Your Serving Of Awesomesauce

So, I'm not writing stuff right now. Partly because someone told me I've been incoherent lately (which means that before I move on, I need to go back and polish some stuff), and mainly because I've been working my butt off and don't have time for everything.

So if you're here, and you're white, you need to go to this site:

http://www.counter-racismnow.com/

This site is the closest thing I've ever found to the elusive "magical fountain of knowledge about racism" (at least as it affects black folks.) Each post seems to be part of a coherent analysis of the role that racism plays in the United States' society, and it's fucking brilliant. So read it and learn something.

(Warning: The blog is a VERY straight and cisgender space. The Web site with which the blog is associated, http://www.counter-racism.com is likewise dominated, and particularly in the forum there is a LOT of heteronormative and downright homo/transphobic thinking. I ain't saying these guys are perfect, just awesome.)

Mississippi Goddam

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBiAtwQZnHs

An old video, but one that I expect most young white people haven't seen. The song was written and performed by Nana Simone in the 60's as a protest against recent acts of racist terrorism. More on Wikipedia. The lyrics allude to numerous acts of daily racism, most of which are still committed to this day. It brings a certain depth of poignancy to the struggles of black people that can never be attained through white-produced media.

What Exactly Is Wrong With Mr. Popper's Penguins?

Okay, so it's half an hour until bedtime, my eyelids are about to shut on their own, the indicator lights on my computer aren't working (I'm starting to suspect imminent system failure - time to back up everything and call the Geek Squad) and then, via this post on Shakesville (in a strictly roundabout fashion), I get THIS.

THIS is the trailer for the upcoming Jim Carrey movie, Mr. Popper's Penguins. Oh, Jim Carrey, how I love/hate you. You, sir, are the male Lady Gaga of comedy. I adore you for your aggressive deconstruction of masculinity and yet you can be such a douche.

Okay, time to quit railing on Jim Carrey. I'm not sure this upcoming mess of a movie is entirely his fault.

It would be far too easy for me just to say the trailer is bad. I mean, we all KNOW that. No, I'm going to go beyond the traditional. I'm going to take a 1:25 movie trailer and deconstruct it like a really real critic, because the failure of this trailer is too deep to be appreciated at first glance.

Here we go.

Firstly, a little background information. This movie is based on a 1938 children's book, also titled "Mr. Popper's Penguins," the summary of which runs thus (according to a website I read):

Mr. Popper is a house painter whose dreams of Arctic exploration prompt him to write letters to real explorers. One of them sends him a penguin, which he keeps in the icebox. Before he knows it, the painter has a litter of 12 beaked birds. They eat voraciously, leading him to form Popper's Performing Penguins, a stage act that goes on tour and creates mayhem at every stop.

I like it. It sounds fun. I especially like the sounds of the hero, Mr. Popper. He is a white male adult, but he's also a working-class hero - and as someone whose job prospects so far have involved working for a dairy or cleaning someone's house, I can get behind that. Plus, penguins! I love penguins. And so do kids. This sounds like the kind of book that would probably induce a lot of giggles in small children, and I'm always for that.

Then I watched the trailer.

OH SWEET CREAMERY BUTTER. I'm just going to make a point-by-point list of everything that they've screwed up.

1. Bye-bye, working-class hero! The protagonist of THIS movie is now a Businessman. Not just any Businessman, but THE Businessman. You know, the one whose nice, orderly life is wackily messed up by wacky kids or wacky penguins, forcing him to slide down the slippery slope from his nice, orderly, kyriarchy-approved Businessman lifestyle into total wackiness. Yes, you know the plot. To explain exactly why this bothers me, well, go back to the summary of the book. It's about a guy who doesn't have much, craves something more, and then ends up getting it, if not exactly in the way he expects. It's an empowerment tale. This is the polar opposite of that plot, and one that's been done to DEATH. Classist, please.
2. WHY DID HE NOT RUB HIS CHOPSTICKS BEFORE EATING? Those are the disposable snap-apart chopsticks, you have to rub them to get rid of the splinters! Actually, that's not the question at all. The question is why he is eating with chopsticks in the first place. He's eating what appears to be a pile of raw (possibly frozen) fish chunks. I could be wrong, but my racist-dar is detecting the good ol' "sushi = raw fish" misconception, straight from the minds of People Who Didn't Give A Shit Enough To Stop Perpetuating This Stereotype. Yeah, you know the guys. Because sushi is raw fish and also Japanese food and you eat Japanese food with chopsticks and yeh.
3. "PENGUINS! YES!" This is not a complaint. This was the highlight of the whole trailer. That kid captures everything that this movie SHOULD be, and probably isn't.
4. "Word." Just "Word." Also the song played at that point in the trailer. Once again, black culture (outdated black culture at that) is treated with this cavalier "isn't this what kids are into these days?" attitude. You throw it in there for cool points, "street cred," if you will. Never mind the fact that while WHITE kids who are into black culture are harmless and easily dismissible (even profitable!), BLACK kids who are into black culture are ghetto and 'hood and OH MY CORNPUFFS THEY ARE SO FUTURE CRIMINALS. Punish them for inventing the culture, then co-opt it for profit. Oh, Whiteness, I've missed the sweet sound of your asshole emissions.
5. Speaking of that dance, Dick van Dyke did that decades ago and it was... well, I was never crazy about it but it was STILL more charming than this, mainly owing to the omission of Jim Carrey's increasingly creepy-ass face. DUDES. Stop putting him in children's movies PLEASE.
6. Oh, and out of three (nine if you count the penguins) characters, there are absolutely no women in the trailer with a speaking role. WHY IS THAT.

I won't bother asking why he feeds them at the table or why there is snow in his house, because it's a kid's movie, and I'm not that much of a dick.

Oh, yes, Pokémon Black & White is racist.

(I went back and forth on this one for a while, trying to figure out whether to do it or not... I need to call this stuff out, but do we really need another white guy talking about racism? Etc. But it's got to be done, and since I'm a pretty big Pokémon player at the moment, I may as well do it.)

There were a lot of jokes going around when Pokémon Black Version and White Version were first announced. In America, the term "black and white" is practically synonymous with the race divide (as well as a particular damaging way of viewing the world, but that never got brought up), and a lot of people would going around saying things like "Black and White is racist!"

It was ridiculous and untrue. The names "Black and White" have very little to do with the race makeup of the game, and much more to do with the concepts of Yin and Yang, nature versus technology, and general color schemeyness. Still, I admit when I heard the title I had a sinking feeling that this was going to be awkward... and boy, was I right.

It started when it was announced that Pokémon Black and White would be the first game to feature a black gym leader: Aloe (Lenora in America), the "Natural-Born Mama." I cringed as soon as I saw that, and her character design was no better: a wide-hipped woman with a big cloth hairband and an enormous apron draped over her front. Apparently the character designer thought it would be a good idea to design the first black woman in the games after a mammy.

And it doesn't get better. The next black character to be introduced is Iris, another gym leader. She, at least, does not appear to be based on a racist stereotype (though I could be wrong). And despite being a young girl, she is the most powerful Gym Leader that the player faces in White Version.

But...

In the anime, Iris is depicted as a "wild child." She roams around the wilderness and swings on vines to get from place to place. To compound how savage/untamed this character is, she lets her Pokémon live in her hair. This isn't the first time a game designer has done this - a recent Final Fantasy title featured a black man who raises chocobos and has a chick who lives in his hair. It seems to be popular opinion in Japan that natural black folks' hair is no better than an animal's nest. This isn't cute. It's disgusting. Equally as disgusting is their choice to play on the "untamed animal" stereotype for the character.

