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volfoss · 1 year ago

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MT-001->MT-003: Jungle Emperor/Kimba (1950-1954)

TW: Discussion of racism (specifically anti-black racism)

Before I get into the plot and well. everything bad about this, I want to quickly explain that this is the first out of 400 volumes of Tezuka's that I will be reading/reviewing. This is absolutely the worst of his works by far and I need to very much emphasize that for anyone who wants to read the 5.5 pages of notes I took (that are under the cut, due to length).

Summary of Plot: A white male lion is known for terrorizing an African village, and they make plans to hunt and kill him. These plans end up succeeding, and his mate, who is pregnant with his son, is captured and taken onto a ship. She gives birth on the ship and pleads with her newborn son, Kimba, to escape and become the king of the jungle, like his father was. The story follows Kimba as he tries to follow in his father’s footsteps, but in his own special way.

Characters: Kimba/Jungle Emperor is a mixed bag when it comes to characters. On one hand, Kimba and his family manage to be entertaining without speech. Their motives are very clear and they are written sympathetically. Jacques the rat is a really good addition to the cast and adds a lot to Kimba as a character. The animal characters have a pretty interesting dynamic with each other, and I feel the little screen-time the villain got was pretty decent. I’m not normally a very big fan of stories centered around animals in the specific way that this does it, so the aspects of the charming animals could be better for someone who enjoys that sort of thing more.

On the other hand, the humans are not written in a super in depth manner (at least not compared to his later works that I’ve read). The protagonists quite honestly fall flat most of the time and don’t lend a ton to the story. The worst of the badly written humans are the African characters. They are horrifically reduced to the worst stereotypes possible, given how Tezuka wants to portray them as “tribes-people”. They are portrayed as stupid and are shown as rather backwards. The best example of the latter is early on, when the leader offers “the best hut” to one of the white characters and when he goes to investigate it, all the promised amenities are either broken or just there for props. They are also portrayed as overly violent and also docile towards the white characters. I cannot express enough how this ticks every single anti-black stereotype in media box.

Another horrific part of this is their treatment of Merry. Merry is one of the two children, and in Volume 1, is kidnapped by the “Jungula Tribe” (as that is what this group is referred to) and by Volume 2, has formed an alter ego (or something along those lines, it’s not really made clear but it is handled badly) named, and I kid you not, Conga (or Konga, depending on the translation) and has taken over the tribe as their leader. She does this by creating electricity (which is pretty clearly implied as something that the tribe she now leads had never seen before, and treat it as something mystical and magical) by rubbing her pen against a cheetah pelt. Her taking over the group is seen as a sad thing but only specifically in the way that the other child that was her friend, feels very disconnected to her and cannot relate to her (and not the frustration that Tezuka was leaning into yet another trope of the white person having to lead the black tribe because they just know better. This is handled in that specific manner with her being pretty abusive towards the other characters, and is only really refuted in the manner of now there’s “good” people to lead them (who are white/Japanese) and the only big difference in the leadership is it is less abusive).

There is also ritual sacrifice, regarding the Pygmy (the specific group is not specified (otherwise I would be referring to them as such, as Pygmy is seen as a derogatory term) and this is how they’re referred to in canon) and many jokes about their short stature. They are shown trying to ritually sacrifice one of the white characters, and it is treated as horrific (but also with tones of comedy, as Tezuka constantly uses slapstick to show dumb the Africans in his work are), which from as far as I could find, was not something factual for the actual groups mentioned. Most of the groups mentioned seem to either be slightly made up (Jungula is one that I could not find any proof of anything similarly named existing) or slightly spelled off (but wouldn’t make any sense geographically, such as Gura (literal translation used here, the fan translation I’m using here just refers to this group as Donga, despite the katakana being “グラ”). This detail doesn’t really factor in with the already HEINOUS amount of racism but it is very interesting to me, as I feel it’s just another excuse for him to be using many stereotypes and mash them together, instead of portraying a nuanced version of any of the groups mentioned. Quite literally, they check off every single way to NOT treat African characters and there is no way around this part of Kimba, as these characters appear in pretty much every chapter. They are absent in Chapter 1 and 2, and I state this solely to make it very clear that in 21 chapters, the racism is present in nearly every single one. Genuinely and sincerely, there is no reason to read Jungle Emperor/Kimba for the characters (or really anything other than reading all of his works, like I’m doing) as they are all pretty flat and the very obvious issues are present throughout the entire work.

Art: As always, Tezuka excels at drawing animals in a very specifically stylized way that still lends to how they would appear realistically. Kimba as a character has an instantly charming design and is drawn in such a way that all of his movements exude a lot of character. But unfortunately, the elephant in the room for the entire read through was how he chose to depict Africans. With the setting (and it being written in 1950), I did not expect it to be good but it is unfortunately a topic that is often ignored in mainstream discussions of Kimba/Jungle Emperor (often, I find what is most discussed is using Kimba/Jungle Emperor as a punchline to talk about Disney stealing the Lion King’s concept from this), and is one that I’d like to discuss in the review. They are a very prominent part of the story (given the setting) and to put it very lightly, this is the worst instance of this in his work. It appears again in (given this is the first thing I’m reading in this chronology, I’m sure that there will be more instances, but this is just from what I’ve read going into it) Black Jack and lesser known works such as Hungry Blues, but this is by far the closest to minstrelsy (with how the Black characters are drawn and portrayed, it very much leans into how older media (Hollywood specifically) tended to derive Black characters down to simple and offensive tropes). It absolutely does ruin any enjoyment, as it is VERY glaring vile and present in nearly every chapter.

Ending: The ending is very bad with how Tezuka clearly viewed Africa as a place to be mystified, with how the final words are. I feel that again, a lot of the messaging in this is stuff that appears in his later works but they are a lot more clumsily handled here (for many reasons). It was a very frustrating ending with how most of the Black characters died, and after that, the white and Japanese (implied) characters from different countries realized their differences (with no mourning for the dead, which happened when ANYTHING tragic happened to any of the non-black characters).

Misc: This was the work I was dreading the most, and reading it first has really just been a very frustrating experience due to just HOW blatantly vile it is. To get into the Lion King comparisons (as that is the typical mainstream knowledge of this manga), there are certainly some similarities. Kimba/Jungle Emperor focuses a bit more on the human side of things (in terms of being pretty blatantly anti-zoo (with the second chapter focusing a couple pages on Kimba’s mother telling him how living in a zoo would be no good life for them, and how zoos are discussed on Chapter 3 of Volume 1) and anti-poaching (most clear in the entirety of the first chapter) instead of animal life and drama there, like the Lion King covers. Honestly, a lot of the plot isn’t super similar unless you’re looking at it from a VERY broad lens (I know I see the scene of the stars forming the dead parent’s face cited a lot here, the fact he has an animal companion that watches over him (even a bird for a bit of the plot) a bit is similar (again broadly), there being an evil lion, and the dead parent plot point), as it really does just focus on different subject matter. It is more of a generational tale than Lion King.

Honestly, I think how Kimba discusses the difficulty for him to grow up for a bit in a normal household (with humans feeding and clothing him) and then having to return to the jungle is really interesting. It gets into his struggle with how he wants to be innately kind (and more “human”/domesticated) but he obviously still has those animal urges built in (a scene that really exemplifies this is in Chapter 5 of Volume 1, where the villain taunts him about the fact that Kimba is upset by a gazelle dying and won’t eat from it, like a normal lion would). It tackles a lot of topics related to how humans can be bad (specifically, the way that one of the humans (who is pretty clearly exploiting the African characters) was a guard at a Nazi camp and you are very clearly not supposed to like this character) and even how, in Chapter 5, Kimba bringing “civilization” to the jungle (he gets the animals that listen to him to build paved roads, restaurants and set up farming practices similar to what humans do) is something that makes some of the animals suffer. There is unfortunately also a lot of really poorly handled colonialism (specifically, in chapter 10, where the “good guys” take over the Jungula tribe and dress them in traditionally European clothing and it is seen as a good thing, as they are no longer under control of Conga. The way that it is handled in this is very muddled, and the way that Kimba bringing “civilization” to the jungle animals is a net positive is a very odd thing to me). It does have some of Tezuka’s trademark anti-war messaging but it honestly just really does not work well here given the rest of the topics. There are definitely glimmers of what COULD be a better manga in this but unfortunately it is buried under far far too much racism.

