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Anna’s Story: Latino Counter Frames to Racism, and the Importance of Language & Culture
Posted by: | CommentsAnna grew up the youngest daughter in of Mexican immigrants who earned a meager living as farmer workers in Burley, Idaho. Who would have imagined she would become a successful attorney in a city like Seattle? Who would have imagined she would win the 2009 King County Bar Association’s Pro Bono award—an award usually reserved for attorneys from the big firms, not for lawyers in solo practice who devote themselves to the area of labor law helping undocumented workers collect wages they are owed? Who would have imagined she would unexpectedly become the legal guardian and new mom of her niece’s three- year-old son because her niece was shot and killed by her husband and the father is in jail?
As Anna recalls the experiences that motivated her to go to law school, she notes they weren’t all pleasant. Her reasons stemmed mostly from witnessing her parent’s being treated terribly. She hated that they weren’t treated fairly when they worked in the fields, whether it was in the sugar beets, the beans, or in the potato fields. Remembering the conditions in the fields made her cry, particularly when she described having to take their own toilet paper because they didn’t have bathrooms, or when the ranchers would give them unfair and illegal rules such as only allowing them fifteen minute lunch breaks. What was worse, she stressed, was that her parent’s would be even stricter by imposing only a ten-minute lunch on her and her family so that the rancher wouldn’t get mad at them for taking lunch at all. Her dad was always particularly cautious when it came to the ranchers or bosses because he didn’t have any power or rights. And that lack of power for her dad is what made her want to go on to law school.
As an undergraduate she told her advising professor that she was interested in going to law school. Her professor told her flat out that she didn’t have what it takes to be a lawyer. Of course, as a Latina from her socio-economic and racialized background, she had heard this kind of “advice” from her teachers before. While it made her angry, she didn’t internalize it. She had stopped doing this a long time ago. Instead she told herself that this political science professor didn’t know what he was talking about. After all, he wasn’t a lawyer. When she was offered an opportunity to attend Gonzaga University’s Summer Pre-law program and her life took off. It was at Gonzaga that she met other Latinas from different regions of the country, all from farm worker backgrounds and they understood each other. They knew the same Mexican musicians, they could speak Spanish, they shared many of the same experiences (including many of the same reasons for wanting to go to law school), they understood the same jokes, and they were all Latinas who were driven and ambitious and wanted to succeed. For the first time in her life, Anna felt comfortable and at peace with others from her culture who were also ambitious and driven.
However it wasn’t easy. Her first year in law school was a difficult one. She was going through a divorce from a very controlling husband. She was having a lot of health problems from all the stress. In addition, there were family obligations and pressures to contend with during that crucial first year of law school: her oldest brother got into trouble with the law, her other brother became seriously ill with diabetes, her youngest brother’s family life was falling apart, and her mother had to return to Mexico because her aunt had passed away. So she was dealing with all these family pressures and problems and went to the Dean of the law school to see what would happen if she would just drop out that year. When the Dean told her that if she quit, she would not be guaranteed a spot the following year. At the time the doctors weren’t sure of her medical diagnosis, so they couldn’t postpone her final exams on medical grounds, and she knew she would just get further and further behind. She either had to finish the year or quit law school altogether. She decided to make it through her first year final examinations. She recalls that during one final examination she actually just put her head down and started to write her exam and to cry. She wrote the whole exam with her head on her desk while crying. Somehow she passed it. Somehow she passed all her exams that year and she made it through her first year of law school when at times getting to class was all she could handle.
After earning her law degree she returned to Idaho to try to help farm workers, but in many ways she felt she was in a straight jacket. Due to the systemic institutional racism that farm workers lived under, she felt as if all she could do was say, “I can’t help you” in Spanish. She described the story of people coming to her telling her that a brother was in Mexico because the rancher called immigration to avoid paying him, but since the brother was no longer in the country, she couldn’t collect his wages for him. She recalled another example of being powerless to help when a farm worker was injured on the job, because farm workers couldn’t receive workers compensation since farm work was exempt from workers compensation at that time. Frustrated and ready to leave Idaho behind, she was offered a position at the Northwest Justice Project in Seattle and took it. Now in solo practice, she has been practicing law in Seattle ever since.
