OSCARS SO WHITE IS NOT NEW

For many years I have been watching the film industry and other media insidiously manipulate the images and angles through which African Americans are viewed. This manipulation has been going on so long and been so consistent and pervasive I could write a book about it, but Donald Bogle already did.
       Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films is a popular book originally published in 1973. It is currently in its fourth edition, updated to include the entire twentieth century. Mr. Bogle will need more updates as the pattern continues into the twenty-first century.

It did not surprise me that Academy Award nominations were rained on Precious, the 2009 movie about a black family that is seriously dysfunctional. That kind of focus is in keeping with the Academy’s history of honoring particular types of roles played by black actors. Among the more than 300 Oscars handed out since 1927, fewer than twenty have gone to black people. 

The winning roles for black actors have largely been when they played characters that conform to conventional white expectations for African Americans—servants, slaves, musicians/athletes, or people who were corrupt and/or cruel. 

The black actors who have received Academy Awards for both leading or supporting roles are: Hattie McDaniel (a maid in Gone With the Wind, 1940), Sidney Poitier (a handyman in Lilies of the Field, 1964), Denzel Washington (a slave in Glory, 1990), Whoopi Goldberg (a dishonest psychic in Ghost, 1991), Cuba Gooding Jr. (a boxer in Jerry Maguire, 1997) Halle Berry (a waitress in Monster’s Ball, 2002), Jamie Foxx (the singer Ray Charles in Ray, 2005), Morgan Freeman (a former boxer in Million Dollar Baby, 2005), Jennifer Hudson (a singer in Dreamgirls, 2007) and Mo'Nique (a brutal and abusive mother in Precious, 2010).

In 2012, the Academy returned to where it began with McDaniel, awarding an Oscar to Octavia Spencer for her role as a maid in The Help. In 2013 two movies about American slavery—Lincoln and Django Unchained—received lots of attention. Both included black actors; however neither of the award winners for these movies was black. (Jamie Foxx was not the right kind of slave.) There was another slave movie released in time to be considered for the 2014 awards, Twelve Years a Slave. That movie excited the country so much, they totally forgot about Fruitvale Station, the movie they were marveling about earlier in the year. 

In my opinion, and I wasn’t alone in this, Fruitvale Station was an excellent movie that dealt directly with contemporary issues. And that, no doubt, was its undoing. 

Why focus on a movie that makes people squirm when you have a perfectly good "black" movie set in the distant past that reassures us all that we’ve made such great progress. Twelve Years a Slave wowed the Academy and received the 2014 Best Picture award. Steve McQueen, the black director, apparently was not so impressive. He managed to direct the Best Picture, but he was not the Best Director. Lupita Nyong’o  received an award for Best Supporting Actor in her role as, surprise! a slave.

The dubious exceptions that prove this insidious rule are Louis Gossett (An Officer and a Gentleman, 1983) and Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland, 2007), who won Oscars as strong military men, though both characters were stern and pitiless. In the same year Precious was released, Morgan Freeman starred in Invictus as Nelson Mandela, one of the most inspirational figures of our time. Although Freeman was nominated, I was certain that a role depicting a black man as a shrewd, resourceful, inspiring leader would not receive an Oscar. I was right.

By celebrating only roles that are subservient, cruel, demeaning and/or within an “acceptable” profession, Hollywood's majority reinforces America’s assumption of white dominance.

The case of Denzel Washington is a stark illustration of this practice. Washington is one of the most talented actors ever; he became Malcolm X and Rubin “Hurricane” Carter in the title roles of two films about complex and empowered black men—Malcolm X (1992) and Hurricane (1999). The Academy Award voters didn't find either of those to be winning performances. In 2002 when Washington finally received an Oscar as best actor in a leading role, it was for Training Day, a film in which he played a brutal and crooked cop. That was a role he could be honored for.

Academy voters for Oscar winners are 94% white and 74% male, and their average age is sixty-three. I expect this trend to continue.

And it is. 

Excerpted from "The Viewers Involvement" in the essay collection, Not All Poor People Are Black by Janet Cheatham Bell.

Purchase Not All Poor People Are Black here.

THE BIG WHITE LIE*

This has never been a "white" country

All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.

Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me

 

I’ve been exposed to America’s racial paradigm for three-quarters of a century; what I write here is based on what I’ve lived and what I’ve learned from reading history in works other than official classroom texts. As the PBS documentary Race: The Power of an Illusion explains, “Race has no genetic basis.” Instead, it “is a powerful social idea that gives people different access to opportunities and resources.” However, scientific data means nothing in the presence of this powerful social imperative.

The murders of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown are high-profile examples of how racism permeates American society. These murders rekindle the fear that I, and most parents of black male children, live with daily. We know that at any moment some person (police officer, random gun-toter) could see your child’s black maleness as a threat that has to be eradicated. And numerous precedents have taught these would-be “guardians” they will not be punished for these murders. These cases remind us yet again that some things haven’t changed in the last 150 years. In 1857 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sanford that blacks “have no rights which the white man is bound to respect . . . .”

It has been dismaying, although not surprising, to see racism’s ugly head spinning wildly after Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. Having our first black president seems to have unhinged a sizable number of Americans, most visibly those in the Tea/Republican Party, but thankfully they are not the majority. These people are outraged at having a black man in the White House and, in addition to insulting the president in every possible way they can think of, they are passing and pushing for laws to take us back in time, to their “glory” days. Apparently they’re longing for the time when people who were not white and male couldn’t vote, let alone run for president. To achieve that end they are erecting new barriers to the right to vote, especially for black and brown folks. This is one step back to the days they long for when only propertied white males had voting rights. 

For these disturbed Americans, President Obama’s election has concretized the warning that Patrick Buchanan has been issuing for years, most specifically in his book, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. “Third world” is his euphemism for people who are not white. That title, and the mythology of a white America that so many want to return to, represent the Big White Lie. 

THE ONLY INVASION

The only “invasion” of America has been by whites—people who looked like Buchanan. This has never been a white country. There were no whites (i.e., Europeans) here when the first immigrants showed up uninvited, but were welcomed. Then these immigrant Europeans utilized their more efficient weaponry to invade and occupy the land, systematically displacing or killing the indigenous people. They succeeded in taking control, but the original inhabitants they dubbed “Indians” survive and continue to have a presence, however marginalized, in their ancestral homeland.

Europeans had been engaged in the capture and sale of Africans for more than a century when they “discovered” the New World. So it was a no-brainer in 1619 to bring Africans across the Atlantic to do the back-breaking work of developing "their" new country and making the most of the land’s resources. Europeans held the reins of power, but the country was not “white” because the original inhabitants were still present, and the number of Africans was rapidly increasing, especially in the South, where much of the slave labor was concentrated. In what was to become the United States, immigrants from Europe gradually set aside their disdain for each other—muting regional prejudices and national differences—to become “white”and thereby establish a cohesive group superiority over the “nonwhites” in their midst. The population of “colored” people expanded exponentially as white males took advantage of their power to rape the “inferior” women. The offspring of these legitimate rapes further diminished the percentage of whites. 

In 1848 the Treaty of GuadalupeHidalgo placed a significant portion of Mexico (including what are now the states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and part of Colorado and Texas) and Mexicans within the United States, increasing the number of “colored” citizens in America yet again. 

The suffusion continued with the importation of Chinese laborers to build the Transcontinental Railroad completed in 1869. Then the U.S. acquired Puerto Rico (there are more Puerto Ricans in this country than in Puerto Rico) the Philippines, and Guam after defeating Spain in the 1898 Spanish-American War. 

American imperialism brought along other “nonwhite territories” like Samoa, the Virgin Islands, Alaska and Hawaii, the latter two admitted as the 49th and 50th states in 1959. The “nonwhite” people living in these territories are all Americans, although they are not allowed to vote in national elections, or the U.S. Congress. (Washington, DC occupies the same dubious distinction, except they can now vote for the POTUS.) U. S. military incursions in Southeast Asia and the Middle East have spurred refugees and immigrants from these non-European areas to settle here and more are coming. The term “nonwhite” is itself the perfect indicator of the assumed supremacy of whiteness. 

Now that the national stew is nicely spiced and these people of color are exercising power, a number of whites are hysterically digging in their heels in a desire to “take their country back.” Fear of becoming a “minority” in “their” country is what built the fence on the Mexican border, toughened immigration restrictions, and increased deportations. 

Their rage for more prisons had long been fueled by a desire to re-enslave blacks—African- and Hispanic-Americans make up approximately 25 percent of the nation’s population, yet they constitute more than half of those incarcerated in the country’s prisons. Now, however, the hungry and rapacious privatized prison industry is gobbling up poor whites as well. (In 1998 an Atlantic article stated, “The United States now imprisons more people than any other country in the world—perhaps half a million more than Communist China.” And the numbers have increased since that article was written.)

What these frightened folk don’t realize is that their hysteria is much too late. Dragging their heels will only create deep ruts. It’s inevitable, people of color will be the majority, and soon. Not because of any “invasion” as Buchanan and others want us to believe. Rather, this demographic shift is a result of long-standing official U.S. policies and imperialist practices that created a racial paradigm in the United States dating back to the first European immigrants. 

Award-winning writer John Edgar Wideman described a racial paradigm as “a vision of humankind and society based on the premise that not all people are created equal and some are born with the right to exploit others.” And this is how it operates in this country that purports to be a democracy.

With the media’s constant barrage of statistics, African Americans are not allowed to forget that we are regarded as not measuring up to the white standard. That makes it easier for officials and others to see African Americans as disposable. For many years we were the defective ethnic group, but as their numbers increase, the alarmists are now focusing on Hispanic Americans. Since 2001, people from the Middle East, or those who look like they could be from that area, have been added to the list of suspects. 

Racism is integral to who Americans are, to what the U. S. has been since its inception and still is. Yet, only in recent months have some tentatively acknowledged its existence, while most are still in denial. What is never mentioned, or hardly even alluded to, is that despite their status as the standard to which everyone else is compared, some whites feel the full measure of their inadequacies until reminded that at least they are not black/Hispanic/foreign, at which time they can swell with pride. 

Many government officials, political leaders, media, pundits and others continue to invoke the Big White Lie because that lie helps them maintain control over those who have no power aside from what their skin color supposedly confers. 

*adapted from the essay of the same title in the collection, Not All Poor People Are Black and Other Things We Need to Think More About.

A Call for White Responsibility from a White Man

Following is the most succinct and precise description of white privilege I've ever read, written by a dear friend, in fact our families are friends. It is must reading for all whites who don't understand all the attention and outrage over the murders of unarmed black men by the police.  Enjoy!

White Privilege Equals White Responsibility

by Jeremy Townsend

When I was 12, I was arrested for popping hood ornaments off of Mercedes and Cadillacs to hang on my fake gold chains. When I was 15, I was arrested for shoplifting a scrimshaw tobacco pipe from a shop at the mall. When I was 20, I was arrested for shoplifting a cordless phone from a department store. These are the times I got caught.

When I was 34, I applied for a job and stated with confidence that I’d never been convicted of any crime. I’m white, and even though I smoked weed, shoplifted, ran red-lights and littered, society saw more value in me than if I had been black. I’m not proud of it; I’m just lucky.

If I had been black, I would have never gotten a pre-trial diversion, a deferred adjudication or any type of leniency from the system. I would have had a record, and I would have had far less opportunity, and I would have never gotten that job that asked if I had been convicted of a crime, and my life would be wildly different today.

I’m white, and I’m terrified of cops. I know what it feels like to have my physical freedom arrested by a police officer. I know what it’s like to be bullied, harassed and put up against a wall by a cop, but I have no idea what it’s like to be black.

I get tense if I pass a cop on the sidewalk, I get flooded with adrenaline and anger when I get pulled over. I know they can do anything to me. In spite of whatever personal rights I might be guaranteed by law, I know they can exercise their authority on my freedom, they can and will intimidate me, and I will operate from a position of fear.

The difference is that while I fear and distrust cops, I live with the confidence that in the eyes of society, for no other reason than the color of my skin, my life is considered more valuable than if I were black.

Let’s imagine that cop is having a bad day, let’s imagine I don’t wanna be fucked with. The cop wants to put me in my place, and I don’t wanna be put in that place. Things escalate, and something happens to me like what has happened to Eric Garner or Mike Brown or Oscar Grant.

I’m white, and I know that in the unlikely event that I am a victim of police brutality, society in general and my “community” will demand that someone be held accountable, that changes be made and that it never happens again.

The painful and terrifying truth is that American society considers my white body and my white life as more valuable than if I were black.

There is a moment in the Eric Garner video when Officer Pantaleo starts to grab Eric Garner in a way that he would never feel entitled to grab me, and that is the moment that has to change in America. The moment the officer felt entitled to exercise force on Eric Garner’s body is unacceptable and pervasive throughout the Black American experience, and it has to change.

When the other officer is pressing Eric Garner’s face into the sidewalk, when the EMTs don’t try to help, when it takes 36 hours to get an official statement from Darren Wilson, when there are no batteries in the camera to document the crime scene, when no one is held responsible, when there is nothing that could be done, when all we have are condolences, when they are all just sad, unfortunate, tragic and isolated events, when politicians, civic leaders, police commissioners, and average white American citizens don’t demand that someone be held accountable, the truth that black lives don’t matter in America is proven and perpetuated.

Maybe we can’t get an indictment, but these incidents expose a far greater systemic racism that we have to address, and white people must demand that it be addressed.

White people in power who are responsible for these cops and these policies and these tragic accidents must GO TO JAIL. They must be reprimanded, they must be shamed, they must be fired, they must be exposed as the most immediate place where we can do better.

The systemic fear of large unarmed black men, the poor decisions, the ongoing use of excessive force must be deemed completely reprehensible, unacceptable, and we as grossly over-privileged white people must give notice to the police forces and public officials of America that we will not stand for it anymore.

Call your local police chiefs, your local district attorney, your local politicians, and let them know that you are giving them notice, that if they allow another tragic accident like what has been happening to unarmed black men across America, you will be in the street, knocking on their door and demanding their resignations.