viz. - Racism

Surface and Appearance in "Accidental Racist," Part 2

Calliope — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:11:24 +0000

At the end of my last post I promised to examine Brad Paisley and LL Cool J's controversial duet "Accidental Racist" in light of Paisley's 2011 "Camouflage" homage. This follow-up post offers that analysis as well as some context from Paisley's pop-country contemporaries and a recent national dialogue about race.

Sharing its name with the garb of hunters and soldiers, Paisley's lighthearted single from the album "This is Country Music" sounds, at first blush, like it would be anything but progressive. You might think only a select crowd could rally around a song that celebrates an aesthetic so closely associated with guns and stealth. But if we listen closer, the song stretches the application of camouflage into unexpected places where it creates an atmosphere of social inclusiveness. Let's see how this plays out.

In the first verse of the song an un-"cool" kid named Kevin makes a successful bid for popularity by pulling up to his high school parking lot with "his entire Chevy Cavalier" painted camouflage. The crowd cheers and Paisley exclaims, "camouflage - it disappears when it pulls out of his garage!"

Camo-bedecked high schoolers show up in the next verse too. Paisley croons,

I asked Jenny to the prom and her mom knew how to sew

So she mad a matching tux and gown from Duck Blind Mossy Oak

We took pictures in the backyard before we went to the dance

And the only thing that you can see is our faces and our hands

The final quatrain moves into a different register, away from teenagers and their efforts to fit or blend into their social environments to symbols of regional and national identity. The song slows down as Paisley concedes, "well the stars and bars offend some folks and I guess I see why." His reluctance to denounce the Confederate Flag outright is puzzling. But perhaps this is the kind of "tact" Paisley needs to use in order to get his largely southern, white fan-base to buy into the alternative flag he wants to propose:

Nowadays there's still a way to show your southern pride

The only thing as patriotic as the old red white and blue

Is green and gray and black and brown and tan all over too

Given the way camouflage functioned earlier in the song, as an invisible social glue that attracts even as it allows anxiety-producing social objects (outfits for prom, the car one drives to school) to fade away, we're encouraged to read the camo-colored flag as performing a similar kind of social function. Characterizing camouflage as his "favorite color" and adding that it is "designed by Mother Nature and by God," the singer makes the humorous claim that it is naturally occuring and divinely inspired. But the joke may have a deeper significance. By refering to camouflage as a single color that comprises "black and brown and tan" shades, the song also advocates for replacing old racist symbols of "southern pride" with symbols of a racially and ideologically diverse place. In the far-fetched, humorous universe of the song, camouflage is the means by which to reject exclusivity in favor of inclusion.

Paisley's struggle to find an acceptable outlet for "southern pride"--which he says is clouded by "southern blame" in "Accidental Racist"--may seem like a strange fixation. But it's a theme that is dear to Nashville country and has been handled in far less considerate or creative terms. Take for instance Eric Church's single "Homeboy," released the same year as "Camouflage." Adapting the biblical story of the prodigal son, the singer pleads with the title character--presumably his little brother--to return home from his wayward life on streets. Like Paisley's songs, Church's tune uses racialized clothing items and physical appearance to signal racial difference. But unlike "Accidental Racist," Church's song doesn't express difference through white and black characters; instead it sets up a strong antagonism between American farm life and hip-hop-influenced, urban culture.

Let's take a quick look at the lyrics. The singer's initial appeal to his brother mocks the urban style adopted and/or popularized by black hip-hop artists:

You were too bad for a little square town

With your hip-hop hat and your pants on the ground

Heard you cussed out mama, pushed daddy around

before you tore off in his car

Here you are running these dirty old streets

Tattoo on your neck, fake gold on your teeth

Got the 'hood here snowed, but you can't fool me

We both know who who you are

Later on in the song the singer counters the gold teeth and the baggy pants of the "'hood" with fixtures of a white, small-town existence: hard work, cold beers, hay bales, and trucks by the lake.