Although far removed from the suffering she and her family experienced as farm workers, and far removed from many of the obstacles she had to overcome to attend and complete law school, Anna’s story is the story of many Latinos who must balance their lives in American culture by doing what is necessary to succeed, while at the same time, trying not to let the process of success change them in ways that are antithetical to traditional Latino culture and values. Her story highlights that for many first generation Latino professionals, the Latino culture is critical for survival and for success, it is the foundation and the motivation for all that they do. However, it also shows that because Latinos as a group are situated in a disadvantaged position in society, Latino professionals are never too far from the pain and dysfunction found in their communities of origin. It seems there is always a crisis when you come from a poor immigrant family without many rights in society.
Often the economic pressures, the cultural expectations of being available to the family (no matter what the situation may be), the fear of the unknown—many times from the parents’ negative experiences in a racist and unkind society, and the need to become too individualistic or too “Americanized,” make it extremely difficult for Latino professionals. In Latino culture one’s family comes first. La familia is one of the most noble and honored priorities of the culture.
Anna’s story of growing up in a farm worker immigrant household in Idaho to becoming such a successful attorney that won the King County Bar Association’s Pro Bono Award, to raising her niece’s three year old son as her own son demonstrates that if you don’t give up, if you are there for the family, if you fight the good fight, then you can become a great success. But it isn’t easy. You have to be strong enough to resist the stereotyping, the questioning, and the racialization you encounter in your new professional role. And at the same time, you have to be available to drop everything you are doing and help out your family or it can be seen as an act of betrayal to your family that you’re not there for them. This is a lot to balance. However, as Anna looks back on her life now, she realizes that part of her is and will always be drawn back to her roots, to her family, and to her culture. She hopes she can instill this cultural strength in her new son as her parents did for her, because in the end her culture is what helped her persevere.
Anna’s story is reflective of many of the stories I heard from the Latinos I interviewed. Her experiences demonstrate not only the white discrimination and opposition her and her family encountered over and over again, but her story is also reflective of the many strategies of resistance Latinos use to confront the racial, class, and gender oppression they experience. Chou and Feagin observe that “among all groups of color, only African Americans have managed to create a strong counterframe and to teach it to successive generations” Yet they discovered in their study of Asian Americans, that communities of color such as Asians are displaying acts of resistance even if they are not direct. Similarly, the Latino respondents in this study are also actively resisting the negative framing of who they are. Often the strategies of resistance to the openly anti-Latino climate in America begin at home. Like Anna’s parents, most of the Latinos in this study came from families who wanted them to lay low and not to make waves. Why: because as an immigrant family, one doesn’t make waves or draw attention to themselves. However, one thing many of the parents insisted upon was that that the respondents learn and speak Spanish at home. Speaking Spanish become a way for them to maintain some sort of semblance of dignity when everything around them told them that they were inferior.
Professor Ron Schmidt understands this well when he writes, “Despite the controversy surrounding English-only debates, the importance of language, identity, and culture go hand-in-hand.” Professor Schmidt argues that language is central to one’s identity; to attack it is to attack the person. He states, “[I]f language, for example, becomes an important marker of ethnic identity, then language policy represents one avenue through which to gain greater public recognition and respect for a particular ethnic community” (p. 53).He is absolutely right. Nearly half of the Latino respondents in this study spoke Spanish as a first language and over thirty percent indicated that they currently speak both English and Spanish within both their family settings and social occasions.
Language and cultural maintenance become heroic acts of resistance on the part of immigrants and their children who often have so few rights.
~ This post is an excerpt from a book manuscript by Dr. Mária Chávez, Assistant Professor, Pacific Lutheran University
New Research: Confronting Racism Boosts Self-Esteem
Posted by: | CommentsA new study of Filipino Americans by researchers at San Francisco State University demonstrates that confronting racism helps boost self-esteem for some.
The study was conducted by Alvin Alvarez, professor of counseling at San Francisco State University and Linda Juang, associate professor of psychology. They are co-authors on a new article, “Filipino Americans and Racism: A Multiple Mediation Model of Coping,” which appears in the latest issue of the Journal of Counseling Psychology. Alvarez surveyed 199 Filipino American adults, both men and women, in the San Francisco Bay Area and found that 99 percent of participants had experienced at least one incident of everyday racism in the last year. The study focused on “everyday racism” — subtle, commonplace forms of discrimination, such as being ignored, ridiculed or treated differently. In an interview, lead researcher Alvarez explained:
“These are incidents that may seem innocent and small, but cumulatively they can have a powerful impact on an individual’s mental health. Trying to ignore these insidious incidents could become taxing and debilitating over time, chipping away at a person’s spirit.”