I want to take a small moment to analyze a section of this essay written on Kimba, as I think there is a lot to unpack.

From the section covering The Roles of Africans in Kimba:

“Fans of Kimba may have wondered why there are no Africans to be seen in Kimba’s jungle; or for that matter, why no English version of Jungle Emperor is available. The problem is ironic and must have struck hard at Tezuka: the depiction of the African tribes in Leo can only be viewed by any modern person as racist.

This takes a moment to process and absorb because so much of Tezuka’s work explores (and attacks) the tenants of racism. Indeed, works as early as Astroboy seem to focus on racism-as-an-evil with such a deliberate ferocity that we can (and must) conclude that any such accusations regarding Tezuka are false. Let’s also not forget his own slogan: “Love all creatures! Love everything that has life!”

We might then wonder how it is that Tezuka has produced these images which offend modern sensibilities and which necessitated the replacement of African natives in Kimba with white hunters and ultimately prevented the publication of Jungle Emperor in English. It must first be said that very few of Tezuka’s human caricatures are particularly flattering–even of himself. What we find offensive in these drawings however is their stereotypical nature.

It is my opinion that the resources that Tezuka first drew from for the creation of his native characters are in fact the problem. More than likely Disney is the culprit here; though one might also consider the depiction of natives in the 1933 feature film King Kong. Most telling however are the now deleted sequences involving a black centaur in Fantasia. Other works by Disney from this period along with this sequence were clearly not meant as racist, but we can only judge from the perspective of the 21st century.

One possible source for Jungle Emperor’s Africans: a censored scene from Fantasia 1940. Though this type of depiction of Africans was common in US comics and animation in this period, we know Tezuka was particularly interested in the works of Walt Disney…”

To get into my thoughts on this part of the essay, we first have to discuss the material mentioned as potential inspirations for how badly these characters are drawn, mainly Fantasia. Fantasia was released in 1940, a decade before Jungle Emperor came out, and the racism was about as bad as in Jungle Emperor. It had many racist scenes in the specific Pastoral Symphony scene of the film, that were then removed in 1969 (source). I do also want to cite a slightly lesser known Disney work from 1925 that is nearly exact to how the Africans are drawn in Jungle Emperor: Alice Cans the Cannibals. I am not saying that this is where he got the inspiration from, simply to bring up the point that there was a lot of media that would treat Africans as cannibals and prone to human sacrifice. This essay gets into a lot of the early Disney racism in a very in depth way that might be of interest in regards to this point.

In a similar way to Fantasia, Jungle Emperor also had to be redone, given how the original pages were nearly lost during the making of the anime in 1965. This led Tezuka to have to redraw a lot of it (which you can most certainly tell which parts of it were redrawn, given it was done in 1977 (for the collected Kodansha volumes)) and unfortunately, the racial caricatures are still present in this updated version. (source) I did want to make this comparison solely for media that is viewed somewhat similarly in the mainstream media (with not much discussion around the racism) that got revised later on. This is a thing however, that Tezuka would improve on in some of his works, but that fact does not even remotely begin to erase what he put in the Jungle Emperor. Even if the art was not as blatantly racist as it was, the way these characters are written is still drenched in stereotypes that obviously do still harm Africans now. In comparison to Disney doing all that they can to erase the existence of the material (and how, even in the modern day, they very clearly struggle to hold themselves accountable (specifically referring to Song of the South)), I’m not sure that I prefer the approach here with there being clearly enough fans of Kimba to fan translate it (as the version I’m reading had two different teams) and to praise it while doing so.

I feel that the insistence that it was just caricatures and not blatantly racist really falls flat when you consider how the characters in Kimba are treated. As I mentioned in the personality section, they are really just very flat stereotypes (with no names, as far as I remember, outside of the Chief) and do pretty blatantly fall into what is racist media. The various groups portrayed in Kimba are not done so with much compassion for them as characters and they are quite honestly just used as slapstick or to boost up other characters (whether by being villainous, and driving the heroes to oppose them or by, in a large panel depicting most of them dying (relatively graphically for this manga as well, with one character being shown in the jaws of an animal), which then brings the heroes together (not due to their death but because, seemingly, with them gone, the other characters realized that they (as the characters were from two unnamed countries) are not so different after all)). They are not even remotely given any compassion or depth compared to every other character and it really just falls into the old tropes of refusing to see Black characters as deserving of that depth (which quite honestly does feel like what happened here). They are shown more as a group and never really focused on them as individual people (as EVERY other character is given that).

There isn’t really a good way to handle the presence of very blatantly racist material in media, but I do think the repeated insistence of a lot of fans to insist that it wasn’t intentionally bad (or that it was just of its time) is not the way to go. Even if at that point, he had experienced the war (bringing this point up for a reason, stick with me), there are later examples of his work that deal with depicting Black characters in a caricatured way, most notably Hungry Blues. That was published in 1977 and still used similar caricatures (although the character in question leaned a lot less into stereotypes personality wise, as it was based off a real person he had met during the war). It is a very inexcusable part of his works and is something that is objectively the most prominent in Kimba (which is part of his early works). Even if a lot of his other works DO have very well handled anti-racist messages (Message to Adolf is one I can think of off the top of my head, Astro Boy also handles similar topics), this one objectively does not and I think it’s important to examine this in a critical way, instead of just brushing it under the rug. If you want to read one of his works that handles racism, anti-war, and the other messages he is known for, there are MANY that handle them better and not like this.

As a white person, I’m aware that my viewpoints on this matter may not hold as much weight as someone who would be affected by how these characters are drawn but I do believe with how little discussion of the very very blatant racism in this there is online, it is something that needs to be brought up. For further reading on the topics of stereotypes of Black characters in media, I found Donald Bogle’s book on the matter to be a very interesting read (although it does focus on Hollywood throughout the ages, some of the things in here did also apply to this) (link) and Henry T. Sampson’s book focusing on animated portrayals of Black characters (specifically, Chapter 3: Way Down in the Jungle: The Animated Safari) (link) to be very related to the topic at hand and be very excellent companions to reading about the topic of how anti-black tropes in media can be impactful and were very much part of the time period.

Overall Thoughts: I clearly had a lot to say on this one, as it is a topic that I do sincerely believe should be getting more coverage in regards to discussing this media. As a manga, it truly was one of the worst ones I’ve ever read, as the plot was pretty rough and the very obvious racism was well, obvious. On one hand, I do wish it was better and that when it was revised in the 70’s, that Tezuka took the time to show that he had grown from the mindset he pretty clearly had in 1950. On the other hand, the only value this has (in my opinion) is a very good case study on what not to do when writing African characters, as it truly fits every stereotype in different ways. I would not recommend this to a single person, it is easily by far the weakest of his works that I have read so far. The characters felt pretty flat and a lot of the moments clearly meant to be tragic fell pretty flat for me. The generational aspect was interesting but due to every other weakness of the work, just did not work for me.

#twist rambles #tzkposting #kimba the white lion #i guess i am maintagging this one. sure. for organization lol #racism #<- for blacklist bc well. fucking clearly lmao.

