t make up for its blood-spattering jingoism or its racist content. Counter-arguments in the film’s defense are often weak with excuses like, “it’s just a movie,” or “it’s based on a comic book” or “it’s simply meant to entertain.” The counter-arguments are short and weak because the film is unapologetic and doesn’t contain anything sympathetic or appreciative about Persians, their culture, and their history. It would benefit Frank Miller and Zack Snyder if they saw Ridley Scott’s brilliant film, “Kingdom of Heaven,” which explores the complexity of war and celebrates dialogue between great civilizations. Such films are beneficiary to society because they convey much-needed messages of coexistence, respect, and understanding that reach wide audiences.

On a personal note, it is discouraging that so many people, including academics, doctors, and scholars, are either not bothered or don’t see the racism in “300.” And every once in a while, another one of my friends will do the Spartan “Ha-oooh!” chant around me and not realize how offensive it is. The fact that so many people cite the movie and enjoy watching it provides enough support for the cognitive social learning theory, where people find the Spartan characters likable and admirable. It is likely that this may be the reason why so many are defensive of the film – simply because they like the movie so much. But we, as a progressive society, need to be bold enough to stamp our foot down and say we will not tolerate racism, just like we would never tolerate watching or promoting films that glorify the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis. As Dana Stevens writes, “If “300” had been made in Germany in the mid-1930s, it would be studied today alongside “The Eternal Jew” as a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war.”

My personal hope is that people will appreciate this analysis and realize the immense impact media has on shaping our thoughts, perspectives, and views of each other. I would also hope that people are inspired to study ancient Persian history and learn about the countless contributions of the Persians, who were among the greatest philosophers, thinkers, poets, artists, physicians, mathematicians, astronomers, and innovators in the history of the world – before and after the Islamic era. I must point out that almost 90% of the paintings I post on my blog are Persian paintings (compare them with Frank Miller’s horrific depiction of Persians in “300″ and you will understand how upset and offended one can be).

The Arab, Iranian, and/or Muslim communities need to make their mark in the film industry and I cannot stress that enough. The release of “300” angered, but also frustrated me because I felt like I could not respond with a film about Persians due to my low-budget. It is a personal dream of mine to make a “Cyrus the Great” film someday, and I’m sure many of us have dreams of certain films we’d like to see about our communities, but they cannot remain dreams. They must be manifested and brought to life, and only through perseverance, sheer dedication, and passion can we achieve our dreams. As evident in “300,” there are people making a living out of vilifying our cultures, histories, and religions while many of us stand by and watch the propaganda machine do its dirty work. I understand that not all of us are aspiring filmmakers, but to those of you who are: the longer we remain the silent, the less people will know about our beautiful stories.

I believe very firmly that Truth prevails in the end and I have faith that the new generation of progressive-thinkers, Middle-Easterners, South Asians, and Muslims alike are on their way in making a profound difference in our world. Someday, the Middle-East and Muslim world will no longer be demonized and feared, but appreciated and respected. The media has the power to turn tables around in such a way.

Someday…

One of the beauties of surfing the Net is that from time to time, you’ll stumble across a nugget of history or some photo that you weren’t even aware existed.

I’ve mentioned that JET, EBONY and the now defunct HUE magazines when they first started back in the day served as historical chroniclers of the Black experience in America. Google just negotiated a deal in which they will be digitizing pre-1960′s EBONY and JET magazines so that you can access their content on the Net.

One of the things I discovered to my delight is that in order to fulfill their mission of documenting the Black experience, EBONY and JET also covered events and discussed Black GLBT issues.

In addition to asking pointed questions about the Black GLBT experience, they also covered the New York and Chicago drag balls as well.

The other night while searching through Flickr and other places for photos of African-American transwomen for future posts, I stumbled across some African-American transgender history.

Most of it is the coverage of Chicago’s Finnies Ball and the New York ones. I chuckled when I saw the HUE article that asks if you can tell the difference between female illusionists and genetic women.

I also noted the incorrect pronouns and the ‘her’ in quotation marks used in some of the articles.

While it was atrocious in the 50′s, I noted that by the 70′s, JET was doing a better job of discussing transgender issues with accuracy and sensitivity two decades before the AP Stylebook guidelines even were published.

But unfortunately some of the attitudes reflected in those articles are still expressed by some of my people.

Some of my peeps think that me and my fellow transpeople aren’t serious about this path we’re taking, or think it’s a joke.