For men in the study, dealing with racism in an active way, such as reporting incidents to authorities or challenging the perpetrator, was associated with decreased distress and increased self esteem. The authors caution that what makes a healthy coping mechanism is influenced by such factors as gender, socioeconomic status, age, English language capacity and length of residency in the United States. There seems to be a different dynamic at work for women in the study who did not report the positive self-esteem boost associated with “active coping,” in the same way that men did. For women, the “avoidance” coping strategy increased psychological distress and decrease self-esteem.
“What’s striking is we found that racism is still happening to Filipinos. Therapists need to look beyond the frequent portrayal of Asian Americans as model minorities and help clients assess what their best coping strategy could be, depending on their resources, what’s feasible and who they could turn to for support.”
Of course, this new research lends further support to the argument that Rosalind Chou and Joe Feagin have done in their book, The Myth of the Model Minority, in which they document the widespread experience of everyday racism among Asian Americans.
Alabama Killings: Faculty of Color
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I have been reading much CNN and ABC online news, and watching the network coverage, but only the Root blog seems to have this extra information on the killings at the University of Alabama Huntsville:
The three University of Alabama Huntsville faculty members who were killed Friday were all people of color. Gopi Bodila, the, the chairman of the biology department, was of Indian origin. Dr. Adriel Johnson, an associate professor, and Dr. Maria Ragland Davis, an assistant professor who specialized in plant sciences, were both African-American. Amy Bishop, a Harvard PhD who was denied tenure, has been charged with capital murder in the killings. Three other faculty members were wounded, two of them critically, at a faculty meeting on the Alabama campus.
The alleged shooter is a white woman from Massachusetts, with a Harvard degree. The media interviews with family and other there suggests this may have been an incident involving tenure not being granted.
Problems in “Honorary White” Notions for Asian Americans?
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There is a lot of discussion these days about “middle groups” of Asian Americans and Latinos being or becoming white as the country gets less and less white, and speculating about whether they will inflate the white group versus black Americans, who will remain at the bottom of the racial ladder and hierarchy with a few other darker skinned folks. This makes significant assumptions about Asian Americans, both collectively and as subgroups. Today, I was reading a provocative paper (“Critical Thoughts on Asian American Assimilation in the Whitening Literature”) by sociologist Nadia Kim, which is one of the very good places you can find a serious challenge to this “honorary whites” discussion of Asian Americans. I encourage you to take a look at her entire paper , but here are two concluding paragraphs:
Concerning the fate of the American racial landscape, this essay challenged the increasingly accepted sociological forecast that Asian Americans (and Latinos) are whitening or aligning with whites in a new black/non-black divide…. these studies do not incorporate the dimensions along which Asian Americans’ racial status depends, namely hierarchies of citizenship within a context of global inequalities (i.e., U.S.-Asian relations). As such, scholars need to address both the limits and dangers of Asian Americans’ high social class status and an American national identity as a cornerstone of whiteness. Methodologically, this essay questioned why the racial assimilation literature does not engage the qualitative and quantitative studies that directly investigate issues of racialized citizenship.
In her paper she questions the meanings put on certain data:
…. the data presented here problematized and contextualized three major predicates of the thesis on Asian Americans’ racial mobility: high socioeconomic status, high rates of intermarriage with whites and racial attitudes and ideology. Taken together, these arguments yield to a larger and more pressing point: the need to consider how white- American dominance has been secured for about 400 years by exercising racial power over all non-whites. Of the racial assimilation studies on Asian Americans, Bonilla-Silva (2002) and Gans (1999) acknowledge this larger project of racial hegemony. Both contend that lighter-skinned and higher class Asian Americans could, respectively, join an honorary white and residual category (while darker-skinned, lower income Asian ethnics would “blacken”). These “middle” Asian ethnics would thereby shore up white racial dominance by being politically palatable and serving as a buffer for black counter-movements, a purpose which “in between” groups have often served.
While these studies should be applauded for their claims about tripartite models, they need also investigate, and act on, the specificity of Asian-American racialization – to take seriously the denial of social citizenship to Asian groups on a racial basis and to capture how it is linked to anti-black subordination and the racial system writ large. In other words, Asian and black Americans have been played off of one another, respectively, as “harder working than blacks” and “more American than Asians” and, at different points in time, “more like those blacks” (“Filipino brown brothers”) and “more like us.”