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blackcat419 · 1 year ago

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Hot take, rooting against foreign invaders who have historically enslaved millions for the most dangerous work, who employ literal creatures of pure destruction, who inbreed to keep their blood pure, and who see themselves as closer to gods than men does not make you racist.

They’re called TargARYENS for a reason.

Last Time

For the last time, please stop asking me to be team black, Daemyra or team Daemon and team Rhaenyra sympathetic. I do not like any of team black, nor do I support Rhaenyra or Daemon and I’ve already explained my reasons.

Please stop sending messages in my inbox saying that I’m racist for not liking Rhaenyra or Daemon.

#anti team black #house of the dragon #hotd discussion #hotd #tw racism

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allwithagrainofsalt · 1 year ago

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So I'm watching Princess Weekes' video about confederate vampires (watch it fr) and I wanna expand upon smth they mention about the explicitly White American Confederate storytelling in,

Drumroll please...

Firefly.

Now first: I LOVE Firefly. It's an incredible show and in fact I think it's a beautiful and inspirational piece of political art in many ways, and I'm gonna talk about that part a little bit at the end. But mainly, why did I hear the comparison and immediately start to have 50 puzzle pieces click? Well. This essay got long, and to be honest idk how much I might be repeating others cuz PW mentioned it due to others talking about it too, but I just kinda took a journey of my own off-the-dome observations based on things I've already read about/know. I hope it's an interesting journey for you too.

TW below the Readmore: discussion of colonial / military violence; discussion of Sexual Assault

We are looking at a world of cowboys in the stars, in which there was a recent Civil War. In fact, we're set in a "real life future," where the majority remaining galactic race stems from the great American Empire. We do get influences of Chinese culture with language and clothing, but remember that Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s - which themselves romanticized the values of independent, libertarian southerners (who massacred Indians and no-good loiterers - we'll talk about that later) - heavily utilized "Oriental" aesthetics and caricatures while dehumanizing the Asian people they were ostensibly in relationship with. After all, Asian Americans were a growing population in the landscape of the Western frontier, often working alongside your storybook railroad workers, gold seekers and, even further east than Pacific coastal industries, working & living alongside cowboys. However, the language of Western-genre films (because of the way it mirrors the language of Confederates) does not respect Asian culture as it is, but rather as a collection of "wisdoms" and aesthetics to pick apart and use the "good parts" of - for use by white people in their white expansion. This idea fits a bit uncomfortably well with Firefly's multiple white characters who are "orientalized" by the camera. Kaylee, Inara, and the Tam siblings fulfill various stereotypes and tropes of Chinese- and other Asian-American diaspora people groups. The show, in this way, offers the "diverse" presence of a Chinese influence... using actors of Italian, Irish, German, and possibly Latine background to fill the roles. This makes the Firefly universe look less of a pacifist future between Western and Asian cultures, and more like a colonized universe where the (white) Western colonialists maintain some practices of those forward-thinking Asians who came before them.

But! You may say! Firefly isn't quite so white as that. What about the POC in the show!? Beyond its treatment of the de/re-Orientalization of a decidedly American/Western future, what about Firefly's real interracial representation, like Zoe Washburne and Shepherd Book? I would argue the inclusion of these unapologetic and kind black activist ideas is part of what begins to bring this show towards something more agreeable, but I also think they are at risk of becoming a bit of an obfuscation of a deeper anti-black racist remnant that remains entrenched in the show's Confederate story influences...

We need to talk about Reavers.

Joss Whedon admitted that Reavers were influenced by the role Native Americans played in traditional Westerns. "Every story needs a monster," he said in an interview. "In the stories of the old west it was the Apaches." It's pretty clear how the Reavers, who rape, murder, skin and cannibalize those of the "civilized world" are constructed from the specific racism against Black and Indigenous groups in America. Depictions of cannibals and savages in media have always been constructed to dehumanize those on the outskirts - whether it's the Apache threat Whedon mentions from the Wild West, or indigenous tribes of Africa or South America in any media, or the "terrifying" blackfaced "black" characters in Birth of a Nation, the horror trope of "uncivilized bands of roving lunatics who self-mutilate and can't communicate with their words" is pretty inseparable from its own racist origins. For centuries Europeans have been making "demons" out of pagans and indigenous people for their battle tactics or necropolitics, while simultaneously working hard to entrench our own atrocities in "necessities of the time." For one example, think of the fear associated with "headhunter" displays versus the still-controversial but more civilized-presenting "harsh peacekeeping" of public hangings. What is the difference between these practices besides a different eagernesses to contextualize the practice? I don't argue in favor of punitive violence for cultural purposes here, but it's important not to lose the contextualization of these tropes' origins in the social messaging of popular media. And in fact, the Reavers show an interesting way that the criminalization of Black and Indigenous Americans ties closely to the way we talk about the incarcerated and the mentally ill. I'm frankly not much more satisfied by the Reavers being an embodiment of "space madness" than I would be if they were straight up just Native Americans, or runaways from enslavement. American culture is great at coming up with "madnesses" which are really just the pushback to dehumanizing and unjust regimes. I'm not saying that the logic of the show would allow Reavers to receive constructive community-based mental health support involving free medicine and good therapy. But in a show that claims to be in favor of the marginalized and their voice for power, it's weird that this doesn't come up, right? Do the monsters in our media need to be irredeemable to work as narrative tropes? I would argue, once again, the inclusion of this Western and frankly genocidal trope (and if you think the Reavers are NOT a genocidal story trope, let me know what paths the narrative offers as a solution besides killing them immediately and indiscriminately when given the chance.) works to build a world-feel that's less "for the people" and more "for the justified, downtrodden warriors who know right from wrong," which is a very confederate line of thought.

Although Firefly highlights some literal black voices in their main cast, the plotline of the show is much the same as a confederate apologist story. Some people are more worthy of life than others in this tale - others who are too animistic and uncivilized; or who are simply left behind by the inevitable march of the white, righteous underdog ideologies. And these bold, brave rebels from the Civil War which recently happened are still around, just waiting to reassert their power and their independent desires from the empire. The Confederacy of the US was a white, ethno-nationalist and fascist state, admittedly so by their own politicians. It provided ideological groundwork for Nazi Germany and preceded much of the pseudoscience of phrenology. The Confederate position was based on white supremacy nearly entirely, and argued for the most racist version of a "globalist" idea possible. As evidence, here's some of the Cornerstone Address presented by Alexander Stephens, the "vice president" of the Confederacy: "Many governments have been founded upon the principle of subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race; such were and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature's laws. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system." But confederate stories and ideas have maintained a long-standing and unyielding influence, as after they lost the Civil War, the ideology of the Confederacy underwent a serious PR rebranding. Rather than "anti-American" racists, they became the noble fighters of a lost cause. They became the "defenders of heritage," and they became the mythologized ancestor of any white people who wanted to claim them. The Civil War "rebels" were painted as noble Southern men and women who, in a political landscape of the South becoming red states and the bible belt, were mythologized as Southern Belles and nobly humble plantation owners who loved Good Black people... just not the "mentally ill" ones who did things like run away or fight bondage.

(By the way, Alexander Stephens had some things to say about mental illness too (same link again)- I'm tying this back to my point about "mentally ill Reavers" being less of a far-cry than you might think from Confederate thinking: "Our new government [the Confederacy] is founded upon [this] idea; its corner-stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. ... Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. ... Those at the North, who still cling to these errors [of racial equality], with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate [call them] fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the antislavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. ... [I] told [a gentleman from one of the northern states in the House of Representatives] that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal." It's worth wondering what makes us, as viewers, accept that Reavers are inherently incurable of the mental illness which makes them monsters. Of course this trope could be used in a critical way - but we can see the real-language example here which should make us question what kind of reading to take from media which only addresses the single solution of wiping a True Evil demographic from existence.)

