Monthly Archives: February 2013

Lisa Lampanelli And Her “N***a”: How a Comedian Became a Cliché (Participation)

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Self-proclaimed comedian Lisa Lampanelli has once again proven her fondness for back-door racism by referring to creator of the hit HBO series Girls, Lena Dunham, as her “n***a” on Twitter. That in and of itself is nothing spectacular, but her pathetic, self-serving attempts at justifying her vocabulary choice have probably been her funniest — unintentional — jokes to date.

And I don’t mean funny ha-ha; I mean funny as in she sounds like a damn idiot.

Undeniably, calling a woman b***h as an endearment is another problematic conversation worth having; but today, let’s deal with the most combustible issue. From The Huffington Post to XOJane, Lampanelli has recycled the same tired, misguided rhetoric that some black people use to justify re-purposing plantation language as a show of camaraderie — namely, that the use of an “a” instead of an “er” makes the word acceptable. She told The Huffington Post:

“The N-word ending in ‘er’ is far different context from the word ending in ‘a.’ Ask any person who knows the urban dictionary, it means ‘friend,'” she said. “And by the way, if I had put the word ending in ‘er,’ that would have been a very derogatory thing about Lena meaning she is less than me, and I view her as very above me. ‘A’ on the end means ‘my friend.'””I’ve played every comedy club and every theatre across the country for the last 25 years and seen a lot of audience members from different ethnic persuasions,” she continued. “I have been using these words since I started in comedy and guess what, people? I won’t stop anytime soon, just because your ass is up on Twitter. I have always used in my act every racial slur there is for Asians, blacks, gays, and Hispanics. To me, it’s acceptable if the joke is funny and if it is said in a context of no hate. It’s about taking the hate out of the word.”

You may be asking yourselves right now, “Did she really refer to the Urban Dictionary to get a more comprehensive grasp of “n****r” etiquette?” Why, yes; yes, she did.

Then in an interview dripping with White privilege, she told Pia Glenn that she doesn’t plan on censoring herself because that would water down the art:

“… because I have, I think, over 800 likes of it on Instagram, I forget the number, I have to look it up. But here’s the thing, I’m not being pejorative, I’m not being dismissive, but I have to say I don’t care. And you wanna know why I don’t care? ‘Cause the minute a comic starts caring about every single person’s opinion, they become watered down, and horrible, and have no sense of relevance whatsoever.”

So, Lampanelli doesn’t care about feedback when it’s negative, but when it’s positive, she presents it as Exhibit A to prove that she can’t be racist because Instagram followers “liked” her photo?

Got it.

Apparently, she never once considering that those 800-plus followers may very well be as simple –minded and thirsty for attention as she is. And while it should have been easy to just shake my head and keep it moving past another lost, white woman so in love with the idea of “all black everything” that she refers to her friends as “n****s” (Hi, Gwyneth), I realized that I just couldn’t indulge her delusional fantasies of bold, groundbreaking humor. Spouting the word “n***a” on social media — or any of the other racist language that she loves — then claiming that she was in character and would never say it in her day-to-day life, doesn’t make Lampanelli a fearless comic — it makes her a coward. In real time, she is trying to figure out whether it’s best for publicity to spin her use of the word as endearing or risque, when all she really needs to do is have a nice, tall glass of shut-up.

For many black people, myself included, the word “n***a” is not an endearment, but a word riddled with hypocrisy and internalized hatred. White women don’t get to sit in their Ivory Towers and tell black people how we should feel about bastardized language historically spewed to demean us; they certainly don’t get to browse through the Urban Dictionary and educate us on how we should collectively feel when, emboldened through its acceptance into pop culture, they grant themselves permission to fling it around at will. For better or worse, that is our debate. As a community, black people continue to struggle with the rules and regulations created to harness the ugly power of the word. We are still trying to build a foundation of cultural pride within our youth strong enough to withstand the commercialized hip-hop industry that tells them they are n****s every, single day — and not as in friend, but as in pen…itentiary.

Lisa Lampanelli is to comedy what the Tea Party is to patriotism. And for her to think that she has the right to progress a racial dialogue that has never affected her in any way, shape or form — other than a few extra Twitter mentions and a spin around the news cycle — solidifies her position as one of the most ridiculous people on the planet. She needs to understand that she is not knocking down any walls nor shattering any ceilings by frivolously parroting the word “n***a;” in fact, by doing so, she accomplishes just the opposite, rendering herself nothing more than a walking cliché. In her haste to appear fearless and post-racial, she merely becomes another white person who feels that minimizing the emotional heft that the term “n***a/er” carries grants her inclusion into a circle that she would otherwise not be allowed into — no matter how many times she mentions that she played the Apollo Theater or had sex with black men.