A key point implicit here is that whites – elite whites — in key US institutions run the show, including the racial hierarchy and the system of racial oppression. These whites control the oppression of Asian Americans in society, and the latter as white-imaged, as “foreign,” “unassimilable,” “nerdy-strange,” and/or “exotic,” are a long way from really being “white” in the persisting white racial frame in white minds, or the white-controlled racial hierarchy it rationalizes. Indeed, what one thing I take from Kim’s essay is that asking if they are becoming “honorary whites” often buys into the white-constructed “model minority” notions that are important in that white racial frame. Indeed, that is the wrong question.
Anti-Asian Racism: Toby Keith and Mocking Asians
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According to news reports at a Nobel Peace Prize party in Oslo, the United States country singer Toby Keith used the standard physical gesture of eye stretching to mock Asians (“yellow”) during an impromptu singing performance. Numerous Asian American groups have condemned the brief performance. The Asian American Justice Center made this comment:
Toby Keith embarrassed himself and his country, denigrated the Nobel Peace Prize and offended Asians and Asian Americans by using a crude, racist hand gesture.
The Media Action Network for Asians made this comment:
By doing this, he is telling Asian fans, ‘You don’t matter, you’re not on my radar.’
The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), the country’s oldest continuing Asian American civil rights group also issued a statement condemning the old racist gesture:
His behavior has drawn criticism from the Asian American community, yet Mr. Keith still has not acknowledged the offensive nature of his gesture nor issued an apology. As the nation’s oldest and largest Asian American civil rights organization, the Japanese American Citizens League joins other organizations in condemning Mr. Keith’s actions, and demands that he acknowledge and apologize for his racist behavior.
When he pulled back his eyes to symbolize “yellow,” Mr. Keith reduced Asians to a demeaning caricature that has long been used to alienate an entire race. Though the gesture lasted no more than a second, it evoked powerful and painful emotions in the Asian American community, a reminder of schoolyard taunts and childhood bullying. It was an immature and insensitive action that only served to humiliate Asian Americans through racial mockery.
Mr. Keith’s silence following the Asian American community’s response to this incident suggests that he does not take our community’s concerns seriously. By not issuing an apology even one week after the event, Mr. Keith has clearly chosen to compound his indifference towards the Asian Americancommunity. This type of attitude underlies a pervasive stereotype of Asian Americans, where physical differences imply a foreignness that hinders an acceptance of being considered as true “Americans.”
Keith has not yet apologized. Oddly enough some in his group made this comment:
“No one at the concert thought Toby was out of line,” his camp said. “Everyone was impressed with his rapping skills and that’s it . . . all of the artists liked each other, hung out, and it was a very friendly, genuine, and supportive atmosphere.”
I guess they do not think Asian folks watch rapping or country music? Or that some other folks might take offense at such racist stereotyping seriously too? At a minimum, we do not teach Stereotyping 101 (or even Human Manners 101?) and thus what racial framing is learned as children lasts a lifetime. Friendly racism?
Numerous social science studies have lately shown how widespread the facial mocking and language mocking and other stereotyping of Asians and Asian Americans are these days. Not to mention the racial discrimination that often flows out of such mocking framing. Such anti-Asian stereotyping/mocking has been part of the white racial framing of Asians since at least the 19th century, as the late Ronald Takaki, among others, has often shown.
Sarah Palin’s Discomfort with Asian Americans
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Over at Huffington Post (HT: John Campbell at dailykos) an article quotes Sarah Palin’s father on her being “uncomfortable” with Asian Americans in the state of Hawaii, where she first attended college:
Palin, though notoriously ill-traveled outside the United States, did journey far to the first of the four colleges she attended, in Hawaii. She and a friend who went with her lasted only one semester. “Hawaii was a little too perfect,” Palin writes. “Perpetual sunshine isn’t necessarily conducive to serious academics for eighteen-year-old Alaska girls.” Perhaps not. But Palin’s father, Chuck Heath, gave a different account to Conroy and Walshe. According to him, the presence of so many Asians and Pacific Islanders made her uncomfortable: “They were a minority type thing and it wasn’t glamorous, so she came home.” In any case, Palin reports that she much preferred her last stop, the University of Idaho, “because it was much like Alaska yet still ‘Outside.’ “ (
photo credit: sizeofguam)
The issue was first raised a couple of days ago at the New Republic by Isaac Chotiner.
