Racism – Page 5 – Wis[s]e Words

Should Tintin au Congo be banned for racism?

Published on April 7, 20112 Comments

Tom Spurgeon responds to the decision of a Brussel court to allow the Tintin racism trial to go ahead. Brought by one Mbuto Mondondo a few years ago against the publishers and owners of Tintin, as he found Tintin au Congo racist and “insulting to all Congolese”. Though not much publicised in the English language comics web, you can imagine in Belgium and France feelings run high about this case,
as Tom explains:

What I hear most often from the side that thinks the case is stupid or even dangerous is that it trivializes the intent of the law for the sake of course-correcting the dissemination of art whose racism is easily understood both as racism and as a deeply unfortunate product of its time. What I hear from the other side is that the criticism of Mondondo comes from an infuriating, deeply troubling perspective that combines the willful excuse-making of the fanboy with the cold arrogance of French-language speaking people generally when it comes to any suggestion of a blind spot in national or regional character. I’m also never surprised when I meet people disgusted with both sides, questioning, say, both the authenticity of the complaint and the strangulated fashion in which the publisher tried to negotiate issues of jurisdiction.

page from Tintin au Congo

What really isn’t in question in this dispute is that Tintin au Congo is racist, because it is so racist. It’s not just that all Black people in the story are depicted in the worst kind of racial stereotype, all thick lipped, coal black and outfitted in ridiculous clothing, but also that the story itself is incredibly patronising towards them, treating them as ignorant, superstitious lazy, emotional children unable to talk properly needing Tintin to solve their problems because they’re too feckless and thick to do it themselves, so they make him their king.

The page I scanned from my anonymous seventies or eighties edition of the 1947 version of Tintin au Congo shows one of the worst incidents in the book, after Tintin managed to derail a train, he has to goad the angry people on board it in helping him put it on the rails again, but they are more interested at first in moaning than in working, until Snowy gives the right example. And that’s in an already cleaned up version of the story; the original version was allegedly worse.

So yeah, that people get offended by this book is understandable. Herge was bone ignorant when he wrote it, writing from his prejudices and that of his audience, being published in ‘Le Petite Vingtième, the youth section of the rightwing catholic Vingtième. His next album, Tintin en Amérique is no better, not to mention Tintin au pays des Soviets. But to go so far as to start a lawsuit to get it banned?

It’s easy to be cynical about the motives of Mondondo, to see this as a media stunt, an irrelevant nuisance suit. But then again he has been pursuing this for years which seems to indicate something more is going. Similarly you can also argue that there are more important targets to go after than an eighty year old comic, but is that true?

Tintin au Congo is an important comic, the true start of arguably the most succesful comics series in Europe, something that has been a part of the childhood of generations of European children sinces the early 1930ties. And in a climate that’s far more welcoming to the kind of casual racist imagery that America has long since rejected (try and googling images of Zwarte Piet for example) having such an influential comic indulge in outdated colonial attitudes is not good. Tintin au Congo‘s racism may, as Tom puts it, be “easily understood both as racism and as a deeply unfortunate product of its time”, but this is true much more for adults than for children coming to it without having the context to place the story in, accepting it at face value. I know I did, all those years ago when I first read it, just like I accepted that America was a place where Tintin could tangle with gangsters in Chicago and indians out west.

On the other hand, any sort of ban, setting apart free speech issues, does mean that an important piece of comics history is lost. Which may not be very important in the world outside comics, but it is a kind of history falsification. The attitudes Herge brought to Tintin au Congo were mainstream, widely accepted facts in Belgium about the Congo, typical of any colonising power seeing its subjects out there as wilful children that have to be lead by a loving but firm hand towards doing what’s best for them. Having Tintin au Congo as a prominent reminder of this may on balance be a good thing.

According to Het Laatste Nieuws Mondondo would also be satisfied if the book was no longer sold in the child’s section of bookstores and would be put into context through e.g. a warning about its racist elements and/or some sort of preface setting the story in its proper context. If this were to be the outcome of the trial, I wouldn’t be unhappy. Banning it complete is losing a piece of important history, not doing anything with the justified complaints of Mondondo, regardless of his personal motivations, seems wrong as well. Having it put in context seems like the best solution.

It’s just not an English murder with a Black victim

Published on March 17, 20111 Comment

Midsomer Murders creator explains why he wants to keep his murders white:

The ITV1 detective show, which has run for 14 series, ‘wouldn’t work’ if there was any racial diversity in it, producer True-May said.

‘We’re the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way,’ he told Radio Times.

He insisted he had never been tackled before about the ‘whites only’ rule in the show, which stars John Nettles as Det Ch Insp Tom Barnaby.

He said: ‘I’ve never been picked up on that but quite honestly I wouldn’t want to change it.

‘We just don’t have ethnic minorities involved. Because it wouldn’t be the English village with them. It just wouldn’t work.

‘Suddenly we might be in Slough. Ironically, Causton (one of the main centres of population in the show) is supposed to be Slough. And if you went into Slough you wouldn’t see a white face there.’

Racist, obnoxious, outrageous, call it what you want, but it’s the creative bankruptcy of his statement that explains why I’ve never watched a full eposde of Midsomer Murders. As if you can’t get that specific brand of sophorific excitement with the occasional Black or Asian face, as if the cozy menace can’t be created without some pasty white 1930ties England that never was.

Unbearable whiteness of British science fiction

Published on March 1, 2011

Pie chart depicting the race of 2011 Clarke Award submissions

Everything is Nice has some nice, juicy posts up analysing the eligible submissions for the 2011 Clarke Award. The Clarke Award is awarded annually for the best science fiction (or fantasy) novel published in the UK the previous year. It doesn’t have a long list but a short list is selected from all submitted novels; those submissions cover roughly 90-95 percent or so of new sf&f novels being published in the UK each year. Some works of course always slip through the crack, especially from non-sf publishers who don’t know or care about the awards. The Clarke Award submissions list than is a good, but not perfect indicator of the state of the UK’s sf publishing industry and as such Martin Lewis has analysed them, which resulted in e.g. the figure above.

In other words: sf publishing is only marginally less white than the group of writers the BBC thinks represents the future of British literary fiction. And worse, it has a much bigger gender imbalance: only 17 percent of the 54 novels submitted this year were written by women. Martin also looks at other identity markers (sexuality, nationality) and it all points to the conclusion that it’s largely straight, white British or American men that were published last year. (The raw data for all this can be found at Torque Control. )

The questions this inevitably puts to mind are a) is this analysis reliable when applied to the general state of the UK’s sf&f publishing industry as opposed to just the Clarke Award submissions b) is this a bad thing (imo: yes) and c) what can we do about it?

Assuming the answer to a) and b) are both yes, the question what we readers can do to change this situation is a difficult one to answer. You can only buy what’s being published after all and if only two books out of fifty-plus are by people of colour, how big an impact will it have when enough people buy their books? It’s easier to send a signal by boycotting a given company’s products, not so easy to express a preference through your buying habits. More projects and media attention to under represented people in science fiction as with the various “women sf writers” reading projects started this year would be a start, but are only suited to provide attention to this problem, not solve it. Suggestions?

Racefail: not just for science fiction anymore

Published on December 8, 2010

Roxane Gay reads this years Best American Short Stories, finds almost every story in the anthology was about rich or nearly rich white people:

What I felt most while reading BASS was a profound sense of absence. Sure there was a story about black people (written by Danielle Evans, coincidentally) and there was a story about a mechanic, to bring in that working class perspective and there was a story set in Africa, but most of the stories were uniformly about rich white people (often rich, white old men) doing rich white people things like going on safari or playing poker and learning a painful lesson or lamenting old age in Naples. Each of these stories was wonderful and I don’t regret reading them, but the demographic narrowness is troubling. It’s not right that anyone who isn’t white, straight, or a man, reading a book like this, which is fairly representative of the work being published by the “major” journals, is going to have a hard time finding experiences that might, in some way, mirror their own. It’s not right that the best writing in the country, each year, is writing about white people by white people with a few splashes of color or globalism (Africa! Japan! the hood!) for good effect. Things have certainly improved over the years but that’s not saying much.

At the same time, she also find her own succes being questioned for the usual reasons:

Anytime you achieve even a little bit of success there’s going to be someone who suggests you earned that success because you’re a person of color (or a woman, or both). Even though you might know you achieved your success because you’re awesome, because you worked hard for years, because you beat down doors until one fell down, you are stuck with the niggling doubt that they’re right. You worry that everyone thinks that way so you can never really enjoy your success, you always push yourself to do better, to do more, to be the best, to be so good they have to stop saying it’s just because you’re a person of color. It is exhausting.

All of which confirms the superiority of science fiction and fantasy fandom, as

Most of 2009, the science fiction/fantasy community was embroiled in a contentious debate about race that was so extensive and ongoing that it even got its own name and wiki: RaceFail, but hey, at least the SF/F community is talking about these issues which cannot be said for other writing communities.

Which is surely the most important point to take away from these two posts. More seriously, it’s strangely heartening to see that the problems sf and fantasy struggle with (the representation of non-white/male/straight voices and viewpoints, the problems with appopriation, systemic racism and underrepresentation of people of colour and so on) are not unique to it. It means that it’s not impossible for science fiction/fantasy to change for the better.

Whites only at Dutch football club Quick 1888

Published on May 12, 20102 Comments

aparheid sign from the old South Africa

From 24 Oranges:

Nijmegen youth football club Quick 1888 […] has adopted a discriminatory policy by “putting children of foreign descent who apply for membership on a waiting list, while accepting native Dutch youth members.” Apparently, parents of non-native children don’t help out with football, don’t have cars to drive the kids to games or have to work on Saturdays.

That was the first I heard of this story; googling gave me the full story from the Dutch papers. Quick 1888 is an amateur club with a rich past, started as a cricket club and branched out into football, having some success before Dutch football went professional, now happily playing in the amateur leagues. Apparantly they now have about eighty percent members of “non-Dutch origin” (allochtoon as the charming Dutch phrase has it), especially in the junior teams. Apparantly having so many allochtonen is a problem for the club as, so the club says, they are less involved, less likely to volunteer, more difficult to communicate with and supposedly there’s also more trouble with them off and on the playing field. Hence the decision to select new members on origin, to get to a 50-50 percent balance of allochtonen and autochtonen. What’s more, this policy was actually undertaken on advice of the Dutch football union!

It is of course breathtakingly racist to enact such a policy, illegal as hell as well, but a more unofficial policy of selection is not uncommon; as the club itself notes, most other clubs in Nijmegen are pretty white already. You would think that all things being
equal you would get roughly the same numbers of white/non-white players at the various clubs, not one club having most of the non-white players and the other clubs few if any… One innocuous explenation could be that Quick 1888 for one reason or another was the first club that a few allochtone players joined and hence become more attractive to others until most of these players were at Quick 1888, few elsewhere. Or it could be something slightly more sinister. Anybody who’s not a child knows how easy it is for a group to discourage outsiders from joining without ever having to articulate explicit policies for doing so.

That Quick 1888 found it both necessary to form such a policy and did not expect much controversy about it is a sign of the changed political climate in the Netherlands. We’ve long been a nation that’s much less tolerant than we like to think we are, but much of our intolerance was hidden, not talked about, only visible to the people it was aimed against. With the rise of Pim Fortuyn and later Geert Wilders this taboo was broken, to the point where it became normal to talk about e.g. “kut Marokkaantjes” (little Moroccan c*nts) in a debate about street crime. Many autochtoon Dutch people have always been likely to believe the reasons the club gave for this policy anyway, feeding into long existing prejudices about foreigners,; the difference is that these now can be openly articulated, rather than remain unspoken in polite society.

This is not to say that I don’t believe Quick 1888 is lying about the problems it has had in the past few years: lack of voluntarism, communication difficulties with parents not speaking Dutch or more criminality; I’m sure these were very real problems. But thinking these problems can be solved if only more white people became members is deeply wrong. These are symptoms of a failing club, one in which the (white) administration/long term volunteers (coaches, technical staff, field maintainers, canteen staff) have become alienated from the larger (non-white) part of its membership. It won’t be the first time that has happened. What is needed is fewer white people in charge and a more creative approach to solving those problems, not blaming allochtonen.