Even though LL Cool J and Brad Paisley work with the same sartorial imagery (Cool J tells us his pants are "saggin'") they actively reject the "us versus them" mentality of a song like "Homeboy." They do this by invoking stereotypically black or white clothing items (cowboy hats, a Skynyrd t-shirt, saggy pants, do-rags, and gold bling) and, without disparaging them, acknowledging that these are proverbially just the cover of the book. Paisley's line,

I try to put myself in your shoes and that's a good place to begin

But it ain't like I can walk a mile in someone else's skin,

captures the way the song treats dress versus more permanent forms of racial identity. Walking in someone's shoes, or in their do-rag or cowboy hat, isn't a meaningless gesture and neither should these objects be left out of a conversation about race. But "Accidental Racist" also refuses to absolve us of the ugliest kind of discrimination--not just judgment based on clothing, but judgment based on skin color.

Image Credit: www.cbsnews.com

If there's any doubt about whether clothing or appearance is a legitimate place to start a dialogue about race, just recall the murder of Florida teen Trayvon Martin that occured just over a year ago and the national "hoodie" movement it inspired. If anything LL Cool J and Brad Paisley do well to remind us that appearance, whether it is racial or cultural, still triggers prejudice and fear. How can we deny the emotional basis of a simple wish like this, "Just because my pants are saggin' doesn't mean I'm up to no good / You should try to get to know me, I really wish you would"?

Surface and Appearance in "Accidental Racist," Part 1

Calliope — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 13:23:37 +0000

Image Credit: Mark Humphrey, AP

The media reacted volubly to Brad Paisley's song "Accidental Racist," a ballad on his newly released "Wheelhouse" album that openly tackles the problem of racism. Staging a dialogue between Paisley and rapper LL Cool J, the song imagines the tense process of "remembering and forgetting" slavery, as one critic put it, from highly stereotyped white and black perspectives. Many voices from the blogosphere last week, including Stewart and Harris from Jezebel and Slate, fumed at the song's presentation of racial history and relations, while others viewed it as simply a provocative song characteristic of Paisley's other work. That it was selected by the NYTimes.com for one of the online "Room for Debate" forums is, perhaps, an indication of how ripe the song's lyrics are for critique and how generative they are of competing rhetorics.

Here I will consider how controversial lyrics from "Accidental Racist" alongside resonant verses from Paisley and other mainstream country artists foreground surfaces and appearances--clothing, physique, and color, for instance--to talk about identity, race, and social perceptions.

Image Credit: www.bet.com

One of the verses from "Accidental Racist" that has caused contention is Cool J's line, "If you don't judge my gold chains / I'll forget the iron chains." Critics object to the implication that white people overlooking a "black" fashion choice is somehow equivalent to black people forgetting about slavery altogether. Setting aside the offensiveness of this equation, I'd just like to point out that the line centers around a clothing accessory and also the suggestion that while such objects can inspire misjudgment and misunderstanding they can also be imbued with meanings that have deep consequences for race relations. I would argue that the song's frequent references to racialized apparel--a white cowboy hat, "invisible white hoods," a Skynyrd t-shirt with a red confederate flag on it, saggy pants, and a do-rag--are not so accidental, and that they fit in with a tendency in Paisley's work to appropriate and explode a certain kind of visual stereotype.

Take for instance, Paisley's tune "Online" from his 2007 album "Fifth Gear." Seemingly just a goofy song about online dating it actually engages with larger questions about anonymity, identity, and personal interaction on the Web, and it does so primarily by parodying the way we enhance our digital appearances.

