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Category Archives: race

Surprising Revelations from the Casey Anthony Outrage Machine

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Casey Anthony, accused of killing her two-year-old daughter Caylee, was found not guilty of murder one on July 5 (she was convicted of lying to police). In response, there was widespread outrage, as the court of public opinion had long since convicted her.

You can see how this reaction came about. It was a high-profile trial involving a dead child—that always gets people’s dander up. There also wasn’t a really compelling alternative explanation for how Caylee Anthony died.

And, perhaps most importantly, most people don’t really understand that the American legal system relies on the principle of reasonable doubt. That is, it’s not enough that it seems most likely that the accused did it. In order to prevent convicting the innocent, the system is set up so that, as Wikipedia puts it, “the proposition being presented by the prosecution must be proven to the extent that there could be no ‘reasonable doubt’ in the mind of a ‘reasonable person’ that the defendant is guilty.” That standard wasn’t met, and Casey Anthony walked—whether she did it or not.

But in the midst of all that indignation and sense that justice had not been served was a peculiar pattern. Twitterer MC Thumbtack (pun alert!) hit the nail on the head when s/he said:

@inthefade I haven’t seen this many people outraged over something that has no affect on their lives since OJ’s glove didn’t fit.

Suddenly, it’s 1995 again. I’m sitting in my eighth grade science class watching the O.J. Simpson verdict come down. (No joke, we did this. I think we had a substitute teacher that day.) And, it’s not like I was reading a lot of news when I was twelve, but the reaction in that room indicated that people were mad.

But aside from the outrage factor, I can’t see what on earth Casey Anthony has to do with O.J. Simpson. However, I seem to be the only one.

When @KimKardashian tweeted “WHAT!!??!! CASEY ANTHONY NOT GUILTY!!!! I’m speechless!!!” O.J. was the go-to response (only one of them can I find now in its tweet form):

@HaHaWhitePPL So was Nicole Brown Simpson’s family when your dad got OJ off.

Granted, the O.J. link makes a little sense here, as Ms. Kardashian is, in fact—as the tweets note—the daughter of a member of Simpson’s team of lawyers.

But she’s also, as Wikipedia describes her, a “socialite, television personality, model, and actress” who’s “known for a sex tape with her former boyfriend Ray J as well as her E! reality series that she shares with her family, Keeping Up with the Kardashians.” That is, she’s not someone whose opinion on legal matters should be considered terribly important. And yet, people felt compelled to respond and point out the O.J. Simpson parallel.

I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, except that it wasn’t just a couple of responses to a tweet by a “she’s famous for what?” celebrity.

It was Venn diagrams over at GraphJam of “People who have murdered” and “People who can get away with murder” with Simpson and Anthony in the tiny overlapping area.

It was OJ captioned as pulling a Kanye West and saying “Yo Casey, I’m really happy for you. I’mma let you finish . . .” followed by “…but I had the best ridiculous acquittal of all TIME.”

It was a five-picture series of “Totally Looks Like” photos with matching facial expressions between Anthony and Simpson, which must have taken ages to compile.

And it was a deployment of the Bed Intruder Meme. It ran Hide Yo Kids with a picture of Anthony and “Hide Yo Wife” with a picture of Simpson. Later, a version added Lorena Bobbitt and “Hide Yo Husband.”

So why so consistently OJ? Why not other people with similarities to Anthony? There’s a parallel with Scott Peterson, who killed his own kid. And Melissa Huckaby was one of those (relatively rarer) women who kill children—that seems relevant. Everyone was similarly sure Michael Jackson was guilty of child molestation, but he was acquitted, too.

But Casey Anthony hasn’t been compared to any of these people by user-generated humor. It’s all OJ, all the time. And it doesn’t make any sense.

That is, the particularity and consistency of Simpson has to mean something.

And it seems to me that if, as the tenor and sheer volume (quantity and loudness) of the outrage suggests, a mother (allegedly) killing her own child and (apparently) getting away with it is one of the most heinous offenses for our culture, the “the OMG, OJ!” response suggests that a black man (allegedly) killing a white woman and (apparently) getting away with it is right up there alongside it.