Using the word “n***a” to refer to Lena Dunham (who has her own black people issues as discussed in an insightful, thoughtful piece by Rebecca Carroll) doesn’t make her bold or funny or shocking or different; in this hipster America, it makes her basic and typical and boring. To then pat herself on the back for standing up to black people and their “f**king phony semantics bullsh*t” like she’s Mitt Romney threatening to repeal Obamacare at the NAACP convention, makes her her own funniest punchline to date.

As Paul Mooney said, “Everybody wants to be a n***a, but don’t nobody wanna be a n***a.”

The dismissive, condescending tone of “I’m white, so I can say whatever the hell I want and you will deal” while simultaneously trying to fold into black culture is not groundbreaking — it’s sad and embarrassingly unoriginal. Hopefully Lampanelli has some real friends (not 800-plus Instagram followers) who will tell her that — and soon — before she becomes more of a joke than she already is.
An earlier version of this article appeared on HelloBeautiful.com

Liberal racial hypocrisy (Participation)

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Liberal racial hypocrisy

Killing people of color just for being a suspected threat is a total outrage for liberals. Well, sometimes

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Liberal racial hypocrisyTravyon Martin and Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi(Credit: AP/HO, Martin Family Photos/Facebook)

Since the reelection of President Obama, liberals have made some bold admissions. Commentators like Touré Neblett of MSNBC’s The Cycle have enthusiastically and repeatedly defended the president’s authority to launch drones against anyone, including American citizens, if he suspects that they are “trying to kill us.”

At no point in his several defenses did Touré reconcile his position with once-popular Constitutional precepts that every person should be presumed innocent until proven guilty, and know the charges and evidence against him, and have the right to a fair trial. Neither did he explain why ordinary Americans should suspend their longstanding skepticism of politicians in power or withdraw the demand that the president and Congress be accountable for their actions, especially the taking of someone’s life.

Sadly, Touré isn’t alone in trusting the president’s complete discretion to decide which individuals are threats to American safety. Other liberals, from Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, to Touré’s MSNBC colleague Krystal Ball, to liberal bloggers also admit to a higher level of comfort with President Obama’s overseeing of otherwise troubling policies such as secret kill lists, targeted killings, and preemptive detentions of suspected terrorists. They are joined by 54% of Americans, who agree that the Obama Administration should have the discretion to kill anyone alleged to be senior al-Qaeda members.

The hoopla has been described by other pundits, liberal and conservative, as hypocrisy or, more accurately, shameless political double standards. Why exculpate a Democratic president for the same troubling, and extrajudicial, policies once engaged in by a Republican president? They’re right, of course. But there’s another double standard to worry about: one that assumes brown/black foreigners shouldn’t receive the same benefit of the doubt about their guilt that is regularly given to other Americans. It can only be ascribed to a racial double standard, one consistent with an aggressive jingoism.

The same racial double standard is exemplified by the deep American indifference to the fact that the subjects of targeted killings, kill lists, no-fly lists, preemptive detentions, and FBI-led entrapments are almost always brown and black foreign nationals, despite the murkiness of the reasons for which the U.S. designates someone a terrorist. As Scott Shane of the New York Times describes in this PBS interview, the criteria by which names are placed on various kill lists or drone lists vary. Regarding drone strikes, although the Administration suggests that they only target members of al-Qaeda, neither they nor the CIA have felt a need to provide evidence of this. We know generally that an able-bodied, military-age male, who is 16 or older, in the “strike target area” constitutes a legitimate target. And that criterion is fairly shaky to begin — or end — with.

When the casualties are young kids taking part in a wedding celebration in Yemen, the indifference is reflected in the claim that their deaths are accidental. Collateral damage. Despite the inaccuracy of the term, most liberals buy the answer.

The American indifference turns to murmurs of indignation when the casualties are 16-year-old American kids who are the sons of irresponsible fathers, in the inspiring comments of presidential advisor Robert Gibbs (see this link beginning at 2:08). Sometimes, the indifference turns into a derisive cheer when it turns out that the targets of assassinations are brown American citizens. In the inspiring words of Touré, those Americans who join al-Qaeda “should be killed.” And they certainly “shouldn’t expect Constitutional protections.” Yet there is widespread evidence that American Muslims make up a negligible percentage of suspected terrorists.