The song begins with its protagonist enumerating what he calls his "stats," details about his height, weight and livelihood:

I work down at the pizza pit

And I drive an old Hyundai

I still live with my mom and dad

I'm 5'3 and overweight

Despite this profile, which, within the heteronormative frame of the song is represented as hopelessly pathetic, the singer is buoyed by the way he looks online:

'Cause online I'm out in Hollywood

I'm 6'5 and I look damn good

I drive a Maserati

I'm a black belt in Karate

And I love a good glass of wine

The sketch of the subject's "real" appearance and that of his constructed online persona present radically different versions of maleness; the one resembles adolescence and the other independence and success. Yet the descriptions are similar in their form and artificiality; neither evokes an image of a real person but rather two poles of a cartoonish spectrum of male desirability. Thus, beyond the song's main lesson--that people "grow another foot" and "lose a bunch of weight" when they portray themselves online--is the notion that a list of personal "stats," like the sort found on Facebook or used to size up a date, fail to express a person's true identity even though they can help with reinvention, profilerating online a "whole 'nother me."

The basic paradox presented in "Online," that while appearances are only skin deep they have real effects and consequences, also underlies the interplay between appearance and perceptions in "Accidental Racist." Paisley articulates the paradox when he apologizes to the black man he meets behind the Starbucks counter,

When I put on that t-shirt, the only thing I meant to say is I'm a Skynyrd fan

The red flag on my chest somehow is like the elephant in the corner of the south

In my next post on this subject, I'll look at Paisley's 2011 song "Camouflage" to further examine his interest in fabric and color and their ideological freight.

A New Version of the South's History for Students of "NewSouth"

james.wiedner — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 03:39:23 +0000

Image Credits: Amazon.com

In researching and writing my last blog posting, which sought to explore the possible dangers associated with the expurgation of the literary classics we use in the school setting, I found myself digging a little deeper into a story from a couple of years ago that I was only vaguely familiar with. In that last posting, I focused upon the ways in which e-books were, by the nature of the medium, particularly susceptible to modification and/or censorship. But these concerns are not ones we should only ascribe to the digital; I wanted to demonstrate that modification of canonical works for the purpose of “protecting” people from any content that might be unpleasant to the modern reader’s sensibilities can and does happen with our “old-fashioned” paper textbooks, too.

With that intent in mind, I mentioned an incident a couple of years ago where a publisher put together an edition of “Huckleberry Finn” specifically intended for classroom use that had been substantively edited from cover-to-cover. To wit: NewSouth Books saw it fit to publish a copy of the American classic “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” that had been modified roughly 300 times by “Mark Twain expert” Dr. Alan Gribben. Gribben took it upon himself to rewrite “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by replacing every instance of the word “nigger” with “slave,” “injun” with “Indian,” and “half-breed” with “half-blood” (cite).

Dr. Gribben, (who, incidentally, was a professor for nearly two decades at UT, a fact about which we should all be proud) composed an introduction to this new version of Twain’s masterpiece wherein he attempts to justify his rewriting; a portion of this Introduction is available on the publisher’s website. NewSouth describes Dr. Gribben’s introduction as one that “eloquently develops” the “bold move compassionately advocated by Gribben” to sanitize the book in a way that Gribben didn’t find so personally offensive.

Reading this introduction is nothing short of amazing in the arrogance, hypocrisy, and short-sightedness it depicts. To mention just one the introduction’s many stand-out moments (it would be impossible to go through them all), Dr. Gribben attempts to justify his decision to rewrite Twain’s canonical work by lamenting the “occasional efforts of rap and hip-hop musicians to appropriate [the N-Word].” The person who felt they were within their rights in determining how the “N-Word” can and cannot be used in classic literature is simultaneously wagging his finger at two overwhelmingly African-American genres of music for “appropriating” that word?

Seriously?

Frighteningly, Dr. Gribben created the new version of Twain with the specific intent that his rendition of Twain would be more appropriate in the context of the classroom. Apparently, maintaining literary integrity is not worth the White Guilt that comes along with remembering this shameful chapter of the past.

Even more frightening is the fact that there is no way the typical reader would know from looking at the textbook that it was anything other than Mark Twain’s words, as he wrote them. Neither Dr. Gribben nor NewSouth Publishing is making any effort to make the reader aware that what they are purchasing/studying/assuming to be authentic. A side-by-side comparison of NewSouth’s edited version and what is arguably the definitive version of the book can be found at the top of this post.