So, if the response to Anthony says a lot about gender (OMG, women shouldn’t kill! Mothers inherently have a link to their children, is she a monster?), the consistent linkage to Simpson says a lot about race. Particularly, the ways race in the U.S is to this day freighted with the project of “protecting” white women from black men.

Even when, as in this case, it has absolutely nothing to do with anything.

Glee’s Diversity Fumbles, Or: Ryan Murphy has a Serious Case of Gay White Man Syndrome

Glee blog three of, I think, four.

Glee seems, in some ways, to be pretty invested in diversity. Certainly, the way people throw praise (accolades from GLAAD) and awards (a Diversity Award from the Multicultural Motion Picture Association) at them (and these are just the examples from the first page of Google results) suggests that his is a popular interpretation.

And indeed, the show has had, in various combinations over its run, some white-American kids, and some Jewish-American kids, and some Asian-American kids, and some African-American kids, and a Latina kid, and a kid in a wheelchair and some characters with Down syndrome, and a boatload of gay, lesbian, bisexual, or questioning kids.

Check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check.Let’s dust off our hands, our work here is done.

That is, Glee seems to be working with a sort of smorgasbord or checkbox model of difference. They have characters who differ with respect to the categories Americans generally recognize as important, and that is about as far as it goes.

Most notably, the show has gotten accolades and award statuettes for the way it deals with sexual orientation, and I actually don’t have a whole lot to dispute there. It’s a pretty narrow subset of LGB folks (and no transfolks), but there sure are a lot of them. The show is gay central (which has not escaped the attention of the right), and because at least one of the people in charge has had those experiences, it does an ok job of it.

And it’s true that they exhibit race in more than black and white, which is a definite improvement over the American TV standard, but they stop at (East) Asian and Latina/o. No Native kids. No Arab or Muslim kids. No South Asian kids (though there was one scripted, he got replaced with Kurt because a) Chris Colfer is just that awesome and b) Ryan Murphy saw himself in him—this is one place where we have gotten into trouble).

But just having characters who fit in those categories—checking off those boxes—isn’t enough. I mentioned offhand a couple weeks ago that Santana is periodically ethnic-ed up when the writers remember to break out their English-to-Spanish dictionary, and that’s really as far as it goes for any of the characters.

Granted, I haven’t yet seen the back half of season two, but I can’t think of a single episode dealing in depth with anybody’s racial or ethnic identity. It seems like the people who make Glee think of race or ethnicity as good only for a snappy one-liner.

Or, sometimes, it’s a minor plot point—like when Quinn was pregnant and craving bacon and Puck’s Jewish mother was appalled or Artie and Tina break up because Tina wants to date fellow Asian Mike (with whom she hooked up at “Asian Camp”—seriously?).

Of course, the ways in which Glee swings at equality and misses haven’t entirely escaped attention: Margaret Hartmann over at Jezebel discusses Why Glee Still Needs To Work On Diversity. Angry Asian Man calls the show out for the way that the Caucasian cast is made so much more central in plots and promotional materials. Even Jeff Field of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil rights argues that “‘Glee’ Loathes Diversity.”

As Hartmann’s article points out, it would be less annoying that Glee fails at doing diversity if it wasn’t so busy patting itself on the back for doing diversity. And this is where it becomes clear that Glee creator Ryan Murphy has Gay White Man Syndrome, and he has it bad.

This isn’t to hate on all gay white men. Some of my best friends are gay white men, to use that horrible, privilege- or prejudice-obscuring saying with tongue firmly in cheek. But Gay White Man Syndrome is a serious problem for that subset of the population of gay white men who have it.

When people have the Syndrome, they tend to mistake their experience of discrimination on the basis of their sexuality as interchangeable with all other ways that people are disadvantaged for the social categories of inequality to which they belong.

This is sort of like saying “I understand what it’s like to be discriminated against as a woman because I’m gay” or “I can’t be racist, I’m gay!”

When you put it this way, it sounds totally ridiculous, but it’s rarely expressed this way. Instead, there’s just an assumption of commonality of the experience of being outside the privileged norm, ignoring the ways in which being white and male are still pretty good cards to have in your hand.

And that’s sort of what happens in Glee. The people making the show apparently don’t know what they don’t know, so they proceed as if what they know is enough to allow them to successfully engage with all categories of social inequality.