This is just one more small bit of evidence that a great many folks in the current Republican Party are much more comfortable with white folks, including those at the very white University of Idaho. And why some analysts see the current Republican Party as betraying it earlier traditions and leaders, such as those who fought aggressively for black rights (for example, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments) after the Civil War, and as graduatlly turning into a kind of white-nationalist party.
Exotifying Asian Women: The White Racial Frame Again
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Marie Clare online (ht Rosalind) has a recent article on “The New Trophy Wives: Asian Women,” which is both insightful and naïve at the same time, even white-framed. The author, Ying Chu, raises the provocative question of why many powerful, older white men are now partnering with younger Asian women:
When the venerable director [Woody Allen] scandalously left Mia Farrow for her adopted daughter, South Korean-born Soon-Yi Previn . . . he may as well have sent out a press release: Asian-girl fantasy trumps that of Hollywood royalty! . . . Rupert Murdoch walked down the aisle with fresh-faced Wendi Deng . . . .Then, CBS head Leslie Moonves wed TV news anchor Julie Chen; Oscar winner Nicolas Cage married half-his-age third wife Alice Kim; billionaire George Soros coupled up with violinist Jennifer Chun; and producer Brian Grazer courted concert pianist Chau-Giang Thi Nguyen. Add the nuptials of investment magnate Bruce Wasserstein to fourth wife Angela Chao and the pending vows between venture capitalist Vivi Nevo and Chinese actress Ziyi Zhang.
She then asks why this is happening, first suggesting this may be a type of colonial “yellow fever”:
The excruciating colonial stereotypes — Asian women as submissive, domestic, hypersexual — are obviously nothing new.
Her primary answer is that these are after all now omnipresent images and
often entertaining. Even now, how many cinematic greats, literary best sellers, or even cell-phone ads . . . characterize Asian women as something other than geishas, ninjas, or dragon ladies? . . . I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry at the cheeky blog stuffwhitepeoplelike.com, which ranks Asian girls at number 11 because “Asian women avoid key white women characteristics, such as having a midlife crisis, divorce, and hobbies that don’t involve taking care of the children.”
So these old and new racialized images are entertaining? We are supposed to laugh at such stereotyping of Asian and white women? Racialized steretoyping is no laughing matter, even if some naïve websites think it is. Then she moves back to a more critical analysis:
“It’s like a curse that Asian-American women can’t avoid,” says C.N. Le, director of Asian and Asian-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “From an academic point of view, the perception still serves as a motivation for white men.” . . . Richard Bernstein found that the Orientalist illusion continues to influence. “Historically, Asia provided certain sexual opportunities that would be much more difficult for Western men to have at home. But it remains a happy hunting ground for them today,” he says, citing one phenomenon in the northeastern region of Thailand called Issan, where 15 percent of marriages are between young Thai women and Western men well into their 60s.
She introduces the importance of the exotic Asian woman stereotype, but quickly drops it instead it and does not exploring what it means in the West. This sexualization of Asian American women in white-male minds is a major aspect of contemporary racism, and one deserving of much more analysis than we have in social science, never mind in the stereotype-riddled popular media. This stereotype is central not only for the elite-men-partnering issue, but much more generally to white (male) framing of Asian and Asian American women. There are, for example, a great many websites dedicated to pleasing the racialized exotic-Asian-female fantasies and images held by many white men across the Internet.
After suggesting that the partnering actions of white men may have some connection to their recognizing the power of China and the rest of Asia in contemporary globalization, she then reverses direction and asks why these often high-achieving Asian or Asian American women pair up with these aging white men of power:
While I’m sure that real love and affection is sometimes the bond in these culture-crossing May-December romances, could it be that power divorcés of a certain ilk make the perfect renegade suitors for these overachieving Asian good girls — an ultimate (yet lame) attempt at rebellion? Maybe these outsized, world-class moguls are stand-ins for emotionally repressed Asian dads (one cliché that is predominantly true).
So now we get her own stereotype of Asian men as somehow not really men as one explanation for the actions of Asian women such as these. As we point out in our recent The Myth of the Model Minority:
In the 19th century Asian American [and Asian] men were stereotyped in the white framing as oversexed and threatening to white women, but in more recent decades they have been more likely to be stereotyped as feminized or emasculated, a shift that may link to the rise of model minority stereotyping. . . . In the United States Asian American women are the group most likely to marry outside of their racial group. They outmarry more than other women and men of color, and much more than Asian American men. In many such cases a white racial framing in the minds of Asian American women may intersect with the sexualization of Asian American women in white male minds. Because their standard of an attractive male has become white-normed and because of the potential to enter directly into white middle-class [or upper-class] world, many Asian women find a white male partner appealing. In contrast, some white men are drawn to the Asian female stereotype of exoticized sensuality and submissiveness.