The racial double standard is exemplified in the general American indifference over the deaths of foreign nationals or brown American citizens, in contrast to the rightful outrage over the needless killings of many other young African American men and women — from Trayvon Martin to the multiple state-led attempts to execute Warren Hill, a mentally disabled prisoner on death row in Georgia, and Hadiya Pendleton, a recent victim of gun violence.

Racism is unacceptable for American liberals. But many critics of racism are surprisingly comfortable with a jingoist foreign policy, even when it includes the deaths of Pakistani and Yemeni toddlers. Jingoism is just another word for extra-national racism, made acceptable by the constant references to American safety and freedom. The ubiquitous existence of the U.S. Homeland is evoked through the Orwellian Department of Homeland Security, whose function of policing the borders hardly repels the troubling resonance with the German homeland. We see further iterations of the Homeland on a daily basis, from DHS’s “See Something, Say Something” public campaign (the DHS video is a must-see, especially for its scary music and self-conscious inversion of racial stereotypes of terrorists and victims) to its federally imposed Secure Communities program. Both gratuitously justify racial suspicion as an integral part of national security and mutually reinforce the message that America is under radical threat at the national and local levels. Those messages are entrenched in the DHS’s massive deportation of 1.5 million immigrants under a Democratic president, and its periodic use of undocumented migrants as target practice. Indeed, that is the Department of Homeland Security’s figurative and functional purpose: the constant symbolic, penal, and lethal reinforcement of the boundaries of the Homeland.

We see reinforcement of the Homeland ideal in other dimensions as well, such as in the profiling of Latinos and other dark populations in the anti-immigration laws of various states. The latest expression of the Homeland can be seen in the newly minted partnership between Yale University and the Department of Defense. Giving each partner a mutual elite imprimatur, they will jointly host a training center where US Special Forces agents will learn new interrogation techniques by experimenting upon the dark immigrant residents of New Haven. The director of the center will be psychiatry professor Charles Morgan, who, as Democracy Now reports, previously conducted research on how to tell whether Arab and Muslim men were lying.

Over the last decade, the Homeland has become an explicit framework that normalizes the militarization of society — especially for darker men and women, who have become used to having their dignity violated through requests for their ‘papers,’ or by being subjected to questioning or frisks at airports and on city streets. Through the Homelandish mindset, many Americans have become immune to the need to respect the humanity and lives of dark foreigners.

After 11 years of vigorously reinforcing those boundaries internally and externally, we’ve forgotten that killing folks outside our nation — without accountability and compelling evidence — amounts to an aggressive xenophobia, which is a heinous racism hiding behind the pretense of “national security.”

Consider the following description by progressive House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi in defending the Obama Administration policy of targeted killings.

“…The values on the other side are not there. This is their life’s work to go to heaven — not to put down their beliefs, but the fact is, we don’t have a shared respect for life.”

Which “they”? Which “we”? Someone needs to remind Rep. Pelosi of sociologist Charles Kurzman’s findings, cited in multiple news sources, in which he points out that radical Muslims pose little threat to Americans. Others, such as Glenn Greenwald, have pointed out that continual extrajudicial killings and other aggressive foreign policies engender much more hostility, hatred and violence than they quell.

It is reminiscent of the conservative logic behind the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The same logic was spouted by Army Lt. General William Boykin, a senior Pentagon official under the Bush Administration. In 2003, he defended the incursion into Iraq by insisting that “We are a Christian Nation leading a war against Satan.” Boykin’s phrase was reported by the New York Times as having been praised by Donald Rumsfeld, then defense secretary.

When liberals uncritically parrot the racist responses given by conservatives, what is left to differentiate ourselves? Pelosi’s response is a microcosm of a larger liberal issue: the tendency of racially progressive liberals to accept troubling policies like the kill list and targeted killings when they learn of the president’s support for them.

Consider an alternative comparison between American racism and a lethal foreign policy. When Trayvon Martin was murdered last year, Black Agenda Report blogger Jemima Pierre wrote:

“[W]e also should ask ourselves the question recently posed on twitter by @public_archive: ‘Trayvon was executed because of a perceived threat; US launches target assassinations because of perceived threats. Both are somehow legal?’” Unfortunately, they are.