In the Black version of the game, Iris doesn't show up for very long, so you'd think they wouldn't have time to mess up... aside from the GLARINGLY OBVIOUS problem of "she spends most of the story arc babysitting a white/Asian girl whose Pokémon has been stolen." Yep, when poor Bianca is just too fragile to handle things on her own, Iris steps in to hold her hand through the ordeal. Which is not positive. It is racist.

Also, Iris is only available to fight as a gym leader in White Version. In Black Version, the final gym leader is Drayden... a white guy. Ho-hum.

The third black character is Marshal, a member of the Elite Four and the only black man in the Unova league. The first time I saw this guy, I got a pretty good of impression of him - he didn't seem to draw directly from a specific stereotype. Now, I'm not entirely sure. He uses Fighting-type Pokémon, and is depicted as a large, beefy brawler, which is par for the course with Fighting-type users, but it's also a common feature of black men in white entertainment - the thug or the soldier or prizefighter or whathaveyou. (I will point out that there is a lot of difference between a prizefighter or a soldier and a member of the Elite Four and master of martial arts. Namely, honor. But it feels suspicious to me anyway. Put this one down as a "maybe.")

Discussing this issue with a friend the other day, she and I agreed that the best way to start diversifying a game is in the non-League NPC's - the guys who just sit around towns and routes waiting to be fought. See, you can add in some Gym Leaders and the like and that's great, but unless they're also being represented in the general population, they become an exception, even an import, and are made foreign as a result.

Nintendo made some efforts in this regard. Firstly, the male backpacker sprite was given black-race-hair (although the character himself has fair skin, meaning he's probably mixed race, which is fine too.) And they added two black trainer types to the game: Dancers and Football Players.

Yes. The mind boggles.

Clerks? White or Asian. Fishermen? White or Asian. Female backpackers? White or Asian. EVERY CHARACTER TYPE WHO ISN'T A DANCER OR A FOOTBALL PLAYER? White or Asian.

They didn't even make any black cops.

In case I really need to point it out, this is another stereotype put into action: the idea of black physical prowess. Black men in Pokémon Black and White consist of excellent dancers, athletes, and one martial artist, period.

Oh, and Lenora and Iris are the only two black women in the game.

Now, I would be remiss if I said there weren't some good points as well. They're just not at the forefront of my mind, usually, because HOLY COW IS THIS GAME RACIST.

Mainly it centers around Lenora, because I've only seen a little bit of Iris and I'm not far enough in the game yet to see what Marshal is like. So we'll see what they did with her.

Firstly, in the American release (and in response to criticism from black Pokémon fans and allies), Lenora's description is changed from "Natural-Born Mama" to "The Archaeologist with a Backbone." And this makes many kinds of sense, since Lenora is, in fact, an archaeologist. Which brings me to my next point: aside from her design, Lenora is one kick-ass character. She's the lead archaeologist in Nacrene City. She has a significant participating role in a storyline that you have to play through in Nacrene before you can leave the city. She owns the museum. She's smart and in a position of power (as a Gym Leader.) And she is happily married to one of the researchers who works at the same museum (a white/Asian guy, of course, but she IS in a happy, monogamous relationship.)

In other words, she's one of the few black female characters I have ever seen that I feel like black children could be exposed to without the kick-in-the-teeth that accompanies so many portrayals. Now, I could be wrong - there could be something I've missed, and of course there's still the nasty role of explaining the "mammy" clothes, which could be more harmful than I'm giving it credit for. (Which makes me wonder how many white parents aren't explaining to their white kids what Lenora's outfit means. But then we're getting into "teaching tool" territory, and that's a subject for another post.)

Also, for once none of the black characters are criminals.

A final point: so far, I've limited this discussion to how the game treats two recognized races: black and white/Asian. And aside from the black/white mixed-race backpackers and an ambiguously tan male Psychic (who might be mixed race of any kind, Latino Mexican, indigenous North American Filipino, southern Japanese, or anything else you can think of) these are the only two racial groups depicted in the game. Meanwhile, the myriad of other races that comprise the visual and cultural makeup of the United States (and particularly New York, on which the Unova region is based) continue to be erased.

(By the way, I refer to the majority race in Black and White as white/Asian because the way these characters are typically seen is largely dependent on where the game has been released - the average Japanese player is going to see them as Japanese, whereas the average European-descended player is going to see them as European-descended, and the artists went to absolutely no effort to make a distinction between the two. Also because the region is based on an American location rather than Japan, so there's no way of telling which the artists intended.)

I could've sworn...

For a minute there I was in an alternate universe where everything was peachy and random cis celebrities were acknowledging I existed and life was good. Then I listened to the song again, and I could've sworn that when I listened to it the first time trans people had their own stanza, but there they are tacked on the end of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual, and she doesn't say anything at all about asexual or pansexual folk.

Then I learn about everything else Lady Gaga has done.

Fuck you, Universe. FUCK YOU. THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS. And fuck you, Lady Gaga, for doing this shit and then making yourself out to be an ally to the point where I was fooled. You made me feel loved, you made me feel wanted, and then this pops up. I am SO not taking this shit.

I am very, very angry today.

In my state, we have a sizeable Latin@ population. Mostly descendants of Mexicans. A lot of these Mexican-descended people are lower-class - you can tell, because they make up between ten and twenty percent of the local population but until the economy crashed they made up a sizeable population of the people shopping at Wal-Mart (yet were almost never seen at Costco or Fred Meyer).

The other day, while my mother and I were shopping for groceries, I stopped to look at a stand of Valentine's Day cards (or Singles Shaming Day cards, whichever you like). I discovered that all of the cards that depicted humans were showing peach-skinned people (to no surprise on my part). I pointed this out to my dear white mother, who immediately informed me that (to paraphrase) "they probably get the cards in from somewhere else where they don't have that population; I doubt they have any control over what they get in."

Later, my sister remarked that if I asked the store employees (again, to paraphrase), "they'd probably tell you that they have the cards with animals for the non-whites."

I've been thinking about this today, and I'm still mad.

• I'm mad because my low-class, brown, yet straight neighbors - be they Mexican-descended or any "other" race, can't afford to shop at a store that actually cares enough about them to represent them in the merchandise.
• I'm mad because that's exactly what the damn store employee would say.
• I'm mad because if I want to get a card for me and my hypothetical significant other, I have to fully transition (whatever the hell that means - T, chest surgery, phallo) and spend the rest of my life with a white woman; any other possibility rules me out of the group. And if I didn't toe the line in relationship terms, and complained about the lack of cards representing us, someone would point me to the animal cards. And it's the same way for most people in queer relationships, regardless of their skin color. For the same reason that they won't make cards with brown people for my non-peach, but straight neighbors - THEY ARE BIGOTS.
• I'm mad because, when I shop for cards, I can expect any card that shows a man dominating a woman to be "funny" in a "yuk-yuk, he's in charge, all right" way and any card that shows a woman dominating a man to be "funny" in a "yeah, my wife walks ALL over me, too - why can't she do everything I want?" way. NEVER MIND the lack of same-sex and/or brown people cards depicting this, much less in a positive light.
• I'm mad because anyone in a committed relationship with more than one person, even if they are peach-skinned and heteronormative, can give up on finding ANY card representing them, even if they're white. Even if they're rich. Not even the animals. Heck, if they tried to get a custom job done they would risk gross-out reactions, bigotry, and potential threat to their physical selves.
  