It’s serious business. Why would anyone subject themselves to the amount of ridicule, physical violence and abuse if they weren’t serious about this?

The other fallacy that keeps popping up is that Black transgender people are a new phenomenon. These articles dating back to the early 50′s and the history of the Harlem Renaissance say otherwise.

(Photo Credit: Ebony, Jet, and Hue Magazines)

Reader Elton sent in an intriguing article from The UK’s Telegraph. The headline says it all:

Charles Darwin’s research to prove evolution was motivated by his desire to end slavery.

The piece explains:

Science historians Adrian Desmond and James Moore have compiled compelling new evidence which reveals Darwin was passionately opposed to slavery and this was the moral impetus behind his work.

Private notes and letters uncovered by the pair reveal that Darwin’s opinions on slavery were far stronger than had previously been believed.

Notebooks from his five year voyage on HMS Beagle, during which Darwin first began to form his famous theories on natural selection, detail his revulsion at the slavery he witnessed in South America.

The historians have also discovered letters written by Darwin’s sisters, cousins and aunts that reveal the family as highly active abolitionists. Darwin’s grandfather and uncles were also key members of the anti-slavery movement.

The pair claim in a new book that Darwin partly chose to highlight the common descent of man from apes to show that all races were equal, as a rebuttal to those who insisted black people were a different, and inferior, species from those with white skin.

When Elton sent in the link, he noted:

A big theory of mine is that the whole “intelligent design”/natural selection debate is deeply rooted in the struggle between those who would seek to extend the white Christian hegemony and those who would seek to dismantle it through science. Unfortunately, the media always portrays it as some dense philosophical debate, without any implications for social power structures.

Thoughts?

Women’s Wear Daily published a “From the archives” feature on the funeral of Dr. King.

While about half of the piece documents the atmosphere and who was there, it also allows a glimpse into the bewilderment and confusion that happened after Dr. King’s assassination.

Amidst the shallow attempts to get a glimpse of the headliners was a very deep sadness and anger. King, a decided pacifist, was often criticized by others in the civil rights movement for being too soft. “They killed the wrong man,” one man said. “Love didn’t work. It’s gonna take some violence now to make these people understand.” So, the opening to Abernathy’s eulogy, broadcast over a loudspeaker perched atop the church, was apropos: “Where do we go from here, chaos or community?”

After his speech and several songs, a procession began from Ebenezer Baptist, passed the Georgia state capitol and ended at Morehouse College. There, Abernathy was joined at the podium by then-Presidential nominee Robert Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney and John Lindsay to speak about Dr. King. By the time King’s casket actually arrived at the cemetery, his funeral had been going for nearly seven hours. He had famously said in February of that year, “I don’t want a long funeral….I want you to say I tried to love and serve humanity.”

According to WWD’s reporter, it took a lot of time to say that.

(Photo Credit: Women’s Wear Daily)

I could never be a real militant. Because there’s no way a real militant would’ve sat through Baz Luhrmann’s latest epic, Australia, which clocks in at a superfluous 3+ hours, and dug it as much as I did. It’s a film rife with knee-jerk infuriation potential. It’s got everything to rankle the revolutionary: racial slurs, a brother taking bullets for Hugh Jackman, an abusive white-on-black relationship, the phrase “I’m as good as Black to those people out there,” and even a little blackface for good measure. But I’ve yet to mention the race-baiting facet that receives the brightest spotlight: the magical Negro (and Half-Negro, as it were) archetype.

From the first frame, a puerile, adorably accented voice works overtime to endear you to what will inevitably be another racist tale of White colonists winning the day. But even so, the charms of that voice are hard to resist–especially when you see the chocolate-drop face it belongs to. Nullah (Brandon Walters) is a biracial pre-adolescent (maybe ten? eleven?), happily living on rundown property called Faraway Downs with his aboriginal mother, a few other servants, and a villainous White rancher named Neil Fletcher. Aboriginal mom, villainous White rancher… you probably already see where this is going.

Enter Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. All you need to know about them is that, by the second hour of the film, Nullah is in their custody and by the third hour of the film they’ve lost him to the desolate Catholic mission camp where all mixed-raced Aboriginal children in a priest’s or policeman’s plain sight were herded, after being stolen from their secure, healthy Aboriginal households. Will the stubbornly feuding, but madly in love Kidman-and-Jackman reunite to reclaim their “creamy” boy, Nullah, by the film’s
bombastic ending?