Is there anything that would make it obvious to any reader- much less a student- that the author’s text is respected in one, and revised in the other? It is precisely because the book is designed such that it could easily be mistaken for the Real McCoy that the actions of Dr. Gribben and NewSouth are so contemptible and dangerous. Below, I've suggested some edits to NewSouth's present cover that would help eliminate reader confusion between the altered and authentic versions. Even if the damage has already been done with NewSouth's first literary miscarriage, they will have a chance to do right when their follow-up edition is published. I, for one, can't wait to see all of the new things they decided to rewrite since the first edition!

I encourage you to read excerpts of Gribben’s introduction, which I’ve linked to a bunch of times in the above post-turned-rant. Excerpts from Dr. Gribben’s introduction to the publication of the classic American novel he saw himself fit to revise are so jaw-dropping in their hypocrisy that it is truly hard to believe that he’s being serious. It’s too bad that he was, because, had he had his tongue in his check, Dr. Gribben’s words would constitute the sort of satire and racial commentary that Twain himself might’ve been impressed by.

Mashups and Misreadings: “We’re a Culture, Not a Costume” Revisited

Lisa Gulesserian — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image credit: STARS

I know that we just survived another Halloween, so you’re probably already on to thinking about your Thanksgiving plans. Humor me as I ask us to think about Halloween again. While perusing Colorlines, a daily news site about contemporary racial justice issues, I stumbled upon a fantastic visual campaign by Ohio University’s Students Teaching about Racism in Society (STARS) organization. The campaign, “We’re a Culture, Not a Costume,” is smart, scathing, and to the point. It’s everything I ever wanted in a campaign to raise awareness about the everyday racism that is often shrugged off in moments of embarrassment and frustration. As expected, the campaign has garnered national attention, but its message has been mocked by mashups posted all over the Internet. We need to think critically about the messages about racism in both STARS’ campaign and in its Photoshopped reiterations. Something’s askew in the mashup world, if you ask me.

According to Jorge Rivas' post on Colorlines, the Ohio University organization behind the campaign, STARS, created the images after the organization’s president, Sarah Williams, saw a person in black face at a Halloween party last year. To bring attention to the insensitivity of many Halloween costumes, Williams holds an image of a woman completely covered in black body paint, wearing a chain around her neck and a baseball cap on her head.

Image credit: STARS

The young woman points to her obviously false teeth (another key part of the costume) while a man wearing a vampire costume feigns going in for a bite on her neck. It’s all fun and games, right? Not to African Americans, like Williams herself, who are being mocked. Everything about the costume is a stereotype—the chain, the hat, the fake teeth. If we’re now “post-racial,” as some commentators have argued since the election of Barack Obama, this image seems like it’s out of time. In fact, it is. This is blackface no matter how hard we try to shrug it off. We see Williams’ serious face, and we know it’s not just a joke, a harmless costume. Her somber face and dark clothing contextualize the image she’s holding. We can’t help but agree with the words above the image: “This is NOT who I am, and this is NOT okay.”

Despite these visual cues as to how to read the campaign, some viewers seem to have taken Williams’ and STARS’ message lightly. On The Chive, “home to the best funny, viral and interesting photos from around the world,” the campaign is seen as a “FAIL.” In a post called “C’mon guys, let’s take Halloween seriously,” Mac the Intern collected 21 mashups of the campaign, using fictional characters, animals, and movie stars.

Images credit: The Chive

With these Photoshopped images, the tone and power of the original STARS campaign is completely ignored and, I would argue, diffused. Yes, it’s funny that people dress in dog costumes. But, when we see that this humor is pointed out using the exact format of the original campaign—the dark background, the orange “We’re a culture, not a costum” banner, the “This is NOT who I am, and this is NOT okay”—we only see the campaign and its creators suffering a fate similar to the one that they would suffer when seeing someone dressed up in a racist costume. Like the creators of the campaign who, embarrassed and ashamed, were forced to stifle their anger and hurt because they’re in a public setting, these images stifle the strong message of STARS’ campaign. We’re supposed to shrug it all off. Halloween’s a time of jokes and treats. But I can’t help but feel tricked.