• I'm mad because if I complain about this to someone who doesn't have any problems finding people like them on greeting cards, I can expect to be answered with "Well, I can't find people who look just like me, either," (i.e., HAVE THEIR EXACT FACE) or "So just don't get one with people on it," or (class privilege a-comin') "So just make a custom card with your faces on it. That would be romantic." LIKE AS IF I OWN A PRINTER.
• But I'm mainly mad because my straight brown neighbors who shop at Wal-Mart are a VISIBLE DEMOGRAPHIC, and a not insignificant one, and Wal-Mart puts out its merchandise like they don't even exist. My non-heteronormativity (and that of my neighbors of all colors)... well, I know that they actively hate it around here. And yeah, that pisses me off, but the failure to acknowledge brownness, specifically, feels like they don't even care. WHY THE FUCK DO YOU NOT CARE. Owait. Because white people all around you keep telling you how demanding those brown folks are and how ignoring them is the best way to deal with racism. Yup yup.
• The cards depicting fat people aren't exactly charitable, either. We're either slobs or we've somehow "fallen apart."
  

GUYS.

I have a friend, a woman incidentally, who is always finding gray smudges in her house. On the walls, on the refrigerator, in the food. It's no mystery how they get there - her husband works with vehicles and he's always coming home with filthy hands because he's something of a slob.

Nothing weird there. Nope, nope, nope.

But my friend is ALL the time bitching about these "black" smears. Hubby comes home, his hands are "black." Touches the cheese with dirty hands, the cheese is "black." Smears gray stuff on the front door, the door is "black."

This kind of microaggressive behavior falls into a pretty gray area. Even a lot of black people are hesitant to say whether this is really problematic, because it's so commonplace and nobody really thinks that black skin = dirty, do they? (At least, not anymore... not most of them, anyway.)

I'm going to stick my white foot out here and say YES, this is problematic. YES, calling something "black" when it is dirty will breed racial prejudice. For exactly the same reason that calling something "gay" or "retarded" when it is wrong, meaningless, or just plain unliked breeds prejudice. Calling something "dark" when it is, in fact, morbid or morally wrong breeds prejudice - how can we associate darkness with things we are afraid of and not become afraid of things that are dark?

If my white audience isn't convinced, picture this - a small, black child listening to my friend, or any other human adult in earshot, exclaiming "This is black! It's disgusting!" Remembering what my life was like as a fat child, I can guess how xe would feel. Unclean. Unwanted. A burning urge to jump in the bathtub and scrub xis blackness away so that xe could be clean and white and right. The idea of putting a child through that kind of identity trauma is nearly enough to give me flashbacks to my own.

It's not harmless, it's not meaningless, and the kid sure as heck isn't going to figure out that when you said it you didn't mean "black-black." So please, for the sake of a child's innocence and self-worth, KNOCK IT THE FUCK OFF.

So, It's Black History Month.

The one time of year when talking about black folks' suffering in "the mainstream" doesn't make you PC or oversensitive or whatevs. And, according to Renee of Womanist Musings, white people spend loads of time talking about the bad stuff we used to do to black people and isn't it nice that we don't have to do that anymore.

At the risk of making it all about white folks, aren't we a bunch of douchebags. (I use "we" in the loose sense, not the literal sense, though I have plenty of douchyness to account for.)

At the same time, I feel like I can't pass up this opportunity to bring awareness to a form of history that is often forgotten (or believed not to exist), inasmuch as the alternative for me is to erase it even further. So here are a few things to get white brains going in a less self-absorbed direction:

Womanist Musings: Why I Am Skipping Black History Month
Womanist Musings: Black History Month
Womanist Musings: Cotton Picking Day
Womanist Musings: Black History Month For Sale
Womanist Musings: Jim Crow Renaissance This Is Celebration?

Blaque Ink: Black Adversity: The Opposite Of White Privilege
Womanist Musings: For Rent: Whites Only
This one's so about white people: Love Isn't Enough: How to Be An Anti-Racist Ally
TransGriot: What You Don't See Is As Important As What You Do See
TransGriot: 'Reverse Racism' Are White Racist Words
TransGriot: Renee's Rule

These are a few posts that share some of the basic concepts of racism as it exists today - equally as important as black history. And remember, social justice isn't just for one month. It's an all-year thing. So read these posts, then bookmark the sites for later and keep on reading. I may not look like it because I prefer not to blog about race issues (being racially privileged, I'm not exactly qualified to comment) but I spend a good chunk of my off-time doing just that.

The Owner's Manual To Your White Brain: An Intro

That's right, guys. A manual. To YOUR White Brain.

Well, we need one. I sure as heck didn't know how to run mine when I first started trying to understand racism, so it's a foregone conclusion that anyone else who's just started doesn't, either. In addition to the aforementioned fuckup, I've gone through so many dumb ideas and misunderstandings and complete failures to figure out what people are saying that it finally hit me: white people probably don't need to learn as much about racism (in the first few months of their education) as they need to learn how to learn about racism. It's not something that can simply be conveyed through memes and quick ideas (though I do love me some memes), nor is it something that can be understood just by knowing the facts that it is made of. It is something that has to be felt, as close as the white brain can possibly come to grokking it. Unfortunately, you cannot tell someone to feel something and cause them to feel it. You have to communicate in the right way, and sometimes they just won't get it until one day it sinks in and then they're going to wonder how the heck they could have been so stupid.

What I want to do is provide a resource for white people to start untraining themselves without making a mess all over PoC's work space - an online workshop, if you will. I'll be staying away from buzzwords - which newbies tend to stare at befuddledly before wandering off for a game of checkers - and relying on allegory, the resources I have found that have helped me to get it, and parables. (Unlike Jesus, I will not make fun of people if they fail to understand them.) During the process, I hope to draw from and bring light to the work and resources of people of darker persuasions (and their pale allies, as relevant), without whose efforts I would still be completely clueless.

I cannot teach someone about racism. I can only teach them how to learn about racism. And that, I hope, will be worthwhile.

I Fucked Up

What else is there to say? I fucked up.

I'm referring to an earlier post, "Criticism of the SWPD Community." There I ranted about how every time I wandered into a thread I found someone rageing about whatever I happened to be thinking about, calling it a white thing and (in my mind) accusing me of being some kind of savior and yadda. So I wrote a lengthy, ranty post on it.

Maybe I needed to write that post. I'm sure the catharsis at least helped me to get through that phase so I could eventually get to somewhere more stable. Doesn't matter. The fact is, it was a bad reaction. See, there is a lot of rage in old posts on SWPD. Rage directed against white people and their fuckeduppitude toward POC. And when I read those posts, I ended up absorbing that rage and feeling like it was directed toward me. And then I took it out on the writers, who I don't think really deserved it.

So, I fucked up.

Question is, what am I going to do about it? Well, the one thing I can do: use my fucked-up white experience to try and prevent further fuckuppitude in the future. How? Well, the takeaway lesson from this experience is that there's a lot more to Anti-Racism 101 than a single blog post or epiphany. I thought that since I'd read the post I was off too a good start, but all I had was a bad case of Novice Disease. I learned that breaking yourself of whiteness, no matter how good your intentions are, how smart you are, and how well you think you've got it, takes more than a few minutes of shock followed by a few days of radically rethinking your worldview.

BIG SHOCK, right? I know, I read that from people of multiple races. But I thought I was different. I thought I was getting it. That's something that a lot of white folks tend to do: assume they're getting it. Of course, assuming you're getting it + a safe space to blather about whatever you're supposedly getting without criticism or even a capacity to understand why you might deserve it = fail.

Starting now, I'm going to try and fuck up less. I've realized a lot of things that I think are going to help. I'm also going to try and turn my biggest disadvantage - my fucked-up white brain - into more of an advantage. I've figured out a few things, and I think that if I can explain them in a way that the white brain is actually capable of understanding, I can do some good. So I'm going to start there.

I'm really sorry, guys. I can only imagine that any POC who read that post (if any of them read it - I rather hope they didn't) were gobsmacked, disgusted, and probably enraged by the sheer amount of fuckedupittude. I don't blame you. And I expect any future readers to be good and cynical about what I'm about to do next.