It’s not. Props to them for having a cast in many hues, but simple presence is not enough.

The Ambivalent Racialization of Rachel Berry

After a crazy semester of exam-taking, I am back, dear readers, and ready to (hopefully) enlighten you once again with my musings on politics, popular culture, and poststructuralism.

As I was reading Isabel Molina-Guzmán’s take on Ugly Betty in Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media a while back, something resonated with my roughly contemporaneous viewing of the first season and a half of Glee. Molina has an extended discussion of the character Betty’s troubled relationship to normative fashion as a form of camp and as a sign of failed whiteness, and this struck me as quite related to Rachel’s positioning in good ol’ Glee.

It’s immediately obvious to anyone watching these two shows that neither Betty nor Rachel can quite succeed at normative femininity and fashion. Molina identifies this as a “queer performance” in the case of Betty, describing Betty’s clothing choices as an “unusual sense of fashion and style that echoes a drag queen aesthetic” (144).

There’s definitely something there to make sense of Rachel, as the insults the show’s Cheerios characters deploy to police Rachel’s fashion choices are frequently assaults on her femininity, like RuPaul or manhands (and others, though it seems, regrettably, that no one has compiled a readily available internet list).

This isn’t because Rachel’s particularly manly—she’s tiny (Google estimated actress Lea Michele’s height as 5’2” when I asked just now) and her outfits routinely leave little doubt that her body is well within shape norms for normative femininity.

No, they aren’t really accusing her of being masculine, and I’d like to suggest that what they’re policing when they police her gender is her racialized difference. (Unless, as suggested by some fans, Quinn is really trying to convince herself that Rachel is unattractive because she wants so desperately to be heterosexual. Though, if she likes men so much, why would comparing Rachel to one make her less attractive? See skywarrior108’s The Truth About Quinn Fabray for a pretty compelling version of this argument.)

This comes into focus most clearly using the complex notion of heteronormativity articulated by people like Cathy Cohen. That is, the norms of race, gender, class, and sexuality (and, depending who you ask, indigenous v. settler status and nationality) mutually reinforce each other, and failing to comply with one imperils all the others.

We can see how all of these things are working in the case of Betty or Rachel’s deviances from the norm. That is, through both are constructed as heterosexually oriented, through not living up to race, gender, and class norms they fall out of normativity.

Ugly’s Betty, Molina tells us, is “never quite white” (146). Specifically, her “performance of Latina femininity,” relatively “assimilated” though it is by comparison to that of her sister, is nevertheless “a failed performance of white, middle-class social acceptability” (136).

And you know, Rachel is never quite successful at this either, at least in part because her quasi-permanent state of fashion faux pas violates that “white, middle-class social acceptability” up one side and down the other. Her clothing frequently speaks explicitly of both sex and childhood in a way that is clearly calculated by the show’s makers to be appalling.

But then there’s the body in those clothes. A body whose skin tone is a couple shades darker than is normative for white women (men have a bit darker range, as Richard Dyer points out in White). And we need to take that divergence from the norm seriously, because it’s evident that between the clothes and the color, there’s a perplexing and ambivalent racialization of the body of one Rachel Berry.

Fans certainly don’t know what to do with it—I’m not going to call anybody out in particular, but the frequency with which fans describing Rachel speak of her “tanned” skin or have Quinn’s internal monologue marvel at her lack of “tan lines” in femslash stories suggests that they want to cram her back into whiteness but have to explain away that not-quite-white hue. It does not seem to occur to them that she just is tan, as a color, or, god forbid, (light) brown.

But the body of the actor playing that character, Lea Michele, is in fact tan/light brown, and however much this panics the desperate American desire to be colorblind, that matters. But it’s not the only thing that matters.

This is clearest when one puts Rachel alongside the other high-school-girl characters, particularly Santana and Quinn. Quinn is, as she is intended to be, the epitome of whiteness—nondenominationally Christian, light-skinned, blonde, middle-class, and normatively feminine. In every respect, this is “whiter,” according to the complex of norms that determine normativity, than Rachel.

Santana, on the other hand, though visually classifiable as nonwhite and periodically ethnic-ed up when the writers remember to break out their English-to-Spanish dictionary, is still better at normativity than Rachel. She does femininity better. She does class better. And, though her non-heterosexuality is a deviation from normativity (and indeed will probably get its own whole blog post sometime soon), her establishment as succeeding at most norms up until the recent arc weights her toward normativity overall.

So determination is partly or sometimes visual and partly or sometimes compliance with norms, but Rachel fails on both accounts. She just can’t get normative whiteness right because of the multiple ways she’s not within the narrow orbit of the normative.

And, like Betty, this is the tragedy of Rachel. Both of these characters want (sometimes desperately) to fit in and be like others—though not at the cost of who they are—but they just don’t quite fit in those boxes. And I think that explains a lot.

A major shout-out to T.J. Tallie for saving me from folly on this post in about a zillion ways. If you want to access his awesomeness, check him out on Twitter.

Doing Whiteness in Dutch Indonesia

Ann Laura Stoler, it turns out, proves the point I argued last week that Butler’s (2004) work is useful for thinking about race; Stoler, in her Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2002, reissued 2010), describes Dutch whiteness in the Indonesian context as something that had to be “done” (though, despite this major point of contact, the citations suggest that Butler was not a conscious interlocutor for Stoler).

This done-ness of whiteness is implicit in arguments like the one Stoler makes that “prescriptions for bathing, breastfeeding, cooking, and sleeping arrangements tied anxieties over personhood, race, and what it meant to be Dutch to the choreography of the everyday” (17). This is much like Butler’s argument that gender is the appearance of an interior essence produced by repeated quotidian enactments of social norms.

Indeed, this “doing” of whiteness trumped what might seem to be the incontrovertible “matter” of raced bodies just as Butler contends that the sexed body is constructed rather than given. Stoler argues that “the colonial measure of what it took to be classified as ‘European’ was based not on skin color alone but on tenuously balanced assessment of who was judged to act with reason, affective appropriateness, and a sense of morality” (2-6).

That is, you have to “act” white/European/Dutch to get to “be” white/European/Dutch, and indeed it is under this logic that being creole was enough to symbolically unwhiten someone despite the genetic heritage of Dutch parents (68-9).

Similarly, the need to continually “do” whiteness explains the horror the settlers had of “men who had ‘gone native’ or simply veered off cultural course, of European children too taken with local foods, too versed in local knowledge,” as this troubled the equation—which they wanted to be unproblematic—between white embodiment and “white” behavior (2).

This is to say that, if the Dutch sense of racial superiority was founded in their sense of being more “civilized” than the Indonesians they colonized, the ways that white people could in fact “veer off course” and begin to behave in the Indonesian way could potentially mean that this imagined superiority wasn’t inherent. (On whiteness as self-control and civilization see also Dyer, 1997; Ferguson, 2003; Floyd, 2009; Frankenberg, 1993; Hedges, 1997; Nagel, 2003; Roediger, 1991; Sandell, 1997; Savran, 1998)

Thus it becomes clear that, as Butler argues about gender, the necessity of repeated instantiation of norms opens up the possibility of doing them “wrong” or differently—and thus the potential to disrupt their hold on normativity.

However, as both Butler and Stoler note, the breaking of norms doesn’t automatically free us from them. Stoler’s book “treats racism as a central organizing principle of European communities in the colonies,” and rightly so; the ways in which racism had this fundamental status meant that “racial thinking was part of a critical, class-based logic that differentiated between native and European and that was part of the apparatus that kept potentially subversive white colonials in line” (13).

This is to say that the threat of becoming unwhitened (with all the loss of privilege this would entail) worked to discourage solidarity of lower-class whites with native interests. David Roediger has documented a similar process as happening in the United States in his 1991 book The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, as the members of the working class of European origin “settled for being white” rather than experiencing themselves as having common class interests with black workers.

The necessity of this work to solidify common whiteness, then, calls attention to “the uncertain racialized regimes of truth that guided their actions” and the ways in which the “criteria by which European colonials defined themselves” were unstable and necessitated the sort of “doing” Butler describes to create solidity and effective reality (6).

References
Butler, J. (2004). The Judith Butler Reader. (S. Salih, Ed.). New York: Wiley-Blackwell.
Dyer, R. (1997). White. London: Routledge.
Ferguson, R. A. (2003). Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press.
Floyd, K. (2009). The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press.
Frankenberg, R. (1993). White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hedges, W. (1997). If Uncle Tom is White, Should we Call him “Auntie”? Race and Sexuality in Postbellum U.S. Fiction. In M. Hill (Ed.), Whiteness: A Critical Reader (pp. 226-247). New York: NYU Press.
Nagel, J. (2003). Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers. New York: Oxford University Press.
Roediger, D. R. (1991). The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso.
Sandell, J. (1997). Telling Stories of “Queer White Trash”: Race, Class, and Sexuality in the Work of Dorothy Allison. In A. Newitz & M. Wray (Eds.), White Trash: Race and Class in America (pp. 211-230). New York: Routledge.
Savran, D. (1998). Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Stoler, A. L. (2010). Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2nd ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Butler and Race?

In rereading some of Judith Butler’s work as published in 2004 in The Judith Butler Reader, I was startled to note how little she actually addresses race. This seeming silence on race is particularly odd when editor and introducer Sara Salih gives Butler a lot of credit for looking at race and in light of Butler’s fairly unambiguous antiracist credentials. (For example, in her refusal of an award from the Berlin Christopher Street Day (i.e. gay pride) people due to racism within their organization)

Indeed, it seems that Butler in some sense “discovered” race sometime between Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993); her 1990 objection to Mapplethorpe’s depiction of “naked Black men” as one which “engage[s] a certain racist romanticism of Black men’s excessive physicality and sexual readiness” (197) is not on par, theoretically, with the kinds of complex arguments she was making about gender at the same point in her career.

In the Reader, it was only in her 1999 introduction to the reissue of Gender Trouble that she pointed out that “racial presumptions invariably underwrite the discourse on gender” (95) or that “gender norms” are substantially “underwritten by racial codes of purity and taboos against miscegenation” (101).

These brief mentions, and the recognition that “race and gender ought not to be treated as simple analogies” and “the sexualization of racial gender norms calls to be read through multiple lenses at once, and the analysis surely illuminates the limits of gender as an exclusive category of analysis” (95) are really all she gives us.

It thus becomes the reader’s job to discern how Butler’s ideas about gender illuminate (or don’t) aspects of the operation of race as a system of discrimination (in both the “differentiation” and “inequality” senses, a dual valence Butler points out with respect to Wittig on p. 29), and so I shall.

The idea of performativity tends to generate resistance because it violates cultural common sense: “What do you mean, race (or gender) is produced by doing? I can see with my own eyes that this person has a race (gender)!” (The fact that this obviousness only occurs with respect to marked categories of race or gender, and white people and men don’t “obviously” have a race or gender to most people, though important, is beyond what I can consider here.)

Accordingly, the social construction of the matter of bodies generally has to be established before performativity can make sense (which makes the fact that Butler explained gender first (1990) and then the body (1993) unfortunate for both her and her readers).

Butler argues that body parts (or bodily characteristics) only come to exist at the point that we notice them (145); accordingly, the physical features that say “race” to us are products of paying attention to them. This does not, however, mean that they are not “real,” either materially or socially, but only that we make sense of bodies through social categories (100) that tell us that this skin color or that eye shape indicates membership in a particular race category.

These are, like sex categories, arbitrary—people from some Pacific Islander groups have the same, objective, “hue”–as it is described by Richard Dyer in his 1997 book White–skin color as some Africans, for example, but we understand them to be different “races” through classifying what “matters” about the “matter” of these bodies, and in so doing materializing these bodies in particular ways (and not others).

Once the matter of bodies is understood as social, performativity becomes easier to accept. Though there’s nothing inherent in the body about the races or genders we inhabit, we experience them as the inner truth of a person because they “act like it.” The possibility of “doing” race out of line with the socially produced body is exemplified by the idea of the “Oreo” or “banana”—people of color who “act white” and are presumed then to be “white on the inside.”

Finally, as Butler notes about gender, performances of racialized selves are not volitional acts—we are hailed at birth into a race as much as a gender, and the social imperative to be raced and gendered is difficult and painful to refuse (What are you?).

In the end, then, I think it is clear that Butler’s work on gender can be useful for making sense of race, though clearly this does not relieve Butler of the obligation to make these articulations herself.