This is a Baz Luhrmann flick. Come on, fam.

But speaking of “creamy,” Nullah is the butt of a ton of racial slurs throughout the film, the former being chief among them. He’s also called a half-caste, a half-half, a half-breed, and an in-between. He often forlornly muses, “I notta Black guy. I notta White guy,” and seriously, this little boy is an instant cavity; he’s that sweet. And he’s indomitable. The child is nearly killed no less than five times in this film and he never, ever seems at all upset about it… which is fortunate, because if he were prone to depression, his character would have Tragic Mulatto written all over it and, really, in a film this full of stereotypes, we really didn’t need that.

Perhaps Nullah’s obliviously carefree attitude has something to do with his grandfather, King George, known to the White community surrounding him as a Bushman/witch doctor/magic man, who stalks Nullah
throughout the film. They sing to each other in these white-whale-like voices that manage to guide them to safety no matter how screwed up things are—up to and including Japan’s explosive obliteration of Darwin, which King George just stands amongst, never bothering to take cover, looking cryptically around like he’s causing it all, and the foot soldier blasts that ravage the quaint little mission camp where Nullah and all the other “creamy”/half-breed/half-caste biracial babies are housed.

There’s an overabundance of Aboriginal mysticism in this film. King George and Nullah are responsible for everything from calming a charging herd of cattle to finding water in the “Never-Never,” a dust bowl from which no one has ever emerged alive, to preserving the love of Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. The Whites in the film look up to them and/or fear them for their feats, without ever having to consider them equals. Case in point: when King George approaches a renovated Faraway Downs to collect little Nullah for his walkabout, a traditional Aboriginal rite of manhood, Nicole Kidman feels entirely justified in trying to forbid the proceedings. (In the end, she comes around, and the last shot of the show is Nullah pulling off his Westernized polo shirt and trotting into the bush with dear old granddad.)

Oddly, though, even with all this going on, I still adored this large-scale hodgepodge of half-stories. I don’t know what that says about me, except that I’m obviously not a militant. And I have high Baz Luhrmann tolerance—and even higher Hugh Jackman tolerance. Add to the mix a cute little Aboriginal kid whose real life story includes beating leukemia at the age of seven and… well. I, like some of Aboriginal Australia, am one step closer to accepting the Prime Minister’s formal apology for more than a half-century of stealing biracial kids and selling them into indentured servitude. I said one step closer. And it’s a really small step… I just… well? What can I say?

Sappiness covers a multitude of sins.

Much of what people know about historic Native issues has to do with land on some level. Indeed, much of what we are about today has to do with our land also. Our Mother Earth is the ultimate living entity, something that sustains life and guides us as a people. They say that without our land, we are nothing.

Nowadays, the news that is frequently dispelled from our communities if you are involved in any left-learning circles are about things like land claims, environmental degradation and destruction, and the suffering and plight of our people as a result of our Mother Earth being taken away from us. While this is all true and essential to acknowledge that we need land for the people, we also need people for the land. I know for myself that whenever I enter an activist space of some sort, I’m constantly being asked about whatever land struggle that is currently going on in some Native community, to which I’ll often reply “I work in sexual and reproductive health. Do you know the latest statistic on AIDS in Aboriginal communities?”

People ask me this I think for maybe a few stereotypical reasons (like they think that we all know everything about each other and send smoke signals the other way to find out), but mostly because it would appear that these are very key issues for us to be involved in, and in reality, we do need this place for the prophecies of our next 7 generations to come true. While I am still a learner when it comes to subjects like environmental justice and food sustainability, I know I cannot separate myself from my community whatsoever, and these are the simultaneous realities we must deal with when even discussing things like sexuality and violence prevention in our communities. I have to be informed.

We cannot pit one issue on top of the other as being more pressing; it’s all affecting us somehow.

Even my own heroine of heroines, Katsi Cook, from my home community of Akwesasne, a leader in reproductive justice and traditional midwifery, starting the Mother’s Milk Project and the first Haudenosaunee Birthing Centre at Six Nations, is now an internationally renowned environmental activist, who (among many of the other corporate squalors she has exposed in her time) had to simultaneously bring light to the fact that PCBs from the General Motors plant were getting into our fish and waters and gravely affecting the women and the way they birthed babies in my community. This is how I know that as a young First Nations woman, I have to care about all of this at the same time and don’t have the luxury of just picking one sector to be vocal on. I wouldn’t want to anyways.