(On the other hand, if you have no idea what I'm talking about and this post looks like so much existential baloney, feel free to ignore it.)

Y'know what really pisses me off? Tsu'tey.

I know, I know. With all the things wrong with Avatar (White Savior Syndrome, the portrayal of Native Americans/Na'vi as amazing and powerful super-nobles who just don't have enough chutzpah/imagination to rescue their own sorry asses, yadda) I pick Tsu'tey, of all things, to bitch about. Why?

Well, I'm a writer - one that loves well-developed characters characters. And despite all the changes L.A.'s had, there's one thing our gold-rush pioneers in Hollywood are still good at doing in spades: pissing on tertiary guys, especially brown/blue ones. Case in point, Tsu'tey.

Who is this mysterious blue man? Well, according to the movie, he's a Na'vi warrior in Ney'tiri's tribe. Nobody knows where he came from, what his credentials are, or how he is in any way relevant to the plot - all we know is that he is engaged to Ney'tiri (what is with those apostrophes?) and slated to become the next tribe leader. Throughout the movie, he does such pivotal things as (1) standing around staring disapprovingly at Jake, (2) teasing Jake, (3) losing his fiancé to Jake, and (4) dying so Jake can take over the tribe.

WHAT THE FUCK.

I'm sure some people don't see why this is a problem. Y'know, every story has characters that aren't integral to the plot. They're there to give it some depth, y'know, make it look like there's an established world. They don't have to do great stuff.

Not Tsu'tey. He doesn't exist to give the story additional depth. He exists so that Jake can take everything he has.

I'm not even kidding. In the beginning, Tsu'tey is betrothed to Ney'tiri, the totally hot catgirl who ends up helping Jake out. It's stated that she's engaged to him. Jake is warned away from hitting on her because of this. Tsu'tey mocks him constantly and tries to get him killed because of this. Because of this, and the fact that they're supposed to be the next leaders of the tribe, you get the general idea that there engagement is kind of a big deal.

And then what happens? One day, without warning, Jake and Ney'tiri just go off and get laid/married. There's no explanation as to why this is suddenly acceptable. Jake just hits on Ney'tiri, and she's like "Oh, fuck tradition! I like you, let's get hitched." I'm all for her having the choice, but it pretty much flies in the face of all the setup about her Very Important Engagement. And what does Tsu'tey do when he sees them the morning after their wedding night? He's indignant for all of two seconds and then he's like "Hmph, whatever," and walks off.

I don't know about you, but I'd be pretty damn pissed if my FIANCÉ went and married someone else and didn't even TELL ME and I didn't find out until I walked in on their honeymoon. So what's with Tsu'tey? Maybe he didn't care because they didn't actually like each other that much (Hollywood Rule: Arranged = Loveless), but we never find out.

Okay, so what else does Tsu'tey do? Well, he becomes temporary leader after the old one dies, and he translates for Jake when addressing the other Na'vi, and then... he dies. That's it, that's his big accomplishment. It's a hugely badass scene, and it does end up saving everybody, but... well, let's just say he's not getting the girl.

Like I said, he exists just so Jake can take all his stuff. Take him out, and nothing would change in the plot (except Ney'tiri's dad would have to live a while longer). He is nothing more than a colossal "fuck you" to the Na'vi - a way for Jake to appropriate their things for his own benefit while Cameron appropriates the Natives' for his, and making it okay by giving his half-assed permission. And he's badly written to boot.

The way I see it, that "translate for me" exchange can only be interpreted two ways:

SULLY: Brother, please accept my asking you to translate for me as appropriate recompense for my stealing your girlfriend.
TSU'TEY: I absolutely consider your cheap token of respect to be equivalent to your phenomenal token of not giving a damn about my people or their traditions.

Or:

SULLY: Brother, please accept my asking you to translate for me as appropriate recompense for my stealing your girlfriend.
TSU-TEY: What, Ney'tiri? You can keep the bitch. Hell, I owe you for taking her off my hands.

Strangely, the least potentially canon option is also the most plausible. It could have been an interesting plot twist, but JC doesn't even give us that.

Rethinking This Whole "Racism" Thing

Between Tim Wise and Noel Ignatiev, I've been doing me some thinking.

And I'm thinking they're right. (I know, I know... I think the white guys are right, what a concept.) I do think that attempting to disclaim whiteness when dealing with PoC is an utterly stupid idea, because the only thing it could possibly accomplish is to disenguilt the pale people of their connection to and at least former complacence in racism - not a good idea. So if a PoC refers to you as white, live with it.

On the other hand, what good does it do for you to identify as white to white people? 90% of the time, the only thing it will do is get you privilege. If you're very careful - if you make it pointedly clear to everyone you interact with that while you may be white, you are against racism - you may lose a tiny bit of that privilege, but still, "not playing by the rules" is a more forgivable offense than "not being white."

Many PoC have used the phrase, "The master's tools will never demolish the master's house." While I sort of grasped the general concept of "your oppressor will never try to help you unless he can do so without undermining himself," it has become clear that there is more meaning in it. In some countries - and certainly in the United States - being white is like being a member of the Catholic Church.

For those who haven't had the displeasure of being an ex-Catholic (or read about someone having the displeasure of being an ex-Catholic), here's how it works: Every person born into a Catholic family is baptized into the church as a baby. They go through the ceremony, get wet, yadda, and get their name enrolled in the Church's records. And in most cases, your name stays there for life. Even if you apostatize, even if you swear off everything your church stands for, even if you become a dedicated Satanist for the rest of your life, unless you fight tooth and nail to get your name taken out of the roster (and sometimes even then), you are counted as a member of the Catholic Church. This wouldn't be too bad if it was just a clerical issue - whoever's in charge of your new religion probably doesn't care what some fusty old church has to say, particularly if you've become an atheist - but it's not. Instead, the Church will use their artificially bloated member list at every opportunity to try and get power. You don't think Catholic law should become dominant in a given country? Look how many card-carrying Catholics there are in that country! Want to prosecute the Pope for complacency in child rape? You're going after a nation, and I have the papers to prove it. (This is the really insidious part: even Catholics don't have a say in how they're represented. Even if they hate the Pope. Even if they approve birth control or would like to sell the Vatican and use the proceeds to buy food for the hungry, their names still get used to back up the very things they oppose.)

Likewise, when you have the right set of genes to be assumed white and don't do anything to make people think otherwise, even if you don't agree with the principles that Whiteness has dropped on the country, you will be used to support its principles. Answer "White" on racial surveys? Politicians will point to the enormous white majority to justify racist laws. Be yet another pale face in your social circle? Somebody will think of a racist joke to "share," and they won't hold back on your account. Even arguing your innocence of a speeding ticket could cause a problem - the cop might give it to you anyway, or he might let you off and go home feeling happy and secure that he's helped out another innocent white person.

The Master's tools may not destroy the Master's house, but the unfortunate fact is that this concept of white supremacy will not be destroyed as long as us pale people remain complacent. A hundred well-read, well-argued, and intensely frustrated voices of color can explain the problem over and over again, but as long as white people believe that the pale are all on their side, most of them are never going to listen to them. This isn't fair, it isn't right, and it's supremely racist, but it's a fact. And us pale people - be we racially "white" or not - are in a unique position to do something about it.

But am I saying that the pale hold the sole power to end racism? Hardly! This is only one facet of anti-racism work, and it does not happen a vacuum. People like Noel Ignatiev and I have only come to realize this was even a problem because of the hours of hard work from PoC. And even if the white majority can be made to stop believing in the sanctity of the white race, that effect will not dissuade them of the inferiority of other races. Nor can it end oppressive lawmaking, increased poverty in communities of color, and many other issues that PoC face. In many aspects, PoC have and will continue to take the lead, with white/pale people assisting as is necessary and beneficial. This just happens to be one issue (possibly the only one) that pale people, specifically, must fight on their own.

