Why do I write about race? Partly because other people are so terrible or inept at recognizing the impact of race on their life, let alone actually talking about it. When I first started, it was a lark. Then I thought I could convince Marvel and DC to do something other than pander to their audience. Then I realized that was stupid, and I’d be better off just talking about this stuff. I’ll spit hollowpoints at them them when they miss, praise them when they hit, and hopefully someone who reads me will look and go, “Oh, this makes sense” and tomorrow will be a little better.
It took me forever to come to that point, though. I figure it’s obvious if you read my posts from that first Black History salvo on through today. Maybe not. Maybe I’m the only one that pays that much attention to what I do. But I have changed and grown as a result of talking about race and comics.
If there really was one taboo subject in the old Usenet days of discussing science fiction, it was doubting the genius of Robert Heinlein. there were always acolytes and fanboys aplenty to explain away the homophobia, misogyny or racism that cropped up again and again in his work, or excuse the flawed logic or inconsistencies that could be found in them. Times have changed though and as new generations of sf readers have grown up, Heinlein has lost much of his former prominence in science fiction. Which means there has been room to start seeing the real Heinlein, not the idealised picture his fans have build up around him.
Nor do I feel responsible for the generally low state of the Negro—as one Negro friend pointed out to me; the lucky Negroes were the ones who were enslaved. Having traveled quite a bit in Africa, I know what she means. One thing is clear: Whether one speaks of technology or social institutions,
“civilization” was invented by us, not by the Negroes. As races, as cultures, we are five thousand years, about, ahead of them. Except for the culture, both institutions and technology, that they got from us, they would still be in the stone age, along with its slavery, cannibalism, tyranny, and utter lack of the concept we call “justice.”
Which is straight out of any angry white nerd’s rant against political correctness ever written. So when was it written? 1964.
This is the soccer player Mario Balotelli, a very talented and I’d say charismatic player — I know who he is, and I get lost with those guys all the time — who plays in the Premier League for current champions Manchester City and is part of the Italy team currently playing (last I checked) in the Euro 2012 tournament. As one of the spokespeople quoted mentions, his being on the Italian team at all is a big deal, and symbolic, and encouraging for a lot of people, which makes this depiction a bit tragic, really. The usual course of dialogue is taken, it looks like, which makes me think we need a new way to talk about this kind of thing. I wish there a way to cop to the ugliness of depicting someone in that matter that didn’t turn on there not being a machine out there that lets us know what’s in someone’s heart. I don’t see that happening any time soon, though.
You can’t really say much about situations like this. A cartoon is published with, deliberate or accidental racist (or sexist) overtones, people point out that “dude, that’s a bit racist”, cartoonist or newspaper either gets defensive and deny the charges, or get defensive but apologise, people rant about it all on the internet. I’m not sure there is a new way to talk about it, even using Jay smooth’s advice on how to tell people they sound racist, people and institutions both will still get defensive. But it might be interesting to take a stab at how this cartoon was created.
The first thing to remember that this comes from an Italian newspaper and though it may be hard to believe, there is a far greater awareness of racism and racist tropes in America (and to a lesser extent, Britain), than there is in continental Europe. Sure, there are plenty of people who hold ghetto parties with no idea that these are incredibly racist, but there is at least some awareness of what would make for an offensive cartoon; there are also more people willing to complain about it. In short, Americans have been more educated to spot these racist tropes and be offended by them.
Meanwhile, Mario Balotelli is somewhat of a loose cannon. A brilliant strike when wants to be, as witnessed by his performance against Germany tonight, he can also do things like throw darts to his teammates, set fire to his bathroom or wear an A. C. Milan shirt on telly when playing for Inter, somewhat like wearing a Yankees Jersey in Boston, only worse. He’s a great, instinctive football player, but seems to lack smarts some of the time. Which is of course somewhat of a stereotype for talented Black players in any sport, that idea it’s all instinct or innate physical and athletic ability, rather than hard work and intelligence that makes them great.
In any case, the combination makes Balotelli an easy target for jokes at his expense, especially as he often looks a bit of a beleagured figure, wondering “why always me”. So I can see where the King Kong idea comes from: the noble, misunderstood giant harassed by, in this cases, flying footballs. It’s a nice cartoon, if not for the simple fact that equating a Black football player with a giant ape is just a little bit racist. That’s something an American cartoonist would’ve recognised earlier.
Right, so the popular image of the American South in the fifties and sixties had been of rednecks, klansmen and big white cops beating up and shooting at peaceful Black civil rights activists. If you came from the south and were white, you were ignorant at best, stone cold racist at worst. Politically you had that old rotten to the core southern Democratic Party as the flag bearer of that image of the old south, corrupt, segregationist and resist to all change while the country was changed around it. In short, not a nice time to be white, from the south and not a stick in the mud bigot.
And then the seventies came and things changed. The south got less racist, you got a new generation less redneck, more hippie, less racist but not ashamed of being southern either. The south seemed to move away from its past, experience somewhat of a boom as cities like Atlanta attracted new businesses and inhabitants alike as the region got richer and less yokel. Meanwhile Nixon’s great southern strategy –as thought up by Lee Atwater[1]– by which he appealed to that core of racist old Democratic voters by well, stoking their racism, has started to work, which means that the Democratic party in turn can be cleansed of its racist past, become more like it is in the rest of the country.
And so you have this vision of a New South in the mid seventies: young, optimistic, integrated, liberal, proud of its heritage but no longer mired in its past. With the culmination of that vision being Jimmy Carter’s election as president in 1976. Here you have the first true southern president since the Civil War, somebody both a liberal and from what rightwingers like to believe is their heartland, a Southern Baptist even, but liberal, who had southern rock bands like the Allman Brothers Band campaigning for him.
Is it any wonder that Republicans hate Carter, even now hate him even more than they hate Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, two other Democrats who “stole” their presidency from them? He represented a vision of the south, of their American heartland in direct opposition to what they wanted it to be, a south in which racist dogwhistles would no longer get their core voters worked up. He was a direct threath to their power and they would go to any length to make him lose the election, even going so far as to make deals with what they themselves would call an evil country, Iran, to make sure that the release of American hostages would not take place before the election so that Carter couldn’t profit from it.
that’s Andrew Weiss’ judgement of the seventies and while he may be bitter, he is sadly more right than wrong. The seventies is when the Republicans got their pretty hate machine really going, first used it to kill off Carter and the New South, then just kept dragging the whole of America ever more rightward into the mire, in the process replacing the real south with their Disneyfied, Nashvilled simulacrum of what they wanted the south to be.
[1] Lee Atwater in 1981: You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*gger, n*gger, n*gger.” By 1968 you can’t say “n*gger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
