Why the Hell is Rape Culture Not Trending?

Protestors stand at the intersection of Mountain and College Ave. in Old Town Ft. Collins to fight against Rape Culture.
Photograph taken by Megan Fischer

Today –Monday December 8^th – in Ft. Collins, the decision on the Andre Alders case was made, allowing an alleged rapist to walk free. In response to the decision, an immediate protest took place organized by a few people who had been following the trial and updating members via a Facebook group page. Also today, there were no protests on campus, or in Old Town, for #BlackLivesMatter. When the protests were on campus and trending as the thing to do last week for social justice minded folk, the turnout was significant. So where were these protestors today?

To be fair, this protest was organized fairly suddenly, and awareness about the case and events being protested were not very widespread. However, this is not the fault of the protestors or the protest organizers on the Facebook page, rather it is representative of the larger problem of rape culture. Either collectively we do not care about rape, or we are content with living in a society where rape goes largely unpunished, and as long as we don’t have to hear about it or get uncomfortable talking about it, we are content to let it keep happening. If you’re not making the connection, the institutional and societal acceptance of rape aligns almost perfectly with the institutional and systematic acceptance of unwarranted violence against black bodies.

This is not suggesting that one issue should be prioritized over the other, or that we should direct our focus toward the issue of Rape after we are all burnt out on Black Lives, but it is to bring awareness to the fact that right now there is a unique opportunity for coalition based directly upon the intersection of institutional injustice that bonds Rape culture and Black deaths. The issues of unwarranted black deaths and unpunished rape are problems where the institutions designed to bring justice and to protect and serve its citizens are failing.

Now, my last post called for people to take the next steps after protesting, however it seems that the fight against rape culture isn’t even being allowed to take the first steps. Rape culture is brought up as a concept in Women’s and Ethnic Studies classrooms, but not forced into a public space where we all have to come to terms with the fact that it surrounds us. When we do see Rape in the media, we see it on Law and Order: SVU as a highly stylized, dramatized, and surreal occurrence. Or we see coverage of Rape on a global scale, looking at how bad they are in India or Saudi Arabia, instead of how bad we are in our own communities. While the global media coverage is definitely full of merit, exposing the widespread injustice of rape culture permeating societies across the world, and while SVU attempts to tell stories that people would rather not have to think about, especially for entertainment, there is still always an aspect of rape that becomes a spectacle in these stories. The most mainstream stories are about graphic gang rapes in foreign lands, which become tales of consumption for people to say that when a woman has her drink spiked and has her body used without her consent, well, at least that’s not as bad as those evil gang rapists.

Even recently, when the accusations against Bill Cosby, one of the largest rape scandals that’s been discussed for years in feminist circles, but now comes to light due to a man briefly discussing it in a stand-up routine, the story is not about what happened to the women who were raped. The story is automatically about “Well, Bill Cosby was always an icon, such a good guy, I don’t believe he would’ve done this,” which leads only to the next logical point of blaming the victims, saying that they are just seeking media attention, that these accusations can’t be true. The women making the rape allegations are completely delegitimized, and the one who gets the most attention is the one who gives the most graphic verbal depiction of her rape, which becomes spectacle for the media and it’s consumers, re-broadcasting her words in fully graphic detail as some kind of sick and twisted perversion that takes her intended meaning and turns it into safe-for-air pornography.

We not only see this victim blaming and exploitation just in rape culture, but with the black bodies as well. Think back to beyond the two Grand Jury decisions, to earlier this year when Janay Rice was brutally attacked by Ray Rice in an elevator. Without her consent, that video was broadcast and shared, exploiting her image under the guise of bringing awareness. She did not give permission to share that video and share her traumatic experience, however she was made a martyr, and her body, or at least the image of its brutalization, was used without any question as to what she would have wanted. The video of Eric Garner has been shared in similar ways, however he is not alive to give consent, which maybe changes the meaning, and changes the way in which it can be consumed. Still the lasting discussion concerning Janay Rice became what did she do to deserve that, or that it was her and Ray Rice’s business, and with the Michael Brown and Eric Garner, the discussion gets narrowed down to asking what they did to antagonize the cops or questioning the legality of selling loose cigarettes, respectively, as if these acts were prompting their results. Either way, there is a trend here of bodies being exploited without consent, of bodies being blamed for the violence enacted upon them, and of a culture that seems to be collectively okay with all of it.

On a local scale, there have been a string of reported sexual assaults this year in Ft. Collins, and around campus. It took 11 reports before the school even spoke out about the assaults, and even then refused to take a definitive stance. The messages sent by the institution were more victim blaming, telling women what THEY could do to prevent being raped, as opposed to speaking to what steps men, or the entire community together, could take, to eradicate rape culture.

The group “End RAPE Culture Fort Collins” organized the protest today with little support, but they do not seem to be slowing down, and are planning more protests with more notice later this week. As opposed to being reduced to hashtag activism and gathering around with no goal besides collectively being upset, they are forcing protestors into a space to disrupt institutions allowing injustice to happen. Today they protested at the location in Old Town where the rape from the Alders case occurred. They were at the heart of the scene as a reminder that this happens in right in front of the Ft. Collins community’s face on a regular basis and goes unpunished. There seems to be organized leadership within the group with a goal in mind to take to task the businesses, the community, and the justice system who are participating in allowing rape culture to thrive. Hopefully the cause catches on, and one form of injustice is not favored during protests at the expense of another. Hopefully these two causes can combine forces, and substantial change can be made on a small scale within Ft. Collins that can pave the way for larger future change. If the emotion and momentum behind recent protests can remain, and these intersections can be made between all related issues of systemic injustice, the power and opportunity to take the next steps toward change will be in place. The all that will be left to do is put one foot in front of the other, and march in solidarity toward overturning a culture of racism and rape.

I Don’t Think We’re Talking About the Same Thing Anymore: #Blacklivesmatter and the Misunderstanding of What Protest Looks Like

If you’ve been online at all for the past two weeks, or watched the news, or talked to someone, or are part of civilization right now and not just wandering off into the Wild like Reese Witherspoon, you are aware of the events that are taking place surrounding the Grand Jury decisions in the cases of Eric Garner, a black man choked to death on camera by New York Police officers, and Michael Brown, a young black man gunned down by an Officer in Ferguson. Neither of these Officers were indicted, and the results have sparked protests and visible unrest throughout the nation, including social media hashtags like #blacklivesmatter, #handsupdontshoot, and #icantbreathe.

Ferguson was the catalyst for the social media discussion and viral protest, and then the Eric Garner decision in New York only further escalated the anger that many Americans felt at seeing a gross and corrupt system that is allowing Police Officers to go free of punishment for taking black lives. Now, if you type those hashtags or names or keywords into any search engine, you are sure to see pictures of people holding signs, doing “die-ins” (laying on the ground in large groups in public spaces) or school walkouts, all over the country. However, I believe in the heart of this social unrest and protest, there is a serious disconnect happening in which #blacklivesmatter is meaning two separate things for two different populations, and it is going ignored under the illusion of true solidarity.

The “#blacklivesmatter” and “#icantbreathe” hashtags can be understood as cultural texts within the social media landscape, meaning that they are works open to interpretation and different use based off of a constructed meaning by each individual who is using them. They were started with a very deliberate intention and meaning, but once they hit the social media sphere and become active texts, that original meaning no longer matters as much as the new meaning that will be ascribed, or coded, onto them by twitter, Facebook, and Instagram users. The disconnect that I think exists is that generally, “Black Twitter” and people of color are seeing an opportunity to express sentiments that they have felt for years, and are witnessing a peak in an ongoing battle. On the other hand, there are well intentioned white people who are having a reactionary response to these recent events, and instead of understanding that there is a flawed and racist institutional hierarchy, and that ALL #blacklivesmatter within the oppressive hierarchy, they are reacting only to THESE specific deaths, and THESE specific injustices. When white people are saying #icantbreathe they’re saying how awful Eric Garner’s death was and seeking justice for the cop that killed him. When Black people use it they’re saying #icantbreathe day to day in a system I’ve been suffocating under my whole life.

Most white people right now are reacting like Rowdy Roddy Piper in THEY LIVE when he puts on the glasses for the first time and sees how fucked up everything is. People of color are like the underground resistance in the movie who have known that this shit has been going on since long before the glasses to make it visible even existed. While the coalition and welcoming of any people willing to fight for a cause is welcome, I believe that these separate and mostly unspoken perspectives are allowing an opportunity for social change at an institutional level to become watered down to gathering masses of angry individuals being angry together, unaware of how to take the next step toward change beyond hashtags and awareness. I don’t want to be misunderstood as saying that awareness is a bad thing, but it is the first step toward making real change, and when awareness is just being raised among other folks who are already aware, there is less of a movement toward change and more of a stagnant mass unrest that eventually disperses.

When using the label of “Protest,” as opposed to a large gathering of people making noise, I think there needs to be context of what successful protests have looked like in the past, and to understand that on a fundamental level, most, but not all, of what is happening right now surrounding the Grand Jury decisions, is not a successful Protest. Malcom Gladwell outlined in a 2010 New Yorker article how Civil Rights protests (which are pretty much the established aesthetic of what a protest looks like for millennials) were organized systems, with dedication, strong-ties and relationships between human beings, and disciplined authority structures designed to have leadership to make hard decisions and direct the networks of protestors. This system of organized protest, much more than a Facebook invite to meet up in the campus student center with a sign, were effective at seeking ways in which people within the power structure of flawed institutions could be directly taken to task and held accountable to use their power for change. There was dedication and there were organized and directed political objectives, which goes beyond the images our generation has been fed of the million man march and even three days of peace and music being all that was necessary to make change.

Twitter does not hold anyone accountable. Facebook does not take authority figures to task. These protests are becoming, quite literally when you look and the cardboard signs and t-shirts, physical manifestations of hashtag “revolution.” On my campus, I have seen people do a “die-in” at the student center, and know that 4.5 minutes of silence were organized on the plaza through a Facebook organized meet-up, and saw statuses glorifying the “protests” for being able to just be there with everybody and hug strangers and share the moment. Well after the self-congratulatory stranger hugging is over and the groups disperse, these weak dies are broken and not one authority figure or hierarchical system has been challenged or taken to task. The protests were not even anywhere close to the Administration building or campus police force, directly addressing anyone who, even on the smallest scale, could make any kind of real systemic change. It’s nice to spread tweets and pictures letting people know you’re mad, but being mad doesn’t disrupt anything, it just creates noise.

If the system of injustice is a man (more like “The Man”) walking down the street and you see him, standing behind him and shouting will just allow him to walk away. Following behind him and shouting will keep creating noise, but he can just as easily keep walking. But by standing directly in front of The Man and shouting in his face, refusing to get out of his way until he makes a substantial change to the situation that meets your demands, you have just created change. You forced someone in a position of power to make a change. It could create conflict. He could punch you square in the fucking face. But I think maybe that’s what protest is. True protest is the willingness to get in the way and challenge authority, to risk getting punched square in the face, and to get back up as many times as you can and repeat, until the system of oppression that’s punching you has a broken fucking hand.

You can tweet or hold a sign, reminding everyone, and maybe even yourself having a crisis of privilege realization, that #blacklivesmatter, but what can you actually organize and accomplish that forces a historically racist institutional hierarchy to change on a fundamental level so that people know for a fact when they leave their home that all #blacklivesmatter?

The last thing I want to say is that my grandparents and most of their generation were aware of the way Black people were treated daily. They participated in it. Not everybody, but definitely a lot of old white people were fully aware, and didn’t give a shit, and still don’t. If there were hashtags notifying them that the Little Rock 9 were being integrated, they still would’ve opposed it. But the protests that constituted Civil Rights Movement, because of the organization and leaders within all oppressed communities including Chicano, Asian, Black, Women, and all of their intersections, directly attacked institutions and racial hierarchies. They took over buildings that represented oppression, they disrupted the system by getting in front of its leaders and forcing change, and they made or changed policy that was the direct source of institutional oppression. While not everything worked, or was perfect, or successful, the change that was made has a lasting effect and is engrained now as slight improvements within oppressive institutions that still require overhaul. The past protests forced new systems and laws into place that racist and ignorant people just had to learn how to tolerate, and still have to until they die off and leave the world in younger generations’ hands.

There still is a long way to go, but if the best we can do is tweet and post our frustration to be read only by others who feel it, and organize cathartic gatherings that refuse to directly challenge oppressors in exchange for the “feeling” of doing something powerful, then we’re failing to take the necessary steps to evolve the successful protests of the past, and all of the injustice that everyone is so angry about remains in place. If all we can do is tweet and post at the system, then all it’s going to do is block us and hide us from its newsfeed.

Resistance is Futile: Mainstream Assimilation and Asking Who Can Participate in the Booty?

The photograph above, used for shitty attempts at click baiting  an article on Billboard.com about the singing competition show THE VOICE, displays the three female judges who have been a part of the show at different times. Two of the artists, Shakira and Christina Aguilera, are Latina, yet the show has managed to eerily morph all three of these stars images into what is virtually the same bleach blonde, fair skinned, Northwest European ideal of beauty. Whether it is part of the shows attempts at keeping a brand that requires their female judge to look a certain way, or if it is an image template that has proven to be a successful marketing tool and has been adopted for that reason by each pop star, they have all participated in assimilation toward the “normal” ideals of beauty and perfection. Either way, this assimilated image is not an isolated incident that is reduced to the images produced by THE VOICE, but it is instead a symptom of a larger problem that has faced “crossover” pop stars for as long as they have existed.

A “crossover” star is a label attached to a star who, because of their race specifically, is considered an outsider to mainstream culture. Mary Beltrán discusses this concept of the “crossover” star and its roots in what was dubbed the “Latin Wave” of the 1990s in her book “Latina/o Stars in the U.S. Eyes.” As Latina stars were making their way into American pop culture, they were not seen as being part of mainstream culture the way a white tar was, but rather a niche market that was permeating mainstream culture. The idea of the “Latin Wave” became that these “crossover” stars were accepted as viable moneymakers in mainstream culture, but were still only really marketable to Latina/o people. The alternative to being seen as just for a niche market was assimilating into the mainstream ideals of what sold and what was marketable to “mainstream, or white, audiences. Through assimilation, these crossover stars could break away from being seen as specifically “Latin” stars, and be seen as regular ol’ run of the mill Hollywood stars. However, assimilation meant the star giving up part of the ethnic background that helped define them in order to be accepted as ethnically vague, or some kind of “exotic” white.

The case study provided by Beltrán is a focus on Jennifer Lopez, possibly the biggest and most successful name to come out of the “Latin Wave.” She describes how J. Lo was first embraced as a Latin star, which not only meant focus on her Latina ethnicity in music and Hollywood roles, but also meant that sexual traits like the “booty,” usually emphasized and eroticized to create the “Spicy Latina” or “Spitfire” stereotype, where put directly under the spotlight and used to market Lopez in the mainstream. There was a constant battle between Lopez and the apparent need for assimilation, and a visible public struggle where her re-branding and marketing attempts to hide her Latina ethnic traits and qualities could be measured against her early interviews where she proudly embraced and promoted her Latina-ness. Lopez was compelled to speak about her ethnicity early on, usually taking full advantage of the emphasis on her derrière, but as she became more successful she began to emphasize her Bronx roots, as opposed to Latin roots, and her Hollywood roles became less Latina specific and more ethnically unidentifiable.

If this case study was to be continued, you can see today that the battle between assimilation and holding onto ethnic roots still plagues J. Lo. As evident by her two most recent, and I think highly contradictory music videos, she shows that she still struggles with the need to market herself as a successful commodity, and the need to promote pride in her ethnic roots while also struggling with the need to promote positive body images for women, and use her status to discuss issues of sexual liberation and agency while occupying an ethnic female body.

Lopez’s first video, “I Luh Ya Papi,” uses the title’s language, as well as the inclusion of two backup dancers who have emphasized Latin vernacular in discussion with a white male video director, to overtly display a Latin ethnic background right from the start. The discussion J.Lo and her backup dancers have with the director is attempting to challenge the typical commodification of the Latina body, speaking against objectifying women in videos, and attempting to reverse the roles so that men are objectified and that women are portrayed as the successful “players” with swarms of sexualized men surrounding them. Lopez openly acknowledges here that she recognizes problems with the portrayal of the female body, and is attempting to make a shift away from that. However, in her next video, she seems to succumb to the very objectification she finds so frustrating, and possibly finds it necessary in order to sell the commodity known as J.Lo.

In the video simply titled “Booty,” Lopez brings direct emphasis to, you guessed it, her Booty, as well as the Booty of Iggy Azalea, who is featured in the video with her. There is not any attempt though, to associate the booty with any kind of ethnic origins. Whereas in the 90s J Lo may have used her butt as a point of ethnic pride, now it is reduced to a simple object of lust, up for grabs by any ethnic or racial background. This is especially prevalent given that Lopez created the video with Azalea, who is criticized for putting on the performance of an Ethnic identity in her public appearance. Along with people like Miley Cyrus and Meghan Trainor, Azalea is part of a current Booty-centric wave that seems to consist of white female artists taking pride in that “boom that all the boys chase,” which seen as exclusive to females of color.

There is a long history of white beauty ideals that has placed female bodies of color as exotic and Othered due to focus by white mainstream culture on enlarged breasts, and most importantly butts, which were displayed as gross exotic fascinations for a dominant white culture who’s ideals of beauty were seen as the exact opposite of an ethnic female body. Since first contact with African women, whites have used black female bodies as the undeniable Other, or the polar opposite, of the fair skinned white females with smaller sexual features. White culture used women of color, such as the Hottentot Venus, to create a racist binary of what beautiful looks like, with white bodies being the ideal. The ideas of assimilation and beauty stem from the black and white body binary, where in order to be successful in the mainstream, or at the very least have an opportunity to try, women of color become as close as they can physically to the white ideal which has been force fed down our throats as what beauty looks like, attempting to get rid of the enlarged features of their bodies, that are used to identify black female bodies as an Other.

However, there is a collision happening right now that becomes emphasized by the Jennifer Lopez/Iggy Azalea video. Where females of color, even J. Lo, have seen themselves forced into a position of assimilation, giving up their ethnic features and traits in order to be more “white” and more successful, it seems now the white stars are beginning to appropriate the features that have for so long been seen as ugly, and Other than what it means to be beautiful and successful, in order to in fact become more successful. Trainor’s video is even seen as inspirational for destroying the traditional notions of a beautiful body. However, she’s not singing or talking about all plus size women, she’s singing about women who are plus size in the right places, meaning white women who are now taking pride in large boobs and booty, that have forever been shunned on black females.

I believe this trend is sparking a need to renegotiate who has the right to use female bodies of color in their music videos. Something like Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” video, with whatever problems it may have, is possibly attempting to own the black female body, and the booty, which has seemingly been reduced to a prop to be exploited in the background of Miley Cyrus and Meghan Trainor. Minaj is taking a more aggressive approach of ownership and agency, while Lopez is perhaps opening the doors saying that all females can participate in the Booty. Coming from a background where Lopez had to sacrifice the Ethnic pride that came with her booty, perhaps accepting white artists who wish to use booty to their advantage is a way for Lopez to be able to regain ownership and discussion of her own. The question that arises is that if every female gets to claim ownership of the booty, regardless of ethnic identity, does the booty mean anything anymore, or has it been reduced and commodified into just another mainstream sexual object.

Borg Cube approaching the Enterprse. If you don’t get the reference… Google.

It seems the Booty trend is coming at pop culture like a Borg collective hell bent on assimilating all Booty’s in its path. I see someone like Jennifer Lopez, with a long history of Booty politics, who may see assimilation of the booty into a larger collective where everyone is able to participate as finally being allowed to use her booty as a successful tool, not just as a Latina, but as an artist just like everyone else. For Lopez, there is no longer a need to hide the booty, however assimilation of the booty into mainstream means that any Ethnic background it is tied to is now lost.

On the other hand, Nicki Minaj sees how the booty, with a long and rich history tied specifically to black female bodies, is being manipulated and used for the purpose of mainstream commodification. She is facing the same booty collective that faced J. Lo, telling Minaj that her booty will be assimilated and adapted, or shared by all females to be used in the mainstream, for whatever purpose, with no respect to the racialized history that applies to it. Minaj is using “Anaconda” to aggressively say back to those attempting to assimilate the booty for their own needs that they have no right, and that the ethnic female body is not a commodity or a product to be sold by the white mainstream that has denied it as an Other for so long. Minaj is resisting the assimilation of the black booty into mainstream as a de-contextualized product.

In other words…

I Luh Ya Worf.

Black-Ish: Do Black Creators have a Responsibility to Challenge Hegemonic Media?

“Yet our best trained, best educated, best equipped, best prepared troops refuse to fight! Matter of fact, it’s safe to say that they would rather switch than fight!”

– Civil Rights Activist Thomas “TNT” Todd, as sampled by Public Enemy in Fight the Power

American pop culture and media has long been, and continues to be, saturated with grossly narrow representations of people of color. Mainstream media is perpetually controlled by the dominant culture within the United States, which has always been straight, white, and male. It is up to this group of people to produce content, which usually reinforces their values and creates images for consumption by mass audiences that shape a hegemony based on this one groups experiences and ideals. Because dominant groups tend to produce this content that so closely reflects themselves, when it comes to producing content representing people outside of the hegemony, there is an overwhelming failure to represent non-dominant-group people as anything other than stereotypes or underdeveloped characters whose purpose is to somehow reinforce the supremacy of the dominant hegemony. However, dominant hegemony will always produce the need for counter hegemonic culture, that attempts to undermine or challenge the values and the problematic image produced in the mainstream. These counter hegemonic images are usually on the fringes of the mainstream, being consumed by limited audiences, and discussing specific issues and problems that are seen largely in the mainstream as only relevant to those specific groups of people as opposed to issues facing us all. Rarely are counter hegemonic productions and creators allowed access into the mainstream, voicing opinions of marginalized groups to large audiences. The most current case of counter-hegemonic media being given mainstream distribution is the ABC show “Black-Ish”, which will soon be followed by “Fresh Off The Boat”, also on ABC, focusing on Asian Americans. The issue I want to raise here by analyzing “Black-Ish” is that what is happening with these shows is the illusion of truly giving voices to marginalized groups.  Instead of allowing for truly subversive content, the heads of production over at Disney/ABC are tapping into a need for counter-hegemonic media, which includes voicing some of the common struggles and problems faced by people of color as tools for comedic effect, while maintaining dominant values in the shows underlying themes and messages, thus continuing to silence the voices of the marginalized groups as serious concerns.

Black-Ish follows a trend started by the Cosby show of representing African Americans, and more specifically African American families, as intelligent, successful, and loving, as opposed to poor, or violent, or buffoons, in order to counter these images that saturated the media. When the Cosby show aired, the black families seen on TV were either in the Ghetto and needed white aid to get out, or had made it out of poverty but the fact they now co-mingled with rich or middle class white people was a punchline. Many images of African Americans still portrayed them as comedic buffoons on TV, re-presenting old images of minstrels or “Coons.” Cosby understood how harmful these images were and saw a necessity to provide images that suggested the opposite about African Americans to mainstream white audiences. The Cosby show was born out of the need for counter images, and was successful in that it created a legacy of shows that followed which shifted representations of blacks more toward Cosby-ish types instead of overtly racist stereotypes, at least until the mid to late 90’s where buffoonish characters started to reappear. The Cosby show also had the negative effect however, of creating the trend of what Sut Jhally calls “enlightened racism.” The images that the Cosby show and its successors produced started to turn into those of the “exceptional” blacks, who were nice and familiar, and most importantly non-threatening to whites. The images also started to form sentiments, to be internalized by both whites and some African Americans as well, that blacks who didn’t make it only had themselves to blame, despite the race and class issues that existed during the times. Heavy focus on the Huxtables’ (Cosby’s family) as the ideal black family framed any Black family who didn’t fit into their high class way of life as failures. During a time where the Reagan conservative political atmosphere and philosophy of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” was hitting its peak, the Cosby show justified individualistic sentiments, ignoring societal inequalities. What was created by the Cosby show was a Catch-22 where positive representations of African Americans were needed, however they came at the cost of blaming non Cosby-ish African Americans for their own struggle, and ignoring the need for an overhaul of widespread institutional racism.

Fast forward a few decades and the need for positive images to fight the negative ones has become the need for diverse images to provide a full spectrum of representations of marginalized groups who are still reduced to certain stereotypes in the media. ABC has decided to return to the form that the Cosby show initiated using the backdrop of an upper/middle class familiar Black family to pose the question “What does it mean to be Black in America today?” However, they do not present a wide variety of Black characters from diverse backgrounds and cultures, the way that someone like Spike Lee did in Do the Right Thing when posing the same question in the 1989, and they do not address hard contemporary issues of racism, while instead framing the concerns of a father trying to preserve African American history and culture within his family as a comedic lost cause. The pilot of Black-Ish, while attempting to ask the question of what it means to be black, instead asks “What are you willing to give up to be American?”

So much of the pilot episode focused on being American and living the American dream, while simultaneously having almost every family member be an antagonist in the Dad’s mission to preserve black culture in his family. Outside of the domestic setting, the Dad had to put up with racism in the workplace (which was of comedic value for the show, of course), culminating in his conditional promotion that only got him advanced because he was black, which he was angry about but eventually accepted. The entire resolution of every issue in the episode was that even though he couldn’t change or preserve anything he set out to, it was just better to accept the racism and loss of black culture in the next generation, because really, we’re just all Americans. The end goal of “Black-Ish” was to latch on to the need for positive and diverse representations, and use the Cosby upper-class familiar black family platform to deliver a message of assimilation as a key to success. Interesting fun fact, this is similar to the way that Cosby, along with Sydney Poitier, latched on at the tail end of the trend of Blaxploitation films with “A Piece of the Action” in order to sneak in the message of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and to just stop blaming everyone else for your troubles.

What makes Black-Ish most significant though, is that opposed to a show being produced by members of dominant white culture, it seems to be in the hands of Black writers and producers, two of which are stars on the show. Anthony Anderson and Laurence Fishburne both hold leading roles and are credited as producers. This means that they have the rare opportunity to give black voices that may not share dominant culture’s ideals a chance to be heard in the mainstream. The barrier that still exists here though is that the show must be marketable to mainstream audiences, which may create compromises between dealing with hard issues of inequality and racism, and keeping things light as to not offend viewers who just want to sit down and have a 30 minute laugh. So the questions that arise for me is how much are the creators able to fight the power within Black-ish, and should they even be expected to when white creators aren’t held to the same standards? White people aren’t expected to make “white” shows, so why should black creators be expected to make “black” shows?

I don’t believe I have an answer.

If a content producer of color has been granted the privilege of a voice on mainstream television, they should not have to be forced to use their voice to fight at risk of being labeled as someone who has betrayed their people, or made a switch. The primary goal of anyone in mainstream media is to make money for whatever company is allowing their production to exist. This isn’t going to change, and it’s unrealistic to believe that every content producer should be producing something that deals with hard issues or attempts to shift the dominant ideology. However, if a show like Black-Ish is going to directly address issues of race in the dialogue and plot, which is something that Cosby Show tended to gloss over or avoid completely, they are taking a responsibility upon themselves to use their story to make substantial shifts, as opposed to saying things that people want to hear, only to reach an endpoint that repeats the same old assimilation messages that negate any of the struggles that had been voiced before. So possibly the answer to my question, is that creators should be held to a higher standard when they make it a point to explicitly address race in their mainstream program, otherwise I believe that they are just co-opting social issues and current progressive mindsets in order to hide their compromising messages of assimilation. If a show is going to fight the power of dominant culture, they need to fight the power. Not play around with the idea of fighting the power, only to decide that life is easier when you just give in to the power. “Black-Ish” doesn’t end up fighting any mainstream ideals despite bringing up issues of race and inequality, and decides that in the end, despite all of these past struggles that have shaped current social/political/economic statuses and are maybe probably definitely worth talking about, we’re all just American’s trying to live the American dream, and that’s what matters.

Crime Drama and Priming: Teaching Viewers How to Recognize the Bad Guy

This week, FOX premiered their new Batman derived TV series GOTHAM, focusing on Detective Jim Gordon’s arrival to the corrupt (and completely non-functional, given Batman’s entire 75 year history of Gotham Police failing to do their jobs) Gotham Police Department. This show joins the countless other series on TV focusing on the drama of being a police officer, and providing viewers with stories about what crime looks like, and more importantly giving faces to the heroes and the criminals.

As described in a 2008 study published by Travis L. Dixon, which focused on television news stories specifically, despite declining numbers, crime continues to be a concern for Americans due to overrepresentation of crime stories in news reporting. Furthermore, overrepresentation of race, as in disproportionate reporting on African Americans as perpetrators with white people in positive roles or as victims, causes increased anti-African American sentiments when it comes to crime and punishment of African American perpetrators. To simplify, the skewed representation of people of color as perpetrators and whites as victims or heroes starts to prime viewers to understand people of color as a threat while they begin to sympathize more with whites, and will take the side of the whites in favor of harsher punishments for people of color.

The news latches on to these stories in order to entertain their viewers, and they begin to form master narratives out of crime that feature whites as victims to perpetrators of color. This kind of crime story needs to be created in order to compete with the alternative of cop and crime drama shows, many which feature the same types of priming but in a more stylized manner. Many of these shows and news reports activate a schema that exists inside of viewer’s minds, or preconceived ideas about a “type” of person being shown, so that the viewer can easily and readily identify who is the criminal. The viewer needs to differentiate between good and bad so that they can more easily be entertained.

The reason GOTHAM intrigues me is that in a way it breaks the formula of association with bad as black and good as white. There still is a focus on two male cop protagonists as the good guys, but the criminals they face, as they have always predominately been in the Batman mythos, are other white folks. There are white victims (like um, Batman’s parents, who I have now seen murdered so many times in so many mediums that I’m just kind of desensitized to Batman’s entire purpose of existence), but the people committing the crimes are also white, and break the typical form set by the media of a hyper aggressive black male going after the poor defenseless whites.

Now there are a few things that I am still trying to put together, one of which is the role of Jada Pinkett-Smith as Fish Mooney, who was created specifically for this show outside of the comic source material. Mooney is an African-American character who does not fit into any major “types” for African American women. However, what is problematic is that she fits perfectly into the “Dragon Woman” stereotype usually assigned to Asian American women characters. The Dragon Woman is mysterious, she’s deceptive, she’s in a position of power which she executes in a brutal fashion, and she’s shady as hell. Mooney fits all of these descriptions, and for Christ’s sake, her lair is in Gotham’s China Town. So although GOTHAM breaks form so far by representing crimes in a non-typical manner, it is partially due to the fact that there are just not many black actors cast, and the biggest one that is cast is being characterized in a fashion usually reserved for Asian women. This could be positive in the way that applying a stereotype to someone it doesn’t apply to normally diversifies representation by showing no one group or people fit into that type, which in this instance is the Dragon Woman Type. It could also still be just as negative by portraying a woman of color in power as villainous and shifty, as well as continuing to reinforce the elements of the stereotype for further production.

The other thing that caught my attention was the inclusion of Renee Montoya, a fan favorite from the comics, the only major person of color besides Mooney, and an openly gay character. As a reader of the comics I knew about her sexual orientation and wondered if they would directly reference her as Lesbian, in the first episode nonetheless. SPOILER ALERT! I was disappointed that when her sexuality was written into the show, it was written in a way that her dialogue with the male protagonist’s fiancé about their past gay relationship turned her sexual orientation into something mysterious and shameful. The show managed to use Montoya’s sexual orientation as just another device to assist in creating the mysterious crime Noir atmosphere