RACE TRAITOR: The Point Is Not To Interpret Whiteness But To Abolish It

I just finished reading this fascinating talk on abolition. Rather than fighting racism from a white standpoint, Noel Ignatiev suggests that white people might do better to actively defect from the so-called "white race," effectively destroying the validity of white supremacy by making it a class/culture issue rather than a skin color issue. It's a fascinating idea, and it does fit with some thoughts I had also had on the subject, and particularly in light of Tim Wise's talk I believe it deserves some consideration. I admit that it appeals to me mainly because it requires so much sacrifice on the part of the white ally - there is no way to have your cake and eat it too if you follow this principle correctly. It is my feeling that I cannot possibly go wrong by taking the steps outlined, although I will have to read and find out how persons of (other) color feel about it and take their viewpoint into consideration as well.

In any case, it's a fascinating read. It's also a good litmus test for the budding anti-racist - if the idea of forgoing your white identity seems offensive or unthinkable to you, you need to keep working.

MUST SEE: Tim Wise on White Privilege

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3Xe1kX7Wsc

Full transcript:

'Cause if you know the history of the whole concept of Whiteness, if you know the history of the whole concept of the white race, where it came from and for what reason, you know that it was a trick - and it's worked brilliantly.

See, prior to the mid- to late-1600's in the colonies of what would become the United States, there was no such thing as the white race - those of us of European descent did not refer to ourselves by that term, really ever, before then. In fact, in the old countries of Europe, we had spent most of our time killing each other. We didn't love each other; we weren't one big, happy family. The side of my family that comes from Scotland, hell, they didn't even worry about fighting people outside of Scotland. Highlanders and lowlanders just fought the hell out of each other. So there was no white race, but in the colonies of what would become the United States, what did we see in the 1660's-1670's? We began to see that Africans of indentured servant status (many of them not enslaved yet, they were not necessarily permanently enslaved; some were, others were indentured like many poor Europeans for periods of seven to eleven years - they could work off their indenture and then they would be free labor, technically) realized, as did the white indentured servants, the Europeans (who hadn't even been called white yet) that they had a lot of things in common, like the fact that they were all getting their clock cleaned by the elites. And so they would get together, more than our history books taught us. To fement(?) rebellion against the elite, to try to get a better deal for themselves on the basis of economic necessity and economic justice.

And what did the elite do? When you see that you're outnumbered by black and white folks who are penniless, landless, peasants, you have to do one of two things: you either have to kill them all, but you can't do that, 'cause who's gonna work? Rich folks weren't going to. They had to get poor people to work. The whole point was to be a person of leisure, back in those days. That was the goal, was not to work. So you couldn't kill them all, you didn't want to kill them all, you'd have to do the work yourself! You'd have to build your own levy. Build your own house. No. Pick your own tobacco! Harvest your own cotton... no. We're not going to do any of that. So you can't kill them, but you can co-opt them, and so the elite in Virginia, for example, in the colony, begins to give certain carrots to people of European descent, saying things like "You know, we're going to let you own a little land. Not much, but just a little. And we're going to get rid of indentured servitude, now you're free labor - and by the way, once you're free labor you get fifty acres of land. Just because you're free labor, see, so we're going to cut you in on this deal. We're going to let you enter into contracts. We're going to let you testify in court, and here's the best of all: we're going to put you on the slave patrol. To keep those people in line," right? The idea was, "you're still going to get your clock cleaned. We still don't like you. We still aren't really going to empower you or change your economic subordination, but we're going to make you honorary members of this team, and you're going to help us keep those other people down."

And so they got a little taste of power, and it did effectively divide and conquer those coalitions - those rebellions began to stop almost instantly. Fast forward to the Civil War era, you have rich white folks in the South where I come from, standing up and openly admitting that the reason they're prepared to secede from the Union - and the only reason they ever articulated publicly, EVER - was to maintain and extend slavery and white supremacy, not only where it already existed, but into the newly acquired - that is to say, stolen - territories from Mexico, to the west. That was what they said. Now we lie about it. We say it wasn't about slavery. That it was about state's rights. Yes, the right of the states to keep and maintain slaves, exactly. But back then they had no shame, so they didn't try and cover it up. They only said it, but once again the rich didn't want to go and do the work - are you kidding? No. They're going to get poor people to go fight for them. And the poor folks didn't even own slaves. Now think: how do you get poor people, who don't even own the shirt on their back - let alone slaves - to go fight to keep your slaves for you? You've got to convince them that their skin is more important than their economic interest, because think about it: if I am a farmer who has to charge you a dollar a day or two dollars a week to work on your farm, to harvest that tobacco or pick that cotton, but you can get a black person to do it for free (because you own them), who's going to get the job? Not me. In other words, slavery actually undermined the wages, and the wage-based economic floor, of the typical white working-class or low-income person. But they were told, "if these people are free they're going to take your job." No, fool, they got your job. That's the point. And so at some level, again, working-class white people being harmed by white privilege. Relatively, being advantaged, right? Being given a leg up, being given a membership to the club, but in absolute terms being kept economically subordinated by the very thing that gave them a sense of superiority. How's that for irony?

Then in the present era - this hasn't stopped, this is not ancient history - now we have people running around insisting that we should close the border with Mexico because, if we don't, the wages of working-class people will continue to fall, the implication being that the only reason workers are paid like crap in this country is because the border is opened. But if you believe that, you would actually have to believe that if that border were closed, then all these owners of capital and industry would just say "Oh, well, you figured us out. Here, it's a raise." Do we really believe that the only thing keeping bosses from paying people more is the presence of low-wage, medium-semi-skilled labor from south of this artificial border? Is that really what we believe? We know that if that border was closed, it isn't going to be closed to capital. It isn't going to be closed to goods. If you have a border that can be crossed by capital, looking for the highest return on investment or goods, looking for the highest price, but labor is chained to its country of origin, how is that going to work to the benefit of working people? By definition, it doesn't. By definition, it emiserates the working class. Divide, and conquer.

But the best example of all, perhaps, in the contemporary era - in the greater New Orleans area after Katrina - here you have two communities that were the worst hard-hit: the Lower Ninth Ward, mostly black community, 94% African-American, about 40% official poverty rate, heavy working-class community, and right across the canal, St. Bernard Parish Chalmette, 95% white, also working-class, high levels of poverty, economically very similar. And at the end of the day, in those first few days of September 2005, more similar than they probably would have realized. Because when those levies broke, they all got their stuff jacked. They all got their stuff destroyed. But if you had asked the white folks in Chalmette - and I've done it - who was the cause of the problems in the greater New Orleans area part of that flooding, they would have pointed across the canal at those black folks (wouldn't have called them black folks) and would have said "there, that's the problem." 70% of the white folks in St. Bernard Parish voted for David Duke, white supremacist, neo-Nazi, former head of the largest Ku Klux Klan group in the United States, when he ran for governer in 1991. Seven out of ten gladly voted for him, because he was blaming black folks for all of their problems and they bough it. What's the irony? The irony is that while they were blaming black people for their problems, while they were blaming black people for the conditions of the greater New Orleans area in which they lived, nobody was paying attention (least of all they) to the fact that these white elite politicians, either in Baton Rouge or in Washington, whose job it was to secure those levies, to make sure that levy funds were spent in the proper way and that they were spent at all, those mostly white and mostly elite politicians did nothing at the end of the day, it wasn't just the black folks in the Lower 9th Ward they didn't care about, they didn't give a rat's ass about those poor and working-class white folks either. And yet when the people of Chalmette - people of St. Bernard Parish - got back into session, first time they had a city council meeting, parish council meeting after the flooding, the lights aren't even on yet. The water isn't even hooked up, and the first order of business was to pass an ordinance saying that you couldn't rent property in St. Bernard Parish to anyone who wasn't a blood relative. Now I'll leave it up to your imagination as to why they'd want to pass a law - that law had never existed before - but now that it's been emptied out and you don't know who might be coming back, that's a damn good way to keep black people out, isn't it? 'Cause if you're 95% white to begin with, if you pass an ordinance that says that, that's a great w-you can't say "no blacks need apply," you can't say "no blacks allowed," but that was an ingenious way to get around the law. Now, they got caught, there was a lawsuit threatened and they got rid of the ordinance. But my point in bringing it up is to say, once again, "divide and conquer" is working. These white folks in Chalmette need to march across that canal and join hands with the black folks who've been sitting there, more than willing to work with them for an awful long time, and march on Baton Rouge, and march on DC, and march on the Corps of Engineers, and recognize their commonality of interest. But the whiteness, and the lure of whiteness, has tricked these have-nothing-in-their-bank-account white people into believing that they got more in common with the rich white folks on St. Charles Avenue, that didn't lose anything in that flooding, than they have in common with the black working-class folks who live about five hundred yards away.