Interestingly enough however, when it comes to understanding the 7 generations teaching, it’s important to remember that we are actually on number 7 right now. This generation and the people my age and younger are supposed to be the catalysts to effect concrete, positive change and send ripples of transformation throughout our nations to be stronger, better, and to live longer. Ironically when it comes to looking at what is going on with youth across our lands, we are certainly failing them the most.

For example in the US:

• Native American youth represent just over 1 percent of the U.S. population, yet they constitute 2 to 3 percent of the youth arrested for such offenses as larceny-theft and liquor law violations..
• Alcohol-related deaths among Native Americans ages 15-24 are 17 times higher than the national averages. The suicide rate for Native American youth is three times the national average.
• Over 30% of Native American youth do not graduate from high school

And in Canada:

• More than 27 000 First Nations children are in state care
• Aboriginal youth ages 15-24 have the highest rate of sexually transmitted infections in the country
• 40% of Aboriginal youth live in poverty

I won’t even go into how much youth-focused programming and youth-led initiatives are lacking across the board. This isn’t only due to funding and racist constraints from government; this has to do with a lot of older people still not getting it that it has to be about the youth now. You need to give up some of your power and privilege for the next generations to continue on the important work you think you are doing.

But fortunately all around me, I have the privilege of witnessing youth who choose a different path to make both land, social, and health issues a priority for themselves to do something about. They are breaking the cycles of marginalization and standing new ground on their own that is all-encompassing, which is really old ground since they’re being traditional in doing so, and proud of it. And the youth from the Swinomish Tribe who recently starred in the amazing “Match Point” documentary are no exception.

I had the honour of watching Match Point during the Youth Program at imagineNATIVE in Toronto this year, and it aired on PBS’s Independent Lens this past week.

From the imagineNATIVE Voices of Tomorrow film description:

For centuries the Swinomish people have relied on fishing and clamming as a way of life. However, the nearby presence of two large oil refineries has threatened this age-old tradition, negatively affecting the water, land, and overall health of the community. Told through the eyes of three teenage boys, who use humour and candidness to confront the politicians behind the scene, they travel to Washington to make a move about the environmental destruction facing their community. As the boys experience a need to tell their story, they produce an incredibly empowering and youthful coming of age story.

Produced by one of my favourite media companies in the world, Longhouse Media, this was a project of theirs called Native Lens, and it allowed the three young friends to be active together in something after attending drug rehab treatment. I totally relate to their initial groans on “But it HAS to be about the environment?” but in the end, it wasn’t really about the “environment” so much as it was about their culture and survival of their community, which related to every single item going on in their lives, in some capacity. Being green isn’t a new thing for us, it’s who we’ve always been, and where we need to go back to. March Point is a highly effective tool to teach audiences young and old the strength of the youth voice and how important it is to hear, since if there is no one to carry any of this on, what are we’re really all fighting for?

This past summer my partner and I embarked on doing a traditional diet for one week, where we only ate the foods grown on our own territories, in the old way (so yes, that meant no electricity). This came after many-a-late-night conversation on the importance of our culture, how fed up we are about the destruction on Mother Earth, and we decided that if we are going to continue to complain we have to actively do something about it we haven’t done before. We blogged about it here, and it taught us not only about the colonization of foods and the severe impacts to our people, but about being full just from the land, and all that it really means for us as youth who need to continue on for our Nations, both spiritually and physically.

It is my hope to continue to write and learn about these issues on environmental justice and food sustainability in my community, and share with you along the way. But in the meantime I’ll remind myself that I’m not just an Indigenous feminist reproductive justice freedom fighter. I’m Native, and it’s my inherent duty to care about the earth, in every way that I can.

One of the best kept secrets in American health administration is the existence of Indian Health Service.

Unbeknownst to many outside the Native community, our healthcare is actually delivered by the military.

Oh sure, they call themselves the “Public Health Service Commissioned Corps” which is just a nice way of saying they don’t carry guns, but you can bet that you will more than likely receive care from someone dressed in full-out camouflage gear who indeed works for the U.S. Uniformed Services.