“We should be outraged at all of these deaths. Trayvon Martin, Adbulrahman al-Awlaki, his cousin, and the countless civilians — so-called terrorist targets — who are victims of a US policy of drone strikes and who have no recourse to the law, and no appeal to human decency.”

I would add: We should be vigorously challenging the racial double standard implicit in the endorsement of Obama Administration policies such as kill lists, targeted killings, and other clearly racist foreign policy measures. We should be demanding proof of guilt rather than placing blind faith in any president’s demand for unilateral authority or discretion.

As Pierre argues:

“Our righteous indignation and anger over the Trayvon Martin murder has to stretch beyond our community to consider a global humanity — and especially the nonwhite victims of US militarism and racism. We must pause and reflect on the injustice of the US government’s extrajudicial assassinations, and the fact that the Obama administration has claimed the right to kill people in multiple countries around the world whenever it wants.”

Skepticism, not trust, is needed in the face of the current administration’s national security and counterterrorism policies. Liberals must start to become more critical of the constant warnings about a “wolf” in “national security” clothing. Just because a president they like is calling for targeted killings doesn’t make the policy any less troubling — politically or racially.

Falguni A. Sheth, a professor of philosophy and political theory at Hampshire College, writes about politics, race, and feminism at translationexercises.wordpress.com. Follow her on Twitter: @FalguniSheth.

Race, Family, and Violence (Online writings)

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Please watch President Obama’s speech below and go here to listen to Dr. Melissa Harris Perry’s response here

After you have watched, please reflect on what each is saying here, how this relates to our discussions of family, notions of innocence, the role of government, how race and class impacts discussions of family?  Do you agree with Dr. Harris- Perry’s response?  Why or why not

 

Conversation ended March 31, 2013


Budget – Choices (Online writings)

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Scenario: You are a single parent living in Pullman. You work full time (40 hours a week) at a local fast food restaurant and make approximately $18,803.00 a year before taxes and other standard deductions (at WA’s minimum wage $9.04). Your annual net salary (what you take home) is around $13,000. You have two kids, ages 3 and 5. According to Federal guidelines, the minimum poverty threshold for a family of 3 is $18,530.00, which means you make too much money to qualify for financial assistance. That means that given Washington’s minimum wage (the highest in the nation), you and your children do not qualify for Head Start, food stamps, welfare checks, subsidized housing, subsidized childcare, or any other federal aid program.

Task: Based on that information, create a monthly budget for your family. Be sure to account for the following: • groceries • rent (in town, $700 for a two bedroom house/apt; out of town $450.00 for the same deal—if you choose to live out of town, you have no option but to own a car and incur in the expenses associated with it as listed below) • car payments/maintenance (if you wish not to have a car, you will need a bus pass—monthly expense $14 for you and $10 per child, a total expense of $408.00 a year). • car insurance • health insurance (no less than $3,000.00 a year for the three of you) • life insurance • gas • child care • utilities • electricity • phone/cell • garbage collection • water • cable • Internet connection • clothing for you and the children • entertainment • school supplies for older child • savings account • children’s College 529 Plans • retirement for you ‘

Things to consider: (1) Some of the things I listed above are optional (e.g., entertainment and cable), but others are definitely not. (2) Although things like clothing and school supplies are not needed on a monthly basis, you still need to budget for them, as this is a yearly salary. Even if you only buy them once or twice a year. (3) Give realistic numbers, for this is a real budget and a real situation for way too many people in our state/country. Finally: That is all the money you have. No “my parents sent me money,” and no “I won the lottery.”

For most people in this situation, those are not real options. In space below, provide a budget and provide explanation for what you spent money on, why, what issues you thought about; reflect on process

 

Thanks to Carmen Lugo-Lugo, who created this assignment
Last day to participate March 15

Oscar loves a white savior (participation)

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Oscar loves a white savior

If a movie features white people rescuing people of color from their plight, odds are high an Oscar will follow SLIDE SHOW

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Oscar loves a white savior

According to oddsmakers, Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” does not have the best chance of winning the 2013 Academy Award for best picture. That top spot right now goes to Ben Affleck’s “Argo” — but it shouldn’t. If history is any gauge, “Lincoln” has to be the frontrunner thanks to its status as this year’s only Oscar-nominated White Savior film.

If you’ve been to the movies in the last half century, you know the White Savior genre well. It’s the catalogue of films that features white people singlehandedly rescuing people of color from their plight. These storylines insinuate that people of color have no ability to rescue themselves. This both makes white audiences feel good about themselves by portraying them as benevolent messiahs (rather than hegemonic conquerors), and also depicts people of color as helpless weaklings – all while wrapping such tripe in the cinematic argot of liberation.

This, of course, is the backbone of Spielberg’s “Lincoln.” As historian Kate Masur recently wrote in the New York Times, it is yet another “movie devoted to explaining the abolition of slavery in the United States” but one in which “African-American characters do almost nothing but passively wait for white men to liberate them.” The result, she writes, is a film that ignores actual events of the 19th century, “helps perpetuate the notion that African Americans have offered little of substance to their own liberation” and thus reinforces “the outdated assumption that white men are the primary movers of history and the main sources of social progress.”

Coming from Spielberg, this isn’t particularly surprising. He is, after all, the creator of one of the most unselfconsciously archetypal White Savior movies of all time: “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” In that cartoonish adventure, a whip-wielding white archaeologist drops from the sky into India and quickly becomes the only person able to save destitute peasants from the rein of a tyrannical human-sacrificing cult.

Spielberg’s Abraham Lincoln is certainly a more nuanced character than Dr. Jones, just as his latest film is more sophisticated (if not as exciting) than the second iteration of his 1980s archaeologist-superhero franchise. In return, he has been rewarded with an Oscar nomination – but probably not just because “Lincoln” plays to the Academy’s general love of historical drama. It also plays to Hollywood award organizations’ specific affinity for the White Savior.

Indeed, in the last quarter century, ten White Savior films have received major Hollywood awards, with fully half of those coming in just the last five years. In chronological order, here’s a look at them – and how they channel the same old story of white people saving the day for people of color who supposedly cannot help themselves.

Cry Freedom (1987)
Major Academy Award Nomination: Best Actor (Denzel Washington)

Richard Attenborough’s “Cry Freedom” purports to be the story of South Africa’s black anti-apartheid leader Steven Biko. However, as the Miami Herald noted at the time, it devolves into “a movie about black suffering in which the hero is white.” Specifically, the film focuses far more attention on white journalist Donald Woods (Kevin Kline) and his gradual appreciation for the anti-apartheid cause, ultimately culminating in his flight from the country in order to expose the atrocities to the world.

“This movie promises to be an honest account of the turmoil in South Africa but turns into a routine cliff-hanger about the editor’s flight across the border,” wrote Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert at the time. “It’s sort of a liberal yuppie version of that Disney movie where the brave East German family builds a hot-air balloon and floats to freedom. The problem with this movie is similar to the dilemma in South Africa: Whites occupy the foreground and establish the terms of the discussion, while the 80 percent nonwhite majority remains a shadowy, half-seen presence in the background.”

Mississippi Burning (1988)
Major Academy Award Nominations: Best Actor (Gene Hackman), Best Supporting Actress (Frances McDormand), Best Director (Alan Parker), Best Picture

Like “Cry Freedom” the year before it, “Mississippi Burning” uses the very real history of black struggle as a vehicle to promote the White Savior narrative. In the latter’s case, the struggle is that of civil rights organizers in the south, but the story is nonetheless about the white FBI agents who investigate the murder of those organizers, one of whom was black.

“Mississippi Burning” stands out in the White Savior catalogue for two key reasons.

First, as the Chicago Reader noted at the time, it reimagined J. Edgar Hoover’s lily-white FBI as a heroic force for good in the civil rights struggle, rather than what it often was: either dreadfully inept or complicit in civil rights crimes.

Second, unlike many other directors who refuse to comment about their motivations, “Mississippi Burning’s” director, Alan Parker, was very open about why he deliberately White Savior-ized his film. As he told Time Magazine:

Because it’s a movie, I felt it had to be fictionalized. The two heroes in the story had to be white. That is a reflection of our society as much as of the film industry. At this point in time, it could not have been made in any other way.

Whether or not you blame Parker for his decisions, the New York Times was correct in noting that his choice represented a larger – and self-fulfilling – consensus in Hollywood.

“Movie people seem to believe that whites would be alienated by serious dramatic films with black principals, no matter how compelling the story lines,” the Times Brent Staples wrote, in a perfect summary of why the White Savior genre persists.

Glory (1989)
Major Academy Award Victory: Best Actor (Denzel Washington)

In a sense, “Glory” was the ancestor of Spielberg’s “Lincoln” – sub in Captain Robert Gould Shaw for President Lincoln, set the film right on the blood-soaked battlefield, and actually give a few African American characters some personality, and you have Edward Zwick’s 1989 classic.

But while “Glory” is a far better film than “Lincoln” in no small part because it gives people of color some real screen time, the underlying White Savior message is the same: namely, that black people were only able to fight back against slavery thanks to the benevolence of some enlightened and privileged white people. The big difference is that in “Glory,” the White Savior succeeds only in harnessing the martial power of black soldiers, but not in actually winning those soldiers’ liberation. In the end, the entire regiment is sent to their graves in the battle to take Ft. Wagner.

Dances With Wolves (1990)
Major Academy Award Nominations: Best Actor (Kevin Costner), Best Supporting Actor (Graham Greene), Best Supporting Actress (Mary McDonnell)
Major Academy Award Victories: Best Picture, Best Director (Kevin Costner), Best Adapted Screenplay (Michael Blake)

One of the major sub-categories of the White Savior genre is the “going native” narrative – and 1990′s “Dances With Wolves” is the modern era’s emblematic example. It is the story of a white Union soldier who fully embeds himself in the Sioux tribe and quickly becomes its primary protector. First, he leads the tribe’s defense against its hostile Pawnee rivals, then he helps them attempt to evade the Union army in which he once served.

Among the defining characteristics of “Dances With Wolves” – as it is with most “going native” stories – is the prominence of what has been called the Noble Savage. As TV Tropes describes it, that is a typically Native American “character who is, due to their race or ethnicity, a member of a barbaric or savage tribe (or a group simply perceived as such by others), who is nevertheless portrayed as nobler or of higher moral fibre than the norm.”

Because it portrays a few people of color in a positive light, the use of the Noble Savage caricature often preemptively blunts criticism of the underlying White Savior story. The idea is that a film like “Dances With Wolves” cannot be bigoted or overly white-centric if it at least shows Kicking Bird and Chief Ten Bears as special and exceptional. This, even though the whole story is about a white guy who saves the day.

The Last Samurai (2003)
Major Academy Award Nominations: Best Actor (Ken Watanabe)

Directed by “Glory’s” Edward Zwick, “The Last Samurai” is yet another film presenting the white Union army official as personally embodying the North’s Civil War effort to liberate people of color (see a pattern here?). In this iteration, the story is transferred to Japan, where Captain Nathan Algren, scarred by his role killing off tribes in the American west, goes native with a band of old school samurais and leads them as they resist the repressive imperial government in Tokyo.

As if deliberately underscoring the White Savior notion, the official poster of the film is just a single picture of Cruise with the title “The Last Samurai” under him – a not-so-subtle message encouraging audiences to (wrongly) perceive the white guy – and not a Japanese person – as the last great leader of the ancient Japanese culture.

Gran Torino (2008)
American Film Institute Award: Movie of the Year

Clint Eastwood’s 2008 film pioneered a White Savior mythology that previously seemed impossible to render – a mythology whereby an old-school racist can simultaneously cling to his bigotry while also becoming the venerable protector of the people of color he insults.

If that seems oxymoronic, absurd and altogether shameless, that’s because it is – but that didn’t stop Eastwood from trying to pull it off. In the process, he delivers a film that hints at the bizarre fantasies of his fellow aging conservatives. Indeed, he seems to be arguing that we should not demand that bigots discard their overt prejudice because for many of them, underneath the coarse racism there is supposedly an honorable warrior who believes in truth, justice, the American Way – and racial fairness.

If only we would better understand these aging warriors, suggests “Gran Torino,” they might all miraculously turn into White Saviors.

The Blind Side (2009)
Major Academy Award Nominations: Best Picture, Best Actress (Sandra Bullock)
Major Academy Award Victory: Best Actress (Sandra Bullock)

AfterElton.com calls this Sandra Bullock vehicle nothing short of “the most astonishing, egregious, most White Saviory White Savior Movie” in recent history. The label seems pretty accurate. As Complex.com notes:

In 2006, writer Michael Lewis’ book ‘The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game’ presented an in-depth and honest look at the tough road to success taken by Baltimore Ravens offensive tackle Michael Oher….As written by Lewis, Oher’s story could make for one hell of a sports biopic.

And we’re still waiting for it. Director John Lee Hancock’s 2009 adaptation of Lewis’s book certainly isn’t that; no, ‘The Blind Side’ is actually a movie about Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock), the football-loving, white mother of two who took Oher into her home and looked after him during his high school and college years. Why? Because Hollywood loves a good white savior story, and ‘The Blind Side,’ which depicts Oher as little more than the black version of Lenny from ‘Of Mice And Men,’ is arguably the film industry’s most egregious example of reductively color-bland storytelling.


Avatar (2009)
Major Academy Award Nominations: Best Director (James Cameron), Best Picture

“Avatar” is such a stereotypical White Savior flick that it earned the nickname “Dances with Aliens.” That label is well deserved, as the film offers up almost every lazy meme in the genre.

Tribe of nature loving Noble Savages? Check. White spy who “goes native” with said tribe? Check. Spy has an enlightened epiphany and a subsequent change of heart, aligning him with the tribe against their evil enemies? Check. White guy unifies disparate tribes to fight their collective oppressors in a more powerful way than they ever have? Check.

But it goes even deeper than that. As The Progressive magazine put it:

Jake Sully, played by Sam Worthington, is the white hero who enters the Na’vi’s land, learns, in three months, all their secrets, becomes a super-Na’vi and is able to return and save them from the attack of his crazy nation’s warmongers. Jake is Cameron’s version of Tarzan, the white man who will save the “savages.” Jake is the only one who can successfully pray to the Na’vi’s mother goddess (Eywa). She hears him, not her own people’s prayers and grief.


District 9 (2009)
Major Academy Award Nominations: Best Adapted Screenplay (Neill Bomkamp, Terri Tatchell), Best Picture

At one level, District 9 is a stereotypical White Savior film much like “Avatar” – basically, it’s the story of a white government strongman with roots in South Africa’s apartheid culture going native with his country’s victims of apartheid. Only instead of those victims being black people, they are extraterrestrials known as “prawns.” Eventually, the savior helps free some of those victims so that they can escape, and the rest is history (well, until the expected sequel).

That said, io9′s Annalee Newitz identifies an important substantive distinction between James Cameron’s 3-D blockbuster and District 9 (emphasis added):

Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege. Jake never really knows what it’s like to be a Na’vi because he always has the option to switch back into human mode.

Interestingly, Wikus in District 9 learns a very different lesson. He’s becoming alien and he can’t go back. He has no other choice but to live in the slums and eat catfood. And guess what? He really hates it. He helps his alien buddy to escape Earth solely because he’s hoping the guy will come back in a few years with a “cure” for his alienness. When whites fantasize about becoming other races, it’s only fun if they can blithely ignore the fundamental experience of being an oppressed racial group. Which is that you are oppressed, and nobody will let you be a leader of anything.

This no doubt makes the latter a much more serious and harrowing film. Unlike so many other White Savior film, the savior in this picture never chose to become a part of the non-white minority. That is, he never reached some moment of benevolent enlightenment whereby he made a moral choice to help the group. On the contrary, even at the end of the film, he is motivated by his desperation to regain his white non-alien privilege (or, at least, body).

In this, District 9 courageously refuses to give white audiences the psychological satisfaction of moral superiority. That’s not to absolve the film of its White Savior roots, of course – but it is to suggest that it at least offered a more nuanced look at privilege than the typical White Savior schlock.

The Help (2011)
Major Academy Award Nominations: Best Picture, Best Actress (Viola Davis), Best Supporting Actress (Jessica Chastain)
Major Academy Award Victories: Best Actress (Octavia Spencer)

Following in the footsteps of 1987′s “Cry Freedom,” 2011′s “The Help” refuses to just focus on black working-class struggle and instead makes the film a tale of the white writer/journalist’s quest to tell that story. As The New York Times’ Nelson George wrote, its “narrative is driven by (the white writer’s) journey from oddball college graduate to rebellious neo-liberal muckraker.”

It’s a subtle pivot, but it is important – by focusing as much or more on the white writer’s courage, talent and perseverance, it effectively turns her into the savior. It also makes a distinction between good White Saviors and bad White Bigots, thus forwarding a falsehood about how racism operates on a systemic level. As University of California professor Patricia Davis wrote in the New York Times:

There’s a problem, though, with (the movie’s) message. To suggest that bad people were racist implies that good people were not.

Jim Crow segregation survived long into the 20th century because it was kept alive by white Southerners with value systems and personalities we would applaud…(It is) a troubling falsehood: the notion that well-educated Christian whites were somehow victimized by white trash and forced to live within a social system that exploited and denigrated its black citizens, and that the privileged white upper class was somehow held hostage to these struggling individuals.

But that wasn’t the case. The White Citizens Councils, the thinking man’s Ku Klux Klan, were made up of white middle-class people, people whose company you would enjoy. An analogue can be seen in the way popular culture treats Germans up to and during World War II. Good people were never anti-Semites; only detestable people participated in Hitler’s cause.

David Sirota David Sirota is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, magazine journalist and the best-selling author of the books “Hostile Takeover,” “The Uprising” and “Back to Our Future.” E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website

Dear white friends and family: Whether it’s ni**a or the n-word, you just can’t say it (Participation)

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Dear white friends and family: Whether it’s ni**a or the n-word, you just can’t say it

Opinion

by James Braxton Peterson | February 21, 2013 at 4:44 PM

“Now, white people, you can’t say ni**a/Sorry gotta take it back.  Now, black people, we’re not ni**as/God made us better than that.” – Lupe Fiasco, “Audobon Ballroom,” Food &Liquor II – The Great American Rap Album, Part 1

To paraphrase Lupe Fiasco: White people, you can’t say the n-word.

If for some reason, this current “All Black Everything” moment – where gold medalists, TV hosts, presidents, pop artists, golfers, Supreme Court justices, etc. are black – if this moment has you confused or if for some reason you think that 2 Chainz or Trinidad James has authorized you to use the n-word at will, please refer to Lupe Fiasco’s “Audubon Ballroom.” He apologizes and rescinds your “right” to use the word and he does so by reminding us of our recent history: “Martin, Baldwin, Audubon Ballroom . . .”

Sadly, we have had this debate or public conversation too many times to recount here. I distinctly remember the NAACP actually burying the word – or at least they ceremoniously buried it – and my hope was that our white friends and family would take the hint. You can’t say it.

Clearly black people have reclaimed and re-purposed the word over scores of years, but not even your favorite rapper disassociates the n-word from its white supremacist history.  For a long time now, I have challenged those who criticize rappers for using the n-word in “positive” contexts to actually listen to the music.  More often than not, the deployment of the n-word in popular rap music is not done so in some utopian, “positive” vein.

The meanings of the n-word, especially when used by black artisans, are nuanced and multi-faceted.  Believe it or not, the meaning and the use of the n-word often varies by both situational context and intonation.  Sorry, but because of these complexities – we gotta take it back.

Recently, shock comic Lisa Lampanelli referred to her “beyotch” (in this case meaning: good friend) Girls star Lena Dunham, as her “ni**a” on Twitter.  You might recall that Gwyneth Paltrow was also seduced by the n-word celebrations in Kanye West and Jay-Z’s infectious “Ni**as in Paris.”  She too lost her way on Twitter.  What both of these women and these instances of white people using the n-word has in common is that each person believes that her association with black people – men in these cases – affords them the right to use the n-word by association.

While I am sure that their black friends will back them up on this (and some have), I know of no rule in the cultural history of black folk that extends the kind of racial complexity and sociolinguistic felicity required to use the n-word to folk outside of black speech communities unless they are unabashedly racist; I know of no rule that permits them to use the term frivolously and with the sociolinguistic benefits of our hard fought battle to reclaim the term itself.

And that’s where these seemingly harmless uses of the n-word by white folk, enamored with black popular culture, actually rub many black folk the wrong way.  Even if you don’t completely buy in to the deconstructed, de-fanged uses of the n-word within the black community, you have to acknowledge that these nuanced uses of the word reflect deliberate, contested attempts to reclaim (and re-purpose) one of the most hateful, offensive, and degrading terms used in the history of white supremacy and racism in this nation.

The very fact that you can use the n-word (on social media) in these ways comes from a history of struggle within the black community.  And although this linguistic struggle to use the n-word in different contextual situations within black speech communities is at best culturally complex and at worst disconnected from this nation’s history of racism, it still represents black people’s struggle.

That means, that no one rapper or no series of inter-racial relationships can in and of himself or in and of itself, permit any white person to use the word in any public way, ever.

Otherwise you simply risk the probability of being seen as a racist.

James Braxton Peterson is the Director of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University. He is also the founder of Hip Hop Scholars LLC, an association of hip-hop generation scholars dedicated to researching and developing the cultural and educational potential of hip-hop, urban and youth cultures. You can follow him on Twitter @DrJamesPeterson