This is a brilliant, powerful, and utterly illuminating piece. One of the biggest flaws I have noticed in anti-racist work (at least on the blogosphere), from people of any color, is the simple inability to connect with white allies. They express the problem, they express their rage, and they have that right, but it is rare for someone to actually communicate, to cause the white person to truly appreciate that they useful in the battle against racism and in fact have a sizeable stake in it. This communication may not be cathartic, and one often feels that the other party does not deserve such treatment, but it is vital in the acquisition of allies - something that other marginalized groups have already discovered. Tim Wise (likely by virtue of being white himself) has managed to communicate with the white mind, bringing to light one of its greatest flaws - to believe, because of the repeated affirmation of their whiteness on all sides, that even the most disenfranchised white person has more in common with their own oppressors than with their fellow oppressed. This is, in a word, bullshit - and I will try to remember that in the future.

(I will also remember to double-check my sources. I wasted a huge amount of time transcribing the talk, optimistically thinking that I was doing something useful, when there was already a PDF version available. Oh, well.)

(Via stuff white people do.)

Undercovers: Pilot

This review is a bit belated, on account of I only got around to watching the episode yesterday (on account of spy shows aren't usually my thing), but here goes. Starting with race issues, since they're the elephant in the room here.

First of all, my predictions were correct: the main couple are a pair of Oreos. While I won't argue the importance of having any black characters in the main roles, it is pretty obvious that they were written by white people who have no idea how black culture works in the middle class. (Furthermore, while the creative minds behind the show were hoping to get black actors, their casting call was unracified, so... yeah.) In a way that's good - who says a role has to be intended for a black person for a black person to get it? On the other hand, who says it's not cool to write a leading role specifically for a black person? In addition, almost the entire supporting cast consists of white people. I guess that's how you be an acceptable black person in this country - hire white people to run your catering business, rescue white spies, work for white government agents, etc. I know they didn't mean to show it that way, but it's thoughtless.

The show has also been criticized for hiring two black foreigners (Gugu Mbatha-Raw is English; Boris Kodjoe is Austrian-born German) to play their American roles. Its critics have in turn been criticized for being too picky - after all, nobody had a cow when British Hugh Laurie was cast as American Dr. House. Well, that's all fine and good, but Dr. House isn't exactly the sole representation of cranky, middle-aged, white male doctors on television. Or one of only a handful of white leads, period. Here they had a chance to represent an entire demographic of American people with two roles, and they felt they had to bring in foreigners? Are American black actors just not good enough, or what?

The bottom line on race: Black protagonists are a great start, but they're a start. Keep working, folks.

Then there's the sexism angle. It continues to bother me that no woman is allowed to be a spy unless 1: she is partnered with a male spy, 2: she is married to a male spy, or 3: she is going to sleep with a male spy at some point. Also, the portrayal of Samantha and Leo's past relationship also bugs me - not because they had one, but because her repeated insistence that he could not be a turncoat comes across as an interference of her personal (womanly) feelings with what would otherwise be sound judgment. (The fact that Steven was Leo's partner for some time but does not feel this way compounds the idea.) She turns out to be right, which does vindicate the problem slightly, but the fact that they never confront this assumption leaves some niggling doubt in my mind. Then there's the scene where she has to hit on a guy she is repulsed by in order to obtain information.

On the other hand, Samantha gets some totally kick-ass moments. She disregards her husband's irrational insistence that she stays "safe," and in doing so manages to save Steven and Leo. Then when she takes off to try and stop the bad guy, she not only takes out his minion without a problem, but stops him single-handedly while Steven is busy rescuing Leo. That, dear reader, is girl power. And it rocks.

Also, the white guy got shot. That was funny.

But what about the show itself? Does it have entertainment value? Definitely. I'm a little irked by some of the spy tropes (ooh, we're spies, we get to go to these exotic European locations!), but I enjoy the storyline, I enjoy the action, I definitely enjoyed Samantha's dress, and I appreciate the implication that they can successfully juggle their spy careers with their catering business. And I loved the little robot-shaped flash drive. So cute.

However, there is one last thing that I do not appreciate: the continued normalization of the overworked middle-class citizen. They spend all day working so they can afford all these luxuries that they're now too tired to enjoy - what's the point? Heck, what's the point of working so hard every day that you're always too tired for sex? More than a spy job, it struck me that these characters needed some time off to rethink their priorities. Maybe they're not so middle class; maybe they're struggling just to keep food on the table and clothes on their backs. But I doubt it. It certainly isn't made to seem that way.

I will, of course, keep watching to see how things play out.

So Far: Outlaw

Time for a return review on one of Hulu's fall shows: Outlaw.

I've just watched the second episode, and I think it's an appropriate time. I enjoyed the pilot and all, but it didn't really deviate from my predictions, so I didn't have much to say about it (Other than the fact that the real murderer was a WASP male, which was just kickass). The second episode, on the other hand, left me with a lot to say.

A quick recap (spoilers!): In Arizona, a white police officer is charged with violating a man's civil rights after he gets into an altercation with a Latino man, resulting from the recent anti-immigration law. Cyrus Garza takes the side of the cop (surprise!) and gets him found not guilty.

Let me just say I have no quibble with the way the story played out. I felt that it was perfectly reasonable to find the cop innocent - especially, as Garza points out, since he was following the law. I don't believe one could safely claim racial profiling in this case because of Reyes' proximity to the Mexican border - the fact is, there aren't a lot of white immigrants coming in from Mexico. So I agree with Garza.

However, I have a complaint, and it's a biggie.

The other day, my sister came to me, having read some anti-racist blogs, and confessed that she now found the Avenue Q song "Everyone's A Little Bit Racist" horrifying. When I asked her why, she explained with a question: "Who does it help?"

Who, indeed? While the song makes a point - nearly everyone harbors some racial prejudice - it doesn't deflate some high-and-mighty darkie who thinks that he or she is better than the white man. It just excuses white people's behavior because everyone else does it too, ignoring the power factors that make it a much bigger problem when a pale (presumed white, usually is) person does it.

So when I saw this episode, I had to ask myself: Who does it help?

And therein lies the problem. It plays out like some kind of knee-jerk "white victim panic." Ohnoez, innocent white cops will be forced to follow this law and be prosecuted unfairly by those mean ol' pro-alien liberals! We're DOOMED! And while the story doesn't deny (explicitly or implicitly) that real victims of color do happen, giving the center stage to the rare, non-overtly-racist, actually-had-reasonable-suspicion cop is just white-serving. Not that there would be anything wrong with that if media didn't tend to serve white people already. But it does, so I was really hoping we'd see a case of actual profiling.