How did this all get started? Well for lands seized (read: stolen) the government has a federal responsibility to provide healthcare to Native Americans. After assimilating us and annihilating our culture, the War Department had this duty in 1849. Which was then overseen by the Bureau of Indian Affairs who was responsible for the many abuses and mistreatments that occurred under their umbrella until 1955, when the government thought it would then be a good idea to turn it over to the Department of Health and Human Services.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not really comfortable going to see a doctor wearing army boots in a non-war torn country. Last time I checked, they haven’t exactly been our best friends in the Native community (forcible removal to attend Residential Schools, reproductive trauma from military testing anyone?) I’m also less than pleased being the only race whose healthcare comes like this.

Among the numerous other problems that you can already think of that exist with this kind of oppressive set-up, IHS lacks several necessary services and policies that exist in other clinics and hospitals because as sovereign peoples, we aren’t subject to receive the same things as everyone else.

Sovereignty is supposed to mean governing our own people, on our own land, the way we want to, but in reality it means doing what the United States allows us to do, when they want to. I saw a really good example of this recently in Oneida, Wisconsin when I was reading a posted U.S. government bulletin on minimum wage that basically read “as a federally recognized Indian tribe we don’t have to make sure you get equal pay since you are a separate entity”.

Oh, but how dare we ever try to assert our sovereignty and take care of our own people according to our own ancestral traditions!

Missing links at IHS include sexual assault procedures and some 50% of clinics who lack the trained personnel to administer rape kits, which is so very interesting when you consider our people have one of the highest rates of sexual abuse in the country.

This was all detailed in the latest Glamour article by journalist Marianne Pearl entitled “The Land Where Rapists Walk Free“. (I’d also like to add to that article that the Yankton Sioux reservation where the story takes place had their IHS emergency room shut down in the Spring of this year).

What is more, if you live in a major urban centre, or even away from your home territory, good luck trying to find an IHS you can go to. In California, Native Americans account for the largest “ethnic” poverty group, while there are virtually no IHS clinics in existence to service the more than 70% of people who live off reservation.

I was actually at a conference once where IHS personnel were wondering why some Native youth didn’t want to come in to get tested for sexually transmitted infections to which I grabbed the mic and yelled “Maybe it’s because we can’t trust you!” I mean, are we really supposed to have confidence in the same system that is still colonizing us, more than a hundred years later?

But don’t worry, if you belong to a tribe and work for IHS, you don’t have to wear the military garb.

They’ll just separate the “savages” from the “civilized”.

(Photo Credit: Glamour Magazine)

Long ago, when I was much younger than I am today, my aunt purchased a VHS tape of cartoons for my cousins and I to watch. She quickly removed the plastic wrapper, slammed the cassette into the VCR, and promptly left the room in order to tackle the long list of chores she had that day.

My cousins were toddlers. I was a small child.

I’m sure that my aunt believed that what she had set us down in front of was harmless. And it initially was. My cousins and I laughed at silly cartoons of goofy animals. The images were dated, but still quite funny. And watching them made me feel good.

Somewhere around the middle of the tape, the images changed. The animals vanished. There were no longer quick-witted bunnies or dim-witted pigs. There were black people. Black people that were designed to look like animals. Gargantuan lips. Inhuman noses. Blue-black skin.

Images all based on caricatures designed to ridicule the features of black people. Images that I saw before me.

I cried. I actually cried until I made myself physically ill. But I wouldn’t tell anyone what was wrong.

A few days later I approached my mother and told her that I didn’t want to be ugly anymore. I told her that I wanted to be white.

My mother looked at me and smiled. She told me if I waited in the bedroom for her that she would make me white. I waited, and after a few moments she entered with a bottle of lotion. She spread the lotion out in a thick layer on my legs as if she was icing a cake. My chocolate brown skin began to slip from view.

She stopped after a few moments and looked at me.

“Doesn’t that look silly?”

I nodded as she bent over to wipe the lotion from my legs.

“See? You’re not supposed to be white! You’re exactly how God made you to be. You understand?”

I understood perfectly. God meant for me to be black. He meant for me to be ugly. And I believed that for a long time. Because that’s what the images I had seen had taught me to believe.

I’m actually terrified to have kids. Because it’s inevitable that my children are going to come across the same type of caricatures that I did as a child. Why? Because comic and cartoon fandoms cling to these caricatures and cherish them. They create new ones based upon the older incarnations. They place these images above the basic human dignity of black people. They tell black people that nostalgia is more important than their humanity.

What am I going to tell my child when he or she comes across these images? How am I going to rebuild his or her spirit when the images break it? Because my mother’s initial approach? Did not work. And fandom simply isn’t going to let these images go. They don’t respect us enough to do so.

So, what am I supposed to do?