Pat Buchanan’s Historical Amnesia: Collective Forgetting Essential to Racism?
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(Photo: Wikipedia)
One of the many uninformed comments that Pat Buchanan has recently made is thus:
White men were 100% of the people that wrote the Constitution, 100% of the people that signed the Declaration of Independence, 100% of the people who died at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, probably close to 100% of the people who died at Normandy. This has been a country built basically by white folks.
Over at Dailykos, Ttujoe has a rebuttal, with nice photos and data on the errors in such wild assertions. He points out the extensive role of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and Japanese Americans (and white women) in various American wars. Many more folks than white men were critical to all these efforts, including the first two (the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence). Even in the first two cases, those 55 or so white men in each case (who were 100 percent of the delegates in the these rather un-democractic settings) would not have been there but for the substantial wealth generated by enslaved African Americans who worked for many of them, even accompanied them to such gatherings as servants, not to mention the many white women who labored for and with them as well:
Well, let’s take Vicksburg first, Pat, you’re just wrong. You must have forgotten about the Battle of Milliken’s Bend. That was the battle where African-American soldiers defeated Confederates who were trying to cut a union supply line. Now, Pat, obviously this was a battle during the Civil War. But what does this have to do with Vicksburg? Well, that supply line the Confederates were trying to cut just happened to be Grant’s supply line who were laying siege to Vicksburg. (By the way, I’m not surprised that you didn’t learn about this- after all, the National Park Service didn’t even have an exhibit or monument about these troops until 2007).
The African American soldiers and support troops in Civil War somehow get left out in most of the public discussions of US history, and in too many accounts of contributions as well. As a result of successful recruiting by Martin Delaney, Frederick Douglass, and other black (and some white) leaders, during the last years of the Civil War several hundred thousand African Americans (men and women), many formerly enslaved, served as Union soldiers and support troops–and thus did more to free enslaved Americans than did President Abraham Lincoln’s famous 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. Without them the war might have ended in a draw or worse. Lincoln was having trouble getting enough white men to right for the Union.
Like the black abolitionists, most of these Union soldiers and support troops undoubtedly held some version of a black liberty and justice counter-frame to the dominant white-racist frame in their minds. For example, the formerly enslaved John Washington, who ran away and became part of the Union Army’s support troops, described his new situation thus:
Before morning I had began to feel like I had truly escaped from the hands of the slaves master and with the help of God, I never would be a slave no more. I felt for the first time in my life that I could now claim every cent that I should work for as my own. I began now to feel that life had a new joy awaiting me. I might now go and come when I please This was the first night of freedom.
Another formerly enslaved member of Union support troops put it this way:
The next morning I was up early and took a look at the rebels country with a thankful heart to think I had made my escape with safety after such a long struggle; and had obtained that freedom which I desired so long. I now dreaded the gun, and handcuffs and pistols no more.
For formerly enslaved men and women, liberty and justice were much more than rhetorical abstractions. Their sacrifices on Civil War battlefields and behind the lines helped not only to free those enslaved, but also to put the United States on track to become a freer country. This is what Buchanan leaves out. It was men and women of color, and white women, who periodically, even centrally, helped keep the liberty and justice ideas out front at times when many white men were trying to maintain traditional forms of oppression.
Commercial Images: Visual Racism from the Past and Present
Posted by: | CommentsOver at Slate, David Segal has posted a useful slide show of blatantly racist commercial images, mostly from the past, for African, Asian, Latino, and Native Americans. Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, and the racist Native American images used by baseball teams today are there.
If you have not seen these, or your students or friends have not seen them, do check them out. This slide show should be of substantial use to you for teaching purposes.
Up is a Racist Downer
Posted by: | Comments[Note: This was written with Carmen Lugo-Lugo, and Mary Bloodsworth-Lugo]
photo credit: Steve Rhodes
In May 2009, Pixar released Up, its tenth animated feature. It premiered as the top grossing film the week of its release, and has netted more than $226 million in its first four weeks alone. Beyond the box office, popular reception has been far from critical, as high profile film critics have offered reviews that might be described as positive, glowing, and celebratory.