There's one thing that I'm not sure on, and that is the eventual "not guilty" verdict. On the one hand, oh boy, all the darkies came out of the woodwork to support poor Whitey! YAAAAY! On the other hand, maybe it will do something to reassure the paranoid that POC are perfectly capable of being reasonable and fair and not letting their bad experiences bias them. So it's a good/bad thing, in my opinion.

Then there was one thing that really got my goat: the fact that Al - the Black Best Friend, of all people - was the one upset about the issue. The one guy who probably knew exactly what he was talking about got shut down not only by Garza (who apparently has never lived in this kind of area) but by all the white people, and then it turned out that they were all right and he was overreacting. Uh, gee. Way to go, writers.

That pretty much sums it up. Good story, unfortunate choice of plot factors, kind of on-the-fence about its overall benefit level. If a PoC wants to take this on and cover something that I missed (goodness knows being a white kid there's probably something), I'd love to hear from xem.

Hulu's Fall Lineup: The Good, The Bad, and the What-The-Fuck-Were-You-Thinking

It's September, and that means it's time for new shows. Hulu is on the ball as usual, throwing up trailers for all the cool stuff we can expect this fall. Or is it all cool?

Or: does it sound interesting (a must for entertainment), and is it offensive to one or more major marginalized group(s)?

I dunno, Billy! Let's find out!

(Note: These are first impressions of the shows in question and are subject to change.)

Trailer #1: The Event.

Plot-wise, I have no idea what's going on here. There's a string of events (but not The Event, we're told) that show an assassination attempt on the President, a man who suddenly finds that his girlfriend is missing, a group of underground something-or-others in Canada... or... something? and some other stuff. It looks like it could be cool, but I can't even tell.

On a racial level alone, it sort of passes. We have a black President with a black military advisor (good roles, but are these getting to be stereotypes?) Another of his advisors is white, and the guy who's missing his girlfriend appears white, as is the woman who runs the underground whatevers. Dig deeper into the kyriarchy, though, and it falls apart. The Event is clearly an able, straight, cisgendered, adult man's club, with only one female character of importance (aside from the missing MacGuffin girlfriend), no women of color in important roles, and no disabled, "alternative sexuality," lower-class, and/or any other members of the mosaic. It's not offensive enough to write it off the watch list (though erasure IS offensive), but it's worth noting.


Trailer #2: No Ordinary Family

The plot: A middle-class, white, dysfunctional (A.K.A. "normal") family takes a vacation to South America. While they're there, they get into a plane crash and end up in water with some weird glowing stuff. When they get back, they discover that they have superpowers. Fun for the whole family! If you're a white, patriarchy-induced, nuclear family, anyway.

I went beyond the trailer on this one, checking out the other promotional material on Hulu, and what I found was not pretty. It's not that the family is white that bothers me - hey, we have stories to tell too - but the other facts. The clear protagonist is the father: a middle-aged, middle-class, able, straight, cis man who feels like he's not strong enough because he... can't control his family? I'm not exactly clear, but the reason seems to be because his teenage children are becoming independent and have less need for an authorative dad, which just bothers him. His wife is a career-oriented power lady who, according to the promotional material, is a "failure" as a mother because she focuses on her job more than her kids. That's right, lady, get back into the kitchen. (Fortunately, as far as I can tell, getting superpowers isn't an instant ticket into stay-at-home-mom mode. But seriously, guys.) The teenage girl is a walking stereotype: addicted to text messaging, constantly trying to blow off her parents, and dating a guy who is only into her for her pussy. (Remember, honey, the only man you need in your life is Dad.) The boy - the only character whose problems aren't inextricably tied to gender - has a learning disability (or at least seems to) that is holding him back in school.

So there are no people of color in main roles, no trans characters, no gay characters (unless the teenage boy is gay, which I doubt because again it's not "that kind of show"), yadda. The only important minority character you see in the trailer is the protagonist's black best friend, who encourages him to try out his powers and then arranges to have a superhero lair installed in his garage (out of the goodness of his heart, we presume). Okay, I understand enthusiasm, but the black guy's willingness to do ALL this stuff for the white guy leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

This is ridiculous. One of the protagonists is a young woman who feels like her familial responsibilities are stopping her from growing up, and she's portrayed as a "rebel" who needs to get over herself and come back to Dad. Another one is a woman who is a "failure" because she can't juggle her 80-hour work week with her kids, leaving Dad (OH NOES!) to fill in. Dad sucks because he's not the glue holding everyone together (the "head of the household," as they say.) Furthermore, the title perpetuates the idea that white, straight, cis, able, and middle class = ordinary. The only thing "ordinary" about this family, EVER, is that one time they did not have superpowers. But the writers don't seem to get that.

At least they didn't get their powers from some "ancient Aztec artifact." The last thing they need to stack onto this nonsense is a dose of cultural appropriation.

Also, what happened to the pilot of the plane? Did he get superpowers too, or what?

In conclusion: Despite the obvious flaws out of the gate, I will be giving this one a shot. It looks entertaining, and it might be better than it sounds. And, y'know, SUPERPOWERS!

(Bear with me! It gets better.)


Trailer #3: Raising Hope

The plot: Some dude living with his mother has a baby fall into his lap and decides to raise it. Hijinks ensue.

This one didn't give me a lot to work with, as the trailer was less than a minute long. But here's what I know: The protagonist is (naturally) a cis, straight, able, white male, but then I'm not sure anyone else would want to get close to this silliness. The story plays the stereotype that men are bad with babies for laughs, while perpetuating it, which sucks. It doesn't look so much offensive as just plain dumb.


Trailer #4: My Generation

Again, I'm not entirely sure what this is. It seems to be a fictional documentary about ten people who were teenagers in the year 2000, and what they're doing now in 2010. It's an interesting concept, but the execution looks trite. To be honest, my biggest complaint is that the trailer was deceptive - at the beginning, it looked like a story about 9/11 and its impact on the way members of that generation grew up, but then it switched directions and became more "slice of life"-ish.

From the trailer, I can tell that most of the cast are white, cis, able, straight, and a whole slew of other "default"-isms. There are a few POC, including two women (the cast is almost half female, which is nice), no gay characters that I know of, no trans characters, disabled characters, dwarves, fat characters, and/or yadda. I can't tell if there are any poor characters or anything else I might have missed. Still, it seems like decent mainstream entertainment, even though I probably won't watch it.

Trailer #5: Outlaw

A Supreme Court justice resigns from the Court so he can become a defense attorney and use his totally kickass knowledge of the law to help a man who was falsely imprisoned for murder. He succeeds! So he decides to help others, too. Definitely worth checking out.

Now here's the surprise: The protagonist is... a Latino! The guy he helps is... a black dude! His legal team is a mixture of races and sexes (though all the women seem to be white, and have minor roles compared to the big boys). The bad news is, our guy is a misogynist. He "can't remember the names of the last three women [he] slept with," and hired one team member "because [she's] pretty." And there are STILL no characters who aren't cisgendered, straight, able, full-sized, yadda - at least not that is mentioned in the trailer.


Trailer #6: Running Wilde: Will Interviews Will

Will Arnett interviews Will Arnett. I don't know what this is supposed to promote, nor do I even care. He just douches around for a couple of minutes - which is enough time for him to crack misogynistic and ageist. Whoopee.


Trailer #7: Lone Star

A charming, attractive, talented, and secretly nice con man (who is not Josh Holloway) falls in love with a couple of his marks and wants to quit the business. Dad says no. Angst happens. It's all very dramatic; looks like a decent show, but not my thing.