So I hope you see the influences now, how Firefly follows Confederate and White Supremacist storylines. It's of course worth talking about though, the ways it can be read as a radical story as well. The cast includes an empowered revolutionary black woman, a black spiritual elder who advocates for pacifism in resistence, a sex worker who consistently values and stands up for herself and her line of work explicitly, a working woman who struggles with misogyny, and a rich man disgracing himself from society to save his mentally ill younger sister who was facing violent abuse at the hands of the state. These are people who orient themselves for one reason or another in at least some form of opposition to the oppressive and violent power of the government, which once again, is an analogous state to the United States. Of course, the difficulty of the anti-governmental Confederate narrative is that anti-governmental sentiment can have incredibly valid origins. If you are facing discrimination you should indeed oppose the oppressive force that monitors and abuses all its citizens in one way or another. But for God's sake, that opposition should come from a perspective of eliminating discrimination for all. Not a perspective like Jayne Cobb's - the explicitly violent and self-serving voice which, through the show and movie, metaphorically pulls our disaffected protagonist, Malcolm Reynolds, toward the direction of his more cynical, militaristic and even fascist internalized values. Firefly wants to simultaneously make a diverse revolutionary text, but also misses the opportunities it presents itself to say something more meaningful through its own medium. We could've addressed the harm of Jayne's willingness to grant "humanity" ONLY to the people he deems as something like family - or who he feels have properly convinced him that they're worth saving. He is the perfect embodiment of the right-wing, misogynist, white-supremacist ideology at the center of Confederate thinking. He's a Nazi who has been pulled into collaborating with real marginalized people through his relationship with Mal. And there's some level of that which could be an interesting story about deradicalization. In fact in some ways I believe the show could be open to some kind of that interpretation, given the almost-betrayal that Jayne goes back against due to his dedication to Mal. But unfortunatly I'd also say that in the execution of the show I got a different perception, which is back to the whole Confederate thesis...

Instead of a fascist who we could watch be deradicalized by his fellow crew, Jayne ends up doing marginal good only ever out of respect for Mal. I would argue in this way, their relationship mirrors the romanticized mythology of the Civil War being a "war between brothers" due to split households in border states. This narrative clearly holds more respect for the Confederacy than continuing to rightfully call the ideology the abhorrent thing that it is, and it is clear that the same ideology rears its head deep into our legal systems through the treatment of oppressed groups to this day. In ways, the influence of pro-Confederate radicals AFTER the war worked to legitimize bigotry of all kinds in a truly unprecedented way in America. If we have to respect the opinions of the Confederates because they were our "brothers" and not our ideological enemies, then who will we feel more and more comfortable throwing by the wayside - them or the people we work together to shamefully dehumanize? Through this contextual lens, with a vision of Mal as a "decent cowboy" compared to Jayne's more blatantly intolerant cowboy persona, it seems glaring that Jayne's bigoted views are just more intense outward versions of similar prejudices to those Mal feels, but by comparing the two characters to one another Mal would of course begin to look more forgivable despite his relative centrism and lack of care for the marginalized beyond his immediate group. Neither Mal nor anyone, for the narrative's sake, ever really, constructively pulls Jayne aside to actually lay down meaningful expectations of respect. And our rebel storylines of outgroup justice in the future should not accept this lack of accountability! By doing so, we leave no room for the revolutionary need for the Paradox of Tolerance...

The one thing we must not tolerate is intolerance.

Oh and P.S., one last thing: Upon an internet search about the paradox of tolerance I learned that Bill Maher has a famous quote about it, and idk the specifics but seeing that dang centrist asshole liberal made me want to clarify that the argument itself could tie very well into stuff like Islamophobic talking points, since the US defends a lot of its military landgrabs as "defending liberal ideals" due to conflating all Muslims with extremist groups. So I just felt the need to add that being "intolerant of intolerance" is NOT equivalent to dehumanizing groups based on stereotypes of them being "more prone to violence" or other dogwhistles like that. I would imagine that comes through, but it's also just worth making explicit. Even me, in this essay, seeing a character who falls into many of the plot points of a Confederate heroism storyline and is a white man - I'm not intolerant OF those things. In the episodes where Mal successfully subverts those ideologies he's mirroring on screen, by interacting with the world differently because he has learned to humanize an increasingly large group of people, I cheer for him! However, I remain intolerant of the intolerance Mal continues to show by virtue of his failure to hold others and himself accountable to the paradox of tolerance, and lets abuse goes unchecked for longer than he, as a man with power and a growing communal mindset, COULD put to rest.

#media analysis #firefly #white supremacy #orientalism #historical #history lesson #critical theory #philosophy #revolutionary #racism #leftism

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madintersexmermaid · 22 days ago

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(trigger warning: discussions of sexual assault)

This may have been pretty obvious beforehand but just in case it wasn't, I gotta come clean. I’m a Demi Lovato hater. I was brought on this planet to hate on Demi. I can’t stand Demi. I pray on Demi getting fully exposed for who and what she really is. I want to see Demi get permanently blacklisted.

And even though I've stated what Demi's done over the years that's given me justifiable reason to deeply dislike her, in case I didn't completely do so before, I'll spell it out again:

Demi Lovato's done a LARGE list of things:

- preached anti bullying and feminism when convenient but then bullied and started one sided feuds with and unecessarily threw catty, passive aggressive shots at other female artists and celebrities such as Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, Zendaya, Pink, Lady Gaga, etc. (Taylor and Selena especially)

- preached body postivity and ED awareness but then body policed and body shamed other female celebrities (as well as Taylor, while having no consideration for the fact that Taylor had an eating disorder at the time; Demi to this day has not acknowledged or apologized for this at all)

- got caught with a secret finsta (traumaqueen4ever) disgustingly mocking and making fun of Selena's lupus and kidney problems, saying the N slur, etc., then deflected, gaslighted the public and played victim on Jameela Jamil's podcast when called out

- started a one sided feud with and acted catty towards Taylor for her donation to Kesha during her court battle with Dr. Luke and Lovato claiming to care about Kesha more but then made no donation herself, instead used money she claimed to not have to buy a car and a bungalow, unwittingly made Kesha's trauma about herself and her obsessive spite and jealousy towards Taylor and worked as an ambassador for Core Hydration Water which is co owned by Dr. Luke, showing Demi's moral hypocrisy

- doubles down and justifies her nasty behavior and rude, bullyish attitude and antics when people call her out then whines, cries and plays victim and usually does a tired regurgitation of her story to emotionally blackmail and manipulate people into feeling sorry for her as a way to distract people from calling her out for being a terrible person when she gets even heavier backlash for her actions and behavior

- constantly treats mental health and trauma as commodified personality traits to weaponize as excuses to be awful to others, which at best is a poor and reckless misrepresentation of mentally ill and neurodivergent folks and survivors of trauma and addiction, and at worst is a harmful exploitation and mockery of mentally ill and neurodivergent folks and survivors of trauma and addiction

- attacked a family business in the midst of an entitled Karen tantrum over sugar cookies and frozen yogurt then tried to paint it as some sort of righteous crusade on behalf of people with EDs when all this does is further give survivors of EDs a bad look and a bad name while also showing no consideration for businesses trying to stay afloat during a pandemic

- Lovato is also racist/antiblack, as she culturally appropriated African twists and arrogantly dismissed people that were trying to educate her; later tried to use 1% African from a DNA test to get a black card and excuse her actions then cried white Karen tears when folks weren't having it; and in continuing with Lovato's racism and antiblackness, there's going back to her use of the N word in that secret finsta and there's also unearthed, unedited photos of Lovato black/mixedfishing and wearing blackface

- Lovato's actions and behavior towards Selena and Taylor are made even more egregious considering that Selena and Taylor were the first people to check on Lovato when she first went to rehab in 2010 and Selena visited Lovato in the hospital in the aftermath of Lovato's drug overdose in 2018

- (tw) Lovato bragged about orchestrating a s*xual a**ult on her bodyguard and passed it off as a joke then had nerve to get mad and play victim (again) when people were rightly outraged and called her out (and apparently that's not the only instance Lovato's done this as there have been other people that have come forward about Lovato's abusive behavior and acts of sexual assault, exploitation, solicitation and harassment; including an alleged history of Lovato bullying and sexually harrassing and assaulting fans on separate occasions and seducing random women into one night stands and then tossing them to the side like garbage as a further excuse to verbally and emotionally abuse them)

That final part should've been enough for Demi's career to be permanently over and should've had Demi permanently blacklisted. She deserves no sympathy, no empathy, no career and no more second chances after that. She's a sick, vile, abusive, manipulative, repugnant and disgusting individual, and her fans are sick and disgusting as well.