Even in the blogosphere where we might anticipate a bit more reflection, acritical responses and ringing endorsements have ruled the day, raining praise upon Up for everything from its uplifting message of enlightenment and the scientific puzzles it posesto the kindness of the studio that produced it. Moreover, At first blush, it might appear that Up also confirms that the United States, as discernible in its popular cultural forms, has indeed entered an era after or beyond the difficulties of race, gender, and sexuality. After all, it features no princess in need of rescue or prince charming to slay the dragon; it contains none of the uncomfortable images of racial and ethnic difference so prominent (in retrospect) in some of the classics-such as the crows in Dumbo, King Louie in the Jungle Book, or the Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp. However, such an analysis of Up would be a misreading of the film itself and of animated cinema over the past two decades-an argument we briefly rehearse here and elaborate in our forthcoming book Animating Difference. Moreover, as discuss in our forthcoming book, we advocate multiplying the white racial frame, which helps illuminate popular culture, as in the recent consideration of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, but which we believe should more fully foreground the centrality of race, gender, and sexuality-what we dub white racial (hetero)sexist frames.
Up focuses on the life of Carl Fredericksen (voiced by Ed Asner). Although set in the present, the past weighs on the narrative, particularly Carl’s love for his childhood sweetheart and wife Ellie, whose death leaves him alone and isolated in a quickly changing world, truncating their shared dreams of traveling to Paradise Falls in South America (modeled after Angel Falls in Venezuela) to shed the burdens of modern life. The turning of the movie is Carl’s struggle to retain his autonomy, property, and memory of Ellie from the forces of development encroaching upon him. Resisting a court order compelling him to be institutionalized, he engineers his escape by attaching thousands of balloons to his house, which literally lift him, and inadvertently a young scout, named Russell, who has stowed-away, up. After crash landing near Paradise Falls, the odd couple set out to the explore the environs, encountering a legendary tropical bird that Russell names Kevin, who with the assistance of a talking dog they also encounter in the new land, the pair struggle to save from an unscrupulous explorer, idolized by Carl as a youth. In the end the adventure, driven by the force of heterosexual love, rejuvenates Carl who changes from crotchety shut-in to community volunteer, becoming Russell’s surrogate father in the process.
Up can be seen as a touching story and artistic triumph to be sure. But more importantly, the film underscores the ways in which animated films use difference without appealing to stereotypes to express prevailing understandings about human possibilities, social relationships, and cultural categories.
Nearly a half-century after the civil rights movement and the second wave of feminism, it centers on the adventures of two males (a boy and a man) transformed through the raceless, homosocial bond forged in the wild making the “right choices” as individuals, thus “doing the right thing,” in this case, defending the defenseless. This is extremely important, given that Russell (the child) is Asian, yet his race is rendered invisible during the adventure. Russell’s values, imparted to him by US society, his family, and the Boy Scouts are similar to those of Carl. Russell tells us he is basically fatherless, and seems to have a void his (Asian) mother cannot fill. The child is looking for a father and finds one in Carl’s individualistic white masculinity. This story of white masculinity burdened with special obligations and tested in a hostile environment beset by evil reiterates the facts of whiteness and the race of masculinity.
The setting of Up further underscores this racialized and gendered morality play: the threats of urban development and technology and the changes associated with them (integration, big government) provide an allegory and grounding for white male resentment, expressed daily on talk radio, cable news, and internet chat rooms, while encouraging a kind of nostalgia for simpler times in which individual action mattered and entities like the Boy Scouts groomed young white men for their duties in life. Thus, Russell may not be white, but the institutions he belongs to (like the Boy Scout), and his interactions with White men (like Carl, and the unscrupulous explorer) are teaching him how to become an honorary straight white man. Moreover, Paradise Falls anchors not only Carl’s and Ellie’s dreams, but a geography of difference in which exoticism, escape, and opportunity are projected onto a place in the South, surprisingly absent of indigenous people and surprisingly easy to get to and claim for yourself.
Hence, the ideal space of imperial fantasy is open to the discovery of and in need of protection by (white) adventurers of the North. Finally, heterosexual romance and a failed quest for family propel Up, for it is desire for difference as much as attraction and commitment that bind Carl and Ellie to one another and compel Carl to repulse the force impinging on him as a white man by casting off the constraints of modernity and the chaos of change.