So, the protagonist is a rich, cis, straight, able, white guy, his dad is a rich, cis, straight, able, white guy, the girl characters are plot devices for the protagonist to play off of, and that's all we know. Not a great showing, I have to say. However, I am liking the growing tendency of story writers to portray in their stories that it is possible to really be in love with multiple people at the same time. LOST did this as well. It's a nice counter to the monogamist propoganda.


Trailer #8: Undercovers

A happily married black couple has their lives interrupted by a guy from their past... who knows that they are ex-spies and wants them to come back to the job. Very traditional spy story. Might be interesting.

As mentioned above, the protagonists are black (pale, pointy black, of course). ABC's motto this season is "more colorful," and they seem to be living up to it pretty well. Of course, they are a middle-class, cisgendered, heterosexual, able-bodied couple. In fact, aside from skin color, there's really nothing to distinguish them from an equally-endowed white couple. Also, why is it a woman can't be a spy unless she's (A) married to a male spy, (B) going to be married to a male spy, or (C) going to sleep with a male spy (or already has)? This SUCKS.

Even so, it's nice to have some non-white protagonists.


Trailer #9: Chase

A U.S. Marshal tracks a serial killer cross-country. He avoids her and kills more people, 'cause he's good at it. Then she catches him! Not really my thing.

Finally, after eight shows, there's a female protagonist (white, able-bodied, cisgendered, straight... eh) who isn't sharing the stage with a man. Plus she's competent at her job. Every other minority group (because you can't have more than one!) is ignored, of course. But just MAYBE this will give young, law-enforcement-ambitions girls who watch NBC someone to look up to.


Trailer #10: Outsourced

A white dude gets a managerial position at a novelty-item company's call center... which has just been moved to India. Lulz ensue.

Naturally, most of the characters in the show are Indian. This being a comedy, however, they are strictly gag Indians. Laughs are gleaned both from the protagonist's ineptitude and from... LOADS AND LOADS OF RACISM! Indian culture is played for laughs, as is the protagonist's racist reactions to it. YAAAAAAY. In between insulting Indian headgear and teaching the locals about America's culture through pop music, he finds time for romance... with a white woman, who was clearly dredged out of the woodwork just so he'd have someone to date who wasn't brown.

Kill me now.

This is also put out by NBC "more colorful," which really makes me wonder WHAT THE FUCK THEY WERE THINKING.


Trailer #11: School Pride

Nonfiction! A bunch of rich guys find one of the crappiest schools in the country and engage the students and faculty in a huge effort to improve it. And they do.

This show looks AWESOME. Being a really run-down school in a poor neighborhood, it's naturally attended by children of color - intelligent, hardworking, enthusiastic children of color who are shown as nothing less than the victims of a bad situation. The School Pride team features a mix of races and sexes (including a woman of color), and they work together with the faculty and students to renovate the facility and get things back on track. The show's upbeat tone seems to prevent it from being exploitative of the children's suffering, though I could be wrong on that since reality television tends to be exploitative by its nature. It is upbeat and inspiring, though - something that children of color need to see more of in mainstream media.

Read.

I'm not going to qualify this further. The content of this blog post proves that it should be read.

http://stuffwhitepeoplesay.wordpress.com/2009/05/17/912/

How To Be A Peach Person

In my introduction blog, I covered a bit about race labels and why I don't like identifying myself as "white." I proposed "over-privileged peach-skinned bastard" as an alternative, which I later shortened to "privileged peach person."

After a bit, it occurred to me that there were facets of this "peach" thing I wasn't covering. For instance, I don't feel it's appropriate to refer to all white persons as "peach" - white supremacists and clueless middle-class WASPs, for instance, can keep on being white. It's more than a race; it's a mindset. So what exactly is a peach person?

To be a peach person, you must meet all of the following requirements:

1. You must belong to the "white" race.
2. You must be aware that as a light-skinned person, you are more privileged than persons of other colors, particularly in the company of other light-skinned people.
3. You must acknowledge and accept that you have no special right to this extra privilege, but that you have it anyway.
4. You must be willing to employ that privilege, as well as other resources at your disposal, to try and make that privilege available to persons of other colors. How you do this is up to you. Call people out on racist remarks, lobby to get persons of other color into influential positions, band with persons of other color to form an interracial alliance, whatever you are able to do.
5. You must accept that the superiority of fair-skinned people is an illusion, and remember this at all times. As others have said, check your ego at the door. No matter where you go or who you are with, remember that light-skinned people are not nicer, purer, smarter, or more human than people of other colors.
   
6. You must own your white heritage. No matter what you call yourself, you are still the product of a long line of oppressors - a line that shows few signs of letting up - and as such, persons of other color will be disinclined to trust you. You need to accept the stigma of being pale, just as other races have been forced to accept their stigmas.
   
7. You do not need to make an official commitment or label yourself an "anti-racist" or anything else. You only need to be willing to accept that your skin color is only your skin color, and the privilege you have exists only because you were born into a profoundly unjust society, and that you have a responsibility to try and correct the imbalance that granted you that privilege.

That is what it means to be a "peach person." To call yourself peach is to disown your "white" ego - to accept that you, too, have a color, and are no different (essentially, if not culturally) than those of darker shades. You are not "lowering yourself to their level." You are declaring that the level you thought you occupied before - that white people believe themselves to occupy on a daily basis - is an illusion, perpetrated by a pale-skinned society so caught up in itself that has almost forgotten it exists.

(I cannot take credit for everything in this list. In fact, I really cannot take credit for any of it. It is thanks to the excellent anti-racist blog, Stuff White People Do - and the many lists of advice for anti-racist allies that they link to - that I have come to understand any of this, much less condense it into a single train of thought. The owner and contributors have opened my eyes tremendously, and I thank them for knocking me off my own white pedestal.)

An Apology

As I have mentioned, I am white (unfairly privileged peach-tone, as I prefer it). As I have mentioned, all peach-toned persons from the United States are racist, whether they mean to be or not. Having thought about myself, I've realized that I've (unintentionally) had a number of racist thoughts/perceptions through the years, and I need to apologize. By having these thoughts, I have unintentionally contributed to a system which marginalizes minority races, especially those of darker skin color, and that is unacceptable. So here is my apology.

I'm sorry for not trusting blacks and Latin Americans as implicitly as I do other races just because of your skin color.
I'm sorry for assuming that Hispanic Latin Americans are shoddy parents just because you shop at Wal-Mart and buy beer.
I'm sorry for seeing a black person in town and thinking "Whooooa, cool!" You are a person, not a novelty item.
I'm sorry for thinking that I might date a white girl or a black guy, but a black girl would just be too weird.
I'm sorry for ogling the Asians who are out shopping for groceries.
I'm sorry for being so ignorant at age 20 that I was actually surprised to learn that South Africa had urban cities in it.
I'm sorry for referring to everyone of a darker color as "black" or "Hispanic" or "Asian" or "Native American" (or whatever other label you can think of), but failing to specify when someone is European-descended.
I'm sorry for opposing affirmative action. (I do, however, think that there are better alternatives. Though since I'm peach-toned, I could be wrong.)
I'm sorry for instinctively dissing hip-hop because it was invented by dem underedumacated black doodz.
I'm sorry for even having to use the phrase "dem underedumacated black doodz." Especially since you've probably had more schooling than I have.
I'm sorry for ignoring media by and about persons of darker color because I was convinced that I wouldn't be able to relate to it.
I'm sorry that my perception filter allows me to look at a crowd of all-peach people and fail to notice anything odd.
And finally, I am very sorry for feeling that I was superior to my (racist) dad.

I am not asking for forgiveness. I am not attempting to make reparations or whatnot. What I did was inexcusable. This is just me saying that I was a jerk, I realize that now, and I regret it and want to do better. Now I am done apologizing, and I'm going to spend my energy on more constructive things, like learning how to erase the internalized racism I'm currently dealing with and how to call it out when I see it in others.