#anti demi lovato #demi lovato stinks

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cosmicanger · 1 year ago

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Against Innocence

Race, Gender, and the politics of Safety

JACKIE WANG

TW//anti-Blackness; d**th; violence

Saidiya V. Hartman: I think that gets at one of the fundamental ethical questions/problems/crises for the West: the status of difference and the status of the other. It’s as though in order to come to any recognition of common humanity, the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced: “Only if I can see myself in that position can I understand the crisis of that position.” That is the logic of the moral and political discourses we see every day — the need for the innocent black subject to be victimized by a racist state in order to see the racism of the racist state. You have to be exemplary in your goodness, as opposed to ...

Frank Wilderson: [laughter] A nigga on the warpath!

While I was reading the local newspaper I came across a story that caught my attention. The article was about a 17 year-old boy from Baltimore named Isaiah Simmons who died in a juvenile facility in 2007 when five to seven counselors suffocated him while restraining him for hours. After he stopped responding they dumped his body in the snow and did not call for medical assistance for over 40 minutes. In late March 2012, the case was thrown out completely and none of the counselors involved in his murder were charged with anything. The article I found online about the case was titled “Charges Dropped Against 5 In Juvenile Offender’s Death.” By emphasizing that it was a juvenile offender who died, the article is quick to flag Isaiah as a criminal, as if to signal to readers that his death is not worthy of sympathy or being taken up by civil rights activists. Every comment left on the article was crude and contemptuous — the general sentiment was that his death was no big loss to society. The news about the case being thrown out barely registered at all. There was no public outcry, no call to action, no discussion of the many issues bound up with the case — youth incarceration, racism, the privatization of prisons and jails (he died at a private facility), medical neglect, state violence, and so forth — though to be fair, there was a critical response when the case initially broke.

For weeks after reading the article I kept contemplating the question: What is the difference between Trayvon Martin and Isaiah Simmons? Which cases galvanize activists into action, and which are ignored completely? In the wake of the Jena 6, Troy Davis, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, and other high profile cases,1 I have taken note of the patterns that structure political appeals, particularly the way innocence becomes a necessary precondition for the launching of anti-racist political campaigns. These campaigns often center on prosecuting and harshly punishing the individuals responsible for overt and locatable acts of racist violence, thus positioning the State and the criminal justice system as an ally and protector of the oppressed. If the “innocence” of a Black victim is not established, he or she will not become a suitable spokesperson for the cause. If you are Black, have a drug felony, and are attempting to file a complaint with the ACLU regarding habitual police harassment — you are probably not going to be legally represented by them or any other civil rights organization anytime soon.2 An empathetic structure of feeling based on appeals to innocence has come to ground contemporary anti-racist politics. Within this framework, empathy can only be established when a person meets the standards of authentic victimhood and moral purity, which requires Black people, in the words of Frank Wilderson, to be shaken free of “niggerization.” Social, political, cultural, and legal recognition only happens when a person is thoroughly whitewashed, neutralized, and made unthreatening. The “spokesperson” model of doing activism (isolating specific exemplary cases) also tends to emphasize the individual, rather than the collective nature of the injury. Framing oppression in terms of individual actors is a liberal tactic that dismantles collective responses to oppression and diverts attention from the larger picture.

Using “innocence” as the foundation to address anti-Black violence is an appeal to the white imaginary, though these arguments are certainly made by people of color as well. Relying on this framework re-entrenches a logic that criminalizes race and constructs subjects as docile. A liberal politics of recognition can only reproduce a guilt-innocence schematization that fails to grapple with the fact that there is an a priori association of Blackness with guilt (criminality). Perhaps association is too generous — there is a flat-out conflation of the terms. As Frank Wilderson noted in “Gramsci’s Black Marx,” the cop’s answer to the Black subject’s question — why did you shoot me? — follows a tautology: “I shot you because you are Black; you are Black because I shot you.”3 In the words of Fanon, the cause is the consequence.4 Not only are Black men assumed guilty until proven innocent, Blackness itself is considered synonymous with guilt. Authentic victimhood, passivity, moral purity, and the adoption of a whitewashed position are necessary for recognition in the eyes of the State. Wilderson, quoting N.W.A, notes that “a nigga on the warpath” cannot be a proper subject of empathy.5 The desire for recognition compels us to be allies with, rather than enemies of the State, to sacrifice ourselves in order to meet the standards of victimhood, to throw our bodies into traffic to prove that the car will hit us rather than calling for the execution of all motorists. This is also the logic of rape revenge narratives — only after a woman is thoroughly degraded can we begin to tolerate her rage (but outside of films and books, violent women are not tolerated even when they have the “moral” grounds to fight back, as exemplified by the high rates of women who are imprisoned or sentenced to death for murdering or assaulting abusive partners).

We may fall back on such appeals for strategic reasons — to win a case or to get the public on our side — but there is a problem when our strategies reinforce a framework in which revolutionary and insurgent politics are unimaginable. I also want to argue that a politics founded on appeals to innocence is anachronistic because it does not address the transformation and re-organization of racist strategies in the post-civil rights era. A politics of innocence is only capable of acknowledging examples of direct, individualized acts of racist violence while obscuring the racism of a putatively colorblind liberalism that operates on a structural level. Posing the issue in terms of personal prejudice feeds the fallacy of racism as an individual intention, feeling or personal prejudice, though there is certain a psychological and affective dimension of racism that exceeds the individual in that it is shaped by social norms and media representations. The liberal colorblind paradigm of racism submerges race beneath the “commonsense” logic of crime and punishment. This effectively conceals racism, because it is not considered racist to be against crime. Cases like the execution of Troy Davis, where the courts come under scrutiny for racial bias, also legitimize state violence by treating such cases as exceptional. The political response to the murder of Troy Davis does not challenge the assumption that communities need to clean up their streets by rounding up criminals, for it relies on the claim that Davis is not one of those feared criminals, but an innocent Black man. Innocence, however, is just code for nonthreatening to white civil society. Troy Davis is differentiated from other Black men — the bad ones — and the legal system is diagnosed as being infected with racism, masking the fact that the legal system is the constituent mechanism through which racial violence is carried out (wishful last-minute appeals to the right to a fair trial reveal this — as if trials were ever intended to be fair!). The State is imagined to be deviating from its intended role as protector of the people, rather than being the primary perpetrator. H. Rap Brown provides a sobering reminder that, “Justice means ‘just-us-white-folks.’ There is no redress of grievance for Blacks in this country.”6

While there are countless examples of overt racism, Black social (and physical) death is primarily achieved via a coded discourse of “criminality” and a mediated forms of state violence carried out by a impersonal carceral apparatus (the matrix of police, prisons, the legal system, prosecutors, parole boards, prison guards, probation officers, etc). In other words — incidents where a biased individual fucks with or murders a person of color can be identified as racism to “conscientious persons,” but the racism underlying the systematic imprisonment of Black Americans under the pretense of the War on Drugs is more difficult to locate and generally remains invisible because it is spatially confined. When it is visible, it fails to arouse public sympathy, even among the Black leadership. As Loïc Wacquant, scholar of the carceral state, asks, “What is the chance that white Americans will identify with Black convicts when even the Black leadership has turned its back on them?”7 The abandonment of Black convicts by civil rights organizations is reflected in the history of these organizations. From 1975-86, the NAACP and the Urban League identified imprisonment as a central issue, and the disproportionate incarceration of Black Americans was understood as a problem that was structural and political. Spokespersons from the civil rights organizations related imprisonment to the general confinement of Black Americans. Imprisoned Black men were, as Wacquant notes, portrayed inclusively as “brothers, uncles, neighbors, friends.”8 Between 1986-90 there was a dramatic shift in the rhetoric and official policy of the NAACP and the Urban League that is exemplary of the turn to a politics of innocence. By the early 1990s, the NAACP had dissolved its prison program and stopped publishing articles about rehabilitation and post-imprisonment issues. Meanwhile these organizations began to embrace the rhetoric of individual responsibility and a tough-on-crime stance that encouraged Blacks to collaborate with police to get drugs out of their neighborhoods, even going as far as endorsing harsher sentences for minors and recidivists.

Black convicts, initially a part of the “we” articulated by civil rights groups, became them. Wacquant writes, “This reticence [to advocate for Black convicts] is further reinforced by the fact, noted long ago by W.E.B. DuBois, that the tenuous position of the black bourgeoisie in the socioracial hierarchy rests critically on its ability to distance itself from its unruly lower-class brethren: to offset the symbolic disability of blackness, middle-class African Americans must forcefully communicate to whites that they have ‘absolutely no sympathy and no known connections with any black man who has committed a crime.’”9 When the Black leadership and middle-class Blacks differentiate themselves from poorer Blacks, they feed into a notion of Black exceptionalism that is used to dismantle anti-racist struggles. This class of exceptional Blacks (Barack Obama, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell) supports the collective delusion of a post-race society.

The shift in the rhetoric and policy of civil rights organizations is perhaps rooted in a fear of affirming the conflation of Blackness and criminality by advocating for prisoners. However, not only have these organizations abandoned Black prisoners — they shore up and extend the Penal State by individualizing, depoliticizing, and decontextualizing the issue of “crime and punishment” and vilifying those most likely to be subjected to racialized state violence. The dis-identification with poor, urban Black Americans is not limited to Black men, but also Black women who are vilified via the figure of the Welfare Queen: a lazy, sexually irresponsible burden on society (particularly hard-working white Americans). The Welfare State and the Penal State complement one another, as Clinton’s 1998 statements denouncing prisoners and ex-prisoners who receive welfare or social security reveal: he condemns former prisoners receiving welfare assistance for deviously committing “fraud and abuse” against “working families” who “play by the rules.”10 Furthermore, this complementarity is gendered. Black women are the shock absorbers of the social crisis created by the Penal State: the incarceration of Black men profoundly increases the burden put on Black women, who are force to perform more waged and unwaged (caring) labor, raise children alone, and are punished by the State when their husbands or family members are convicted of crimes (for example, a family cannot receive housing assistance if someone in the household has been convicted of a drug felony). The re-configuration of the Welfare State under the Clinton Administration (which imposed stricter regulations on welfare recipients) further intensified the backlash against poor Black women. On this view, the Welfare State is the apparatus used to regulate poor Black women who are not subjected to regulation, directed chiefly at Black men, by the Penal State — though it is important to note that the feminization of poverty and the punitive turn in non-violent crime policy led to an 400% increase in the female prison population between 1980 and the late 1990s.11 Racialized patterns of incarceration and the assault on the urban poor are not seen as a form of racist state violence because, in the eyes of the public, convicts (along with their families and associates) deserve such treatment. The politics of innocence directly fosters this culture of vilification, even when it is used by civil rights organizations.

WHITE SPACE

[C]rime porn often presents a view of prisons and urban ghettoes as “alternate universes” where the social order is drastically different, and the links between social structures and the production of these environments is conveniently ignored. In particular, although they are public institutions, prisons are removed from everyday US experience.12

The spatial politics of safety organizes the urban landscape. Bodies that arouse feelings of fear, disgust, rage, guilt, or even discomfort must be made disposable and targeted for removal in order to secure a sense of safety for whites. In other words, the space that white people occupy must be cleansed. The visibility of poor Black bodies (as well as certain non-Black POC, trans people, homeless people, differently-abled people, and so forth) induces anxiety, so these bodies must be contained, controlled, and removed. Prisons and urban ghettoes prevent Black and brown bodies from contaminating white space. Historically, appeals to the safety of women have sanctioned the expansion of the police and prison regimes while conjuring the racist image of the Black male rapist. With the rise of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s came an increase in public awareness about sexual violence. Self-defense manuals and classes, as well as Take Back the Night marches and rallies, rapidly spread across the country. The 1970s and 1980s saw a surge in public campaigns targeted at women in urban areas warning of the dangers of appearing in public spaces alone. The New York City rape squad declared that “[s]ingle women should avoid being alone in any part of the city, at any time.”13 In The Rational Woman’s Guide to Self-Defense (1975), women were told, “a little paranoia is really good for every woman.”14 At the same time that the State was asserting itself as the protector of (white) women, the US saw the massive expansion of prisons and the criminalization of Blackness. It could be argued that the State and the media opportunistically seized on the energy of the feminist movement and appropriated feminist rhetoric to establish the racialized Penal State while simultaneously controlling the movement of women (by promoting the idea that public space was inherently threatening to women). People of this perspective might hold that the media frenzy about the safety of women was a backlash to the gains made by the feminist movement that sought to discipline women and promote the idea that, as Georgina Hickey wrote, “individual women were ultimately responsible for what happened to them in public space.”15 However, in In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement Against Sexual Violence, Kristin Bumiller argues that the feminist movement was actually “a partner in the unforeseen growth of a criminalized society”: by insisting on “aggressive sex crime prosecution and activism,” feminists assisted in the creation of a tough-on-crime model of policing and punishment.16

Regardless of what perspective we agree with, the alignment of racialized incarceration and the proliferation of campaigns warning women about the dangers of the lurking rapist was not a coincidence. If the safety of women was a genuine concern, the campaigns would not have been focused on anonymous rapes in public spaces, since statistically it is more common for a woman to be raped by someone she knows. Instead, women’s safety provided a convenient pretext for the escalation of the Penal State, which was needed to regulate and dispose of certain surplus populations (mostly poor Blacks) before they became a threat to the US social order. For Wacquant, this new regime of racialized social control became necessary after the crisis of the urban ghetto (provoked by the massive loss of jobs and resources attending deindustrialization) and the looming threat of Black radical movements.17 The torrent of uprisings that took place in Black ghettoes between 1963-1968, particularly following the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968, were followed by a wave of prison upheavals (including Attica, Solidad, San Quentin, and facilities across Michigan, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Illinois, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania). Of course, these upheavals were easier to contain and shield from public view because they were cloaked and muffled by the walls of the penitentiary.

The engineering and management of urban space also demarcates the limits of our political imagination by determining which narratives and experiences are even thinkable. The media construction of urban ghettoes and prisons as “alternate universes” marks them as zones of unintelligibility, faraway places that are removed from the everyday white experience. Native American reservations are another example of a “void” zone that white people can only access through the fantasy of media representations. What happens in these zones of abjection and vulnerability does not typically register in the white imaginary. In the instance that an “injustice” does register, it will have to be translated into more comprehensible terms.

When I think of the public responses to Oscar Grant and Trayvon Martin, it seems significant that these murders took place in spaces that the white imaginary has access to, which allows white people to narrativize the incidents in terms that are familiar to them. Trayvon was gunned down while visiting family in a gated neighborhood; Oscar was murdered by a police officer in an Oakland commuter rail station. These spaces are not “alternate universes” or void-zones that lie outside white experience and comprehension. To what extent is the attention these cases have received attributable to the encroachment of violence on spaces that white people occupy? What about cases of racialized violence that occur outside white comfort zones? When describing the spatialization of settler colonies, Frantz Fanon writes about “a zone of non-being, an extraordinary sterile and arid region,” where “Black is not a man.”18 In the regions where Black is not man, there is no story to be told. Or rather, there are no subjects seen as worthy of having a story of their own.

TRANSLATION

When an instance of racist violence takes place on white turf, as in the cases of Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant, there is still the problem of translation. I contend that the politics of innocence renders such violence comprehensible only if one is capable of seeing themselves in that position. This framework often requires that a white narrative (posed as the neutral, universal perspective) be grafted onto the incidents that conflict with this narrative. I was baffled when a call for a protest march for Trayvon Martin made on the Occupy Baltimore website said, “The case of Trayvon Martin – is symbolic of the war on youth in general and the devaluing of young people everywhere.” I doubt George Zimmerman was thinking, I gotta shoot that boy because he’s young! No mention of race or anti-Blackness could be found in the statement; race had been translated to youth, a condition that white people can imaginatively access. At the march, speakers declared that the case of “Trayvon Martin is not a race issue — it’s a 99% issue!” As Saidiya Hartman has asserted in a conversation with Frank Wilderson, “the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced.”19

In late 2011, riots exploded across London and the UK after Mark Duggan, a Black man, was murdered by the police. Many leftist and liberals were unable to grapple with the unruly expression of rage among largely poor and unemployed people of color, and refused to support the passionate outburst they saw as disorderly and delinquent. Even leftists fell into the trap of framing the State and property owners (including small business owners) as victims while criticizing rioters for being politically incoherent and opportunistic. Slavoj Žižek, for instance, responded by dismissing the riots as a “meaningless outburst” in an article cynically titled “Shoplifters of the World Unite.” Well-meaning leftists who felt obligated to affirm the riots often did so by imposing a narrative of political consciousness and coherence onto the amorphous eruption, sometimes recasting the participants as “the proletariat” (an unemployed person is just a worker without a job, I was once told) or dissatisfied consumers whose acts of theft and looting shed light on capitalist ideology.20 These leftists were quick to purge and re-articulate the anti-social and delinquent elements of the riots rather than integrate them into their analysis, insisting on figuring the rioter-subject as “a sovereign deliberate consciousness,” to borrow a phrase from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.21

Following the 1992 LA riots,22 leftist commentators often opted to define the event as a rebellion rather than a riot as a way to highlight the political nature of people’s actions. This attempt to reframe the public discourse is borne of “good intentions” (the desire to combat the conservative media’s portrayal of the riots as “pure criminality”), but it also reflects the an impulse to contain, consolidate, appropriate, and accommodate events that do not fit political models grounded in white, Euro-American traditions. When the mainstream media portrays social disruptions as apolitical, criminal, and devoid of meaning, leftists often respond by describing them as politically reasoned. Here, the confluence of political and anti-social tendencies in a riot/rebellion are neither recognized nor embraced. Certainly some who participated in the London riots were armed with sharp analyses of structural violence and explicitly political messages — the rioters were obviously not politically or demographically homogenous. However, sympathetic radicals tend to privilege the voices of those who are educated and politically astute, rather than listening to those who know viscerally that they are fucked and act without first seeking moral approval. Some leftists and radicals were reluctant to affirm the purely disruptive perspectives, like those expressed by a woman from Hackney, London who said, “We’re not all gathering together for a cause, we’re running down Foot Locker.”23 Or the excitement of two girls stopped by the BBC while drinking looted wine. When asked what they were doing, they spoke of the giddy “madness” of it all, the “good fun” they were having, and said that they were showing the police and the rich that “we can do what we want.”24 Translating riots into morally palatable terms is another manifestation of the appeal to innocence — rioters, looters, criminals, thieves, and disruptors are not proper victims and hence, not legitimate political actors. Morally ennobled victimization has become the necessary precondition for determining which grievances we are willing to acknowledge and authorize.

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sanyu-thewitch05 · 3 years ago

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Tw: N-word, proshipping, anti-blackness, NSFW of minors

So I found out the author of the webtoon Boyfriends used the N-word. Let me tell you, there was no excuse even if he was 16. If White southern Belle Josie can keep the N-word out of her mouth, why can’t other minorities. Him being from Indonesia isn’t an excuse. Black people have made it pretty clear that we don’t want non-blacks saying nigger/nigga. We’ve been saying that since the Civil Rights era, something that was televised across the world, but y’all haven’t taken anything from it.

The thing is that when non-black people say the N-word in this day in age, even knowing the definition and history, it’s more insidious. He knew what the N-word is and what it stands for and still decided to say it on Twitter. I can imagine what he says when he’s alone with friends and family. Or what he thinks of black people in general.

As if this man couldn’t get any problematic, he’s supports proshipper and drew NSFW of BTS when one of the members was a minor. I’m honestly more disappointed that y’all don’t hold other minorities to the same standards as white people. If a white person said nigger/nigga they’d never hear the end of it. But when it’s another minority( like someone who’s non-black Hispanic, Asian, etc) y’all just take their apology and move on. Y’all stay supporting racism and anti-blackness when it comes from other minorities. Once again:

I don’t care if you’re 16, a teenager, or a grown adult

I don’t care if you’re from Japan, Tibet, or Atlantis

If you’re non-black keep the n-word out of your mouths!!!

@thisismisogynoir

Here’s a thread showing other evidence: Ray evidence

#proshitters dni #tw proshitter #racism #anti blackness #what’s so hard about non-blacks keeping the n-word out of their mouths #I’m not talking about black Hispanic or Latino people. I understand the difference between ethnicity and race #meaning black people with a different ethnicity are not going into the non black in this discussion #y’all know what the n-word means why are y’all using when you’re non black #and hearing on the internet as slang is not an excuse #especially when that slang you’re talking about is exclusively aave and was probably a conversation between two black people #And hearing it in a rap song isn’t an excuse either

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violentdevotion · 4 years ago

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Is there anti blackness in Asian communities? Absolutely and I will never try and say otherwise because that's an outright lie. BUT if you're going to write about racism in and torwards Asians and you say 9/11 ruined the model minority myth then I cannot take you seriously because you're obviously either: very young, American (meaning you're writing in a North America-centric perspective) or ignorant. Do you think brown people were considered Model Minorities during colonisation or paki bashings, or do you think discrimination torwards South Asian began in 2001?

#tw racial violence #tw racial slurs #tw racism #i will also say im writing very specifically about England/UK because i cant claim to understand how race and racism and discrimination wor #s elsewhere and i think a few people should make that clear when they try to talk about race in general terms #this is also very specifically at an article i read.#preferably i wouldnt have to drag the black people into this discussion and thats not what im trying to do #but the article was about anti blackness in asian communities #and in reading someone claim 9/11 dispelled the model minority myth i knew i couldnt take a word or it seriously and that this wasnt for me #discrimantion in england is integrally linked to immigration and while race ABSOLUTELY is a factor #turning these things into a black white and brown topic loses the nuance that is needed #also im not an expert #i am an 18 year old brown lit student in england #born after 9/11 #i will never claim to be an expert (unless i do become one) so correct me if i got anything wrong #i just felt there was a bit of nuance needed from a non american perspective #OHMYGOD EDIT IN ONE OF THE TAGS I SAY 'THE BLACK PEOPLE' THAT WAS AN TYPO THE ORIGINAL SAID THE BLACK COMMUNITY BUT THAT DIDNT READ WELL AND #I FORGOT TO GET RID OF THE 'THE'

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akajustmerry · 2 years ago

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video essay round up!

The Visual Effects Crisis - conscise breakdown of the history behind the current VFX labour crisis in Hollywood

Medical Assistance in Dy!ng & the Art of Death - tw for discussion of death, suicide and terminal illness.

Did Content Kill Culture? - how an oversaturation of streaming services is killing culture in favour of endless content.

Act Black, Be White: The Secret to Tik Tok Fame - a case study on how white tiktok fame is built on the stolen work of Black creators.

what makes gen z humor so interesting? - the relationship between so-called gen z humour and “meta-irony”

The Psychology of the Religious Right - tw for discussions of racism, white supremacy, etc.

How Spotify Manufactures Gay Culture - fascinating essay on how algorithms are creating an artifical “gay culture”

WTF is Barbiecore? | Revival of the White Woman Ideal - breaking down the revival of barbiecore/bimbo-core and it’s links to anti-blackness

"Breeding Kinks" and the fake apocalypse at its core - ever wondered why so many rich men are obsessed with having babies?

The Holocaust is Not a Metaphor: The Grey Zone (2001) - one of the best video essays on a single film i’ve ever seen. tw for discussion of antisemitism and the holocaust obviously

#video essays #films #music #tv #barbiecore #social media #video #/

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assignmentimprobable · 2 years ago

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Back at it again and one thing I want to say following the release of IWTV AMC is that the context surrounding a character’s racial swap in horror is what makes or breaks the whole thing.

Analysis below the cut.

TW for discussions of racism, violence, and eugenics.

Light spoilers for IWTV (2022)

Let me explain using an example that doesn’t work. Albert Wesker in the Netflix Resident Evil series. Albert Wesker is a eugenicist. Eugenics is a field framed by white supremecist views and anti-disability beliefs. It feels… Wrong, to race swap him to use those frameworks as is in line with his character without any meaningful effort to address the subject or say anything important about it. It’d be different if the story tackled the idea that hierarchies based in racialized science are often enforced by members of the communities that they harm (that’s how they survive.) through respectability politics and exceptionalism, but Wesker is just? A villain. That’s it. It ends there.

Now let’s use an example that works. Candyman, acted superbly by Tony Todd. He was a white man with red hair in the original short story by Clive Barker. But we don’t care because the recontextualization of his story is constructed in a way that… idk, for lack of better word actually shows an active dedication to what choice is being made, and how it is carried out. Is it racist that a black man is chasing around a white woman and terrorizing her? Yes, at it’s nature because of the history of deaths that followed false accusations during the era of Jim Crow and the Black Codes. However, Candyman is loved by the black community. Why? Because he’s sympathetic, because he’s charming, because his power is given in the wake of something awful and not even remotely uncommon for black people living in his time. Because he’s handsome and debonair and speaks with a voice like honey. There’s this great documentary called Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror that I recommend you check out if you’re interested in seeing the topography of the genre and it’s continued cultural relevance.

Candyman works because of the setting around it: gentrification and hood poverty. How myths and horrors can float around in poverty stricken communities because honestly? What’s one more when you’re facing hunger and state indifference and violence to survive? Helen‘s critical mistake was assuming that Candyman was some mass-delusion to blame squalor on a boogeyman. Like no bitch. The Candyman stories flourish in these places because of the desensitization to horror that living in an environment with them brings. Also, centering Candyman himself: His subsequent backstory and the 2021 entry to the series do so much to lend sympathy to his character. There’s a retroactive reason he’s enamored with Helen, and we see that racist violence and cruelty made him what he is. A painter in love turned something that white people invoked- that’s why he’s Candyman. The projects didn’t name Candyman, the white people who tortured him to death did. We can sympathize with him, we can ask why Helen felt so compelled to interrupt the lives of this community. For what? To be some white savior? To chase a study in intellectualism, knowing she can go home and forget them? She fucked around and found out. Enter Candyman.

So why does it work for Louis?

Well, let’s take a look at his book counterpart.

Being half black I can’t sympathize with book Louis. I don’t give a fuck about what he’s been through. Seriously. He was a slaver. There’s no such thing as a benevolent slave owner, you have human beings as currency and *chattel*. His framing as the hypocritical, but more compassionate and empathetic of the duo is something I can’t buy. That’s not something I can overlook, it takes me out of the enjoyment. I cannot separate that from his character to enjoy him for what he’s supposed to be.

AMC Louis? completely different story. By introducing blackness to his character, you are creating what is supposed to be the ‘monster’ as is the genre’s convention, but not a *monster*. He’s infinitely more compelling, more complex as a well-to-do eldest son of an affluent black family struggling with the racial hierarchy, his sexuality; and the judgment that comes with these two categorical assignments. He’s dealing with the lapse of generational wealth- something that many black people have not had the opportunity to build to the level of glut that white affluent families have. Often all it takes is ONE generation of bad decisions to lose it all because one or in the luckiest cases: two generation’s worth is the most for many who find their footing. Louis can’t be himself. He has to be tough but infinitely patient and well mannered to appeal to his white business partners. He can’t be angry, but he must be rough for fear that he’ll be walked all over. He’s judged for the very thing that keeps his family in their comfort. He’s not free to emotionally engage with art because of what kind of policing results from being a black man AND a queer man. Those two distinctions overlap and create a separate experience that people refuse to really put an understanding to? Like people put a monolith to queerness that has its defaults in white convention. White butches and twinks and bears and hunks. The colloquial y’all don’t have to deal with how your race informs the behaviors that people ascribe to queerness.

When Louis read his mother’s mind and heard her disgust over the simple act of *getting his nails done* i couldn’t help but think about conversations among the black elders when they see the little boys acting even a little outside their norms. “He’s got a little sugar in the tank”, “you need to snap him out of that, make sure he doesn’t grow up a punk”. Some of that is garden variety homophobia, but so much of it is also how much crueler life is when you’re black and you’re gay. The racial hierarchy exists in the communities it subjugates and it maintains racial norms of what black men are supposed to act like. Louis is bound to that.

That kind of context makes it easier to sympathize with Louis and feel his pain. It lends itself well to his relationship with Lestat and the balance they’re supposed to strike. Lestat, a white man, is able to kill as he does because his whiteness gives him carte Blanche to see himself superior to ‘humans’. Whiteness, the construction, incentivizes putting people into categories of ‘other’ and situating yourself at the top. ‘Humans’ replace ‘blacks’. Of course he doesn’t care that he’s taking human beings out of this world, of course he takes delight in the killing. Vampirism gives him the tools to do what the world (the social stratosphere, the *law*) already encourages and incentivizes white men to do completely unimpeded! People don’t like to talk about it, but like the Vampire genre lends itself a little too well to capitalist greed and colonial wealth hoarding. Louis does not, and has never had access to these tools. Of course he is horrified, of course it is unnatural to him. Of course the transition is difficult! That makes the divide between them so interesting. That’s what makes this change for Louis’ character so good.

Context *matters* if you’re going to reclaim a character in this genre. Race swaps in action and fantasy?

Nah, you don’t need a reason lmao fuck y’all. Black MJ, Black Ariel, Black Catwoman, Iris West, and Jim Gordon for life idgaf idgaf idgaf.

Anyways. If your character has a storied history of racist belief or politics, and the change will fundamentally alter the fabric of how the story is carried out then writers have an obligation to accommodate and write carefully around it. Which I think they’ve done here in the series so far. I’m excited to see what happens next.

#interview with the vampire #iwtv series #Louis de pointe du lac #candyman #stevie speaks

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