So, as you’re thinking about roasting a turkey and falling into a contented slumber, know that we’re not done with Halloween yet. There are still all those Facebook Halloween pictures to look at.

Excuse me, but there's some prejudice on your face

ladysquires — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 21:16:29 +0000

Photo credit: Pargon, Flickr Creative Commons

There are plenty of negative things to be said about the Tea Party, particularly in the wake of Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally: that the movement's appropriation of the words and images of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln represents the deployment of unreconstructed white privilege at its worst, that it is controlled by corporate and media elites with a vested interest in obstructing a Democratic agenda (note the Tea Party's inexplicable support of the Citizen's United decision, which seems completely out of step with their populist ethos though perhaps somewhat consistent with the libertarian ideal of unfettered markets).

Yet I'm noting, with increasing annoyance, a problematic elementary school nastiness in criticism of the Tea Partiers and their ideologues. Note the photograph above, which was posted on Flickr as part of a series called "Teabonics." The argument of this particular photo and a few others like it seems to be that Tea Partiers are fat and stupid and therefore don't deserve to be taken seriously. Such a reading seems to be confirmed by the first comment, which says, "Resisance is Conservative for Fat Ass." And while, yes, I agree that there is a dismaying irony in signs like the following, given the draconian new anti-immigration laws in the Southwest, I find myself asking, "Really? Is this the level to which we must descend?" (Forgive the hackneyed syntax. I did not want to be accused of ending my sentence with a preposition).

Photo credit: Pargon, Flickr Creative Commons

Such tactics might not merit concern if they weren't being legitimized in corners of the blogosphere that I had previously found quite lucid and respectable. I came across the first photo on the widely popular humor site Political Irony, which accompanies the image with a link to the site LOLGOP, a blog (which is designed to look like the Drudge Report, performing a sort of rhetoric before you even get to the content) that makes the claim that "there may have been only 87,000 people there, but they ate for 1,000,000." LOL indeed. As far as I can tell, that claim is as unsubstantiated as Michelle Bachmann's assertion that 1,000,000 attended the rally and appears to be simply a jab at the rotundness of certain attendees.

Let's take stock of everything that's wrong with that, shall we? First of all, this line of critique makes several aggressively sizest assumptions about the relationship between larger body size, intelligence, and human worth. Furthermore, it eclipses the presence of the many progressives who happen to be fat (or poor spellers). Then we have the Flickr album labelled "Teabonics," obviously a pun on the term "ebonics," which was used for a time to describe African American vernacular speech. In other words, this pun posits a relationship between the quality of one's grammar or spelling, intelligence, and worth as a human being, a logic that has historically been used to exclude African Americans and other minorities from the public sphere. Given the relationshisp between illiteracy and poverty, this is also a logic that erases anyone from a lower socio-economic background.

In other words, this critique--"LOL, Tea Partiers are fat and uneducated"--enacts the same forms of prejudice found within the Tea Party itself by making overt arguments about what types of people and voices count in the political arena, i.e. no fatties, no poor and/or uneducated people, and by extension no one who fails to embody hegemonic ideals of middle class respectability. And don't worry, there's sexism in there to. Among the taglines on LOLGOP is the following: "Sarah Palin is the porn industry's idea of what a businesswoman looks like." Ok, sure, this could be a critique of the way in which Palin has been sexualized by the media, but I doubt it. Devoid of context (and there is no link on that entry), this appears to be a dig at Palin's appearance. How droll. As Melissa McEwan of Shakeville so aptly states, the sexist attacks (most recently in the Vanity Fair piece) on Palin's appearance and performance of motherhood are infuriating precisely because they "compel feminist/womanist women to come to her defense, or, at minimum, point out the absurdity of the coverage. (Bauerlein also tweeted: "'Sarah, these aides say, seemed comforted by having the children around, and she seemed lonely when they were gone.' Truly a monster.") To have feminist writers mock the paucity of legitimate criticisms in a hit piece on Palin can't have been the point."

As the wise man said, before removing the splinter from your friend's eye, first attend to the log in your own.

Visualizing (Post-)Racial Protest and Politics

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 21:25:18 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Towleroad

H/T: Hampton Finger

It’s been hard to miss the recent media coverage of the new Arizona immigration law SB 1070, which allows police to stop individuals and require them to show legal papers proving their citizenship upon “reasonable suspicion.” Many have interpreted this as legalizing racial profiling, which has caused protests to spring up against this, most recently the one pictured above where individuals smeared refried beans in the shape of a swastika to point out the potentially fascist implications of the bill. What makes me curious is how racial tensions have been visually deployed during the theoretically post-racial Obama presidency.

I was fortunate to recently attend a talk at the University of Texas’s John L. Warfield Center for African & African American Studies given by Dr. Soyini Madison on the topic of “White Anger, Crazy Patriotism, and (Post) Black Performativity.” In this talk, Dr. Madison discussed how what she refers to as “crazy patriotism,” which she accounts for as something like a sacred belief in nationalist ideology, first projected their frustrations onto Michelle Obama to portray her as an angry black woman who hates America (as seen on a New Yorker cover previously discussed on viz.), then re-appropriated it as a righteous anger that seeks to preserve American values. This discussion seemed relevant for viz. readers if only because Dr. Madison constantly referred to the visual “momification” of Michelle Obama on newspaper stands nationwide.

Image Credit: Jezebel

Jezebel’s recent post on her magazine covers notes how frequently she likes to pose with her hands clasped:

Why do so many Mobama covers feature the First Lady with her hands demurely clasped? Deliberate signaling of her approachability? Or is it just how she likes to pose? What does it all mean?

Jezebel is clearly onto something here: the pearls she wears, along with her clasped hands, her manicured nails, and the apple on the table all serve to portray the First Lady as a suburban middle-class mom whose causes and views are all as wholesome as the organic foods she grows in her home garden. Yet while some have criticized her for this momification, Madison points out how this particular post-black identity allows the Obamas to displace crazy patriotism yet still maintain race as a part of the discussion. (It’s interesting to consider how her image helps sell magazines as a note, though—she helps sell magazines directed at African-Americans, but “doesn’t produce more than an occasional lift” for general-interest publications.)

The question that I think can come from pairing together what seems like two different discourses is to see how the visuals of post-raciality still lean on racially encoded signifiers. Just as refried beans serve as shorthand to identity an angry Hispanic speaker, Michelle is dressed and posed to present a nonthreatening blackness to viewers.

William Faulkner once wrote that “the past is never dead, it’s not even past.” We can see in these images that while some commentators and Tea Partiers might argue that this law doesn’t involve racial profiling and that Obama is not subject to racist attacks, racism and its legacy remain problems with which we must cope—especially when people are already being arrested according to this law's logic.

Cartooning Obama

Nate Kreuter — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 16:19:43 +0000

Right off the bat, I want to say that I'm not accusing contemporary political cartoonists of creating racist depictions of Barack Obama. But I do wonder, is that tough to avoid? Political cartoons typically accentuate the subject's features in unflattering ways. They're caricatures. Remember George W. Bush's enlarged ears? The problem is that, with the nation's first African-American President, cartoonists have to avoid a whole history of racist cartooning. They have to simultaneously do what they've always done, which is make fun of the most powerful person in the world, but without referencing a racist visual history.

Consider this racist cartoon:

(Image from the Ferris State University Jim Crow Museum)

That's probably a scary referent to have in the cartoon history books if you're an editorial cartoonist working today. I'd be curious to hear what others have noticed on this dilemma, but it seems to me that most cartoonists are simply emphasizing Obama's skinniness and height, so as to avoid any of the racist references. But then there are some cartoons, like this one, that seem to be flirting with the historical racist images: