1 post tagged “slavery”

I read, a little while ago, a post from Jack Yan about the new Vogue cover featuring LeBron James and the sort of irritating (to me) Gisele Bundchen (umlaut purposefully omitted).  I have seen the cover in the supermarkets and stuff and thought it was, whatever, LeBron looks kind of hot, Gisele looks like Gisele, but whatever.

I never once thought of King Kong or the threat white women face from big, bad, burly black men.  Not once.  At least, not until I read Jack Yan's post.  And see, that is why I am a racist I guess, because I am completely oblivious to the racist stereotypes being perpetrated at my local supermarket.  The blogosphere is apparently alive! with all kinds of people being offended by the presentation of LeBron as scary and gorilla-like.  They have taken umbrage!  I had no idea until I read Jack Yan's post, and then I dismissed it as another case of people who have an ideology that they then go around seeking evidence for--as the Great Tony Mattina used to say, let the data drive the theory, not the other way around.  If you want to find evidence of racism, you'll certainly find it, but the actual data would suggest a much more complex picture--complex and nuanced like Obama's speech (a speech, by the way, that I thought was fucking excellent.  Obama, I will vote for you.  Unless you do something really stupid, like have sex with rabbits on camera with that blind guy from New York.)

Then, because my job is totally sucking tonight (grrrrr--pulmonary function tests suck ass!), I perused some of the links Jack provides and even read what my old friends at Jezebel had to say*.  And now I have to add this:

If you look at that picture of LeBron and the G-bund and see King Kong and a scary black man--maybe even a criminal!  get out the chastity belts!--that says way more about you than it does about the rest of us who just looked at it and thought, "oh, wow, rich, famous people on the cover of a magazine.  fancy that.  maybe i'll get some altoids..."

I'm not going to say I'm colorblind--I can't, since about a year after I moved to Montana (by far the whitest place I ever lived, since I divided my childhood between Hispanic-majority New Mexico and a black-majority part of Arkansas) I caught myself thinking, as I saw a black man walking down the street, "Ooh, black dude.  Damn, I'll bet he's conscious of that all the time living here.  Or maybe not.  Maybe all the white people just pretend they don't notice, like I'm pretending not to notice.  I'm way overthinking this.  He's just a dude, walking down the street.  But why is he carrying a squeegee?  Eh, what the hell?  Why not carry a squeegee?"

But, honestly, when I looked at that Vogue cover I didn't see a "black man" let alone a "scary black man" and certainly not a gorilla-like black man.  I saw LeBron James, with a basketball and a Brazilian (model).  No umbrage necessary. 

Also, offense is regularly taken at the fact that Vogue so rarely features anything but white (assuming we count the Latins as white.  Yeah, I said "the Latins.") on its covers...so...I'm not sure exactly what the offended multitudes want. 

Days like this, and especially since the speech, I really think we need Obama at this point.  We have got to start getting past this shit, people.  In general, certain segments of the population are getting way too offended all the time (I have no idea how you even live that way--what is it like to be offended all the time?  It must particularly suck since you do not, in fact, have a right not to be offended). 

Or should we just keep fighting over the actions of our ancestors?  Mine, before coming to America, were sitting around in Ireland wondering if they should try to hold out during the Great Potato Famine (fortunately, we're stout people) or get on a boat to come to the promised land to be...wage slaves and sharecroppers.  By the time they got here, slavery was near its end in this country (though wage slavery continues unabated), and anyway they were far too freakin poor to own anyone.  And the Osage ancestors were, you know, chilling on the res after walking the Trail of Tears and all that (but they weren't slaves, right?  so that makes it all OK.  except that some of them were slaves, and anyway, like 95% of them died).  So, those are my oppressive white ancestors*.  How about yours?

Also, why don't African-American people in America seem more concerned, as a whole, about slavery that is still going on in Africa?  You'd think there would be a sympathy thing.  Feh.  (moderately related side note:  The entire reason I cannot stomach Chris Rock is that I once saw him doing stand-up and he was saying that white people are always complaining about everything, "Oh, I'm lactose intolerant" but you don't see starving Africans complaining about being lactose intolerant because they're just happy to get milk.  This left me speechless.  I'm just a cracker, but even I know that most Africans are in fact lactose intolerant, and so if they are being given milk, they aren't complaining about lactose intolerance mainly because they're too sick to do so.  As Public Enemy once said, "Read a book or something.  Learn about yourself, learn your culture."  WORD.  But, hey, with a bit of luck, the people who are in charge of sending Africans relief packages are also crackers who know about the racial and geographic lines of lactose intolerance.  Hmm, but now I'm reading through this collection of quotes and finding him kind of awesome.  Maybe I gave up on him too soon.  He should have just gone with the peanut allergy instead of lactose intolerance.) 

But that's just me.  I am white, and so that per force makes me a racist in the irrefutable logic of the offended.

*But on one of their many sister sites, Guanabee, I found this interesting tidbit:  "There’s been a long tradition of a “fight for white,” meaning that various ethnic groups over the years have had to struggle for the chance to be seen as normal and neutral. Irish-Americans, for example, who are today almost synonymous with the concept of what it means to be white (fevered dancing without the use of hips or shoulders, the consumption of potatoes), were very much “the other” for a very, very long time in America. Jewish and Italian Americans were also not always considered white folks here in the old U.S. of A. " 

**I also have Quapaw Indian ancestry.  And no, you cannot tell by just looking at me.  I pretty much look like a potato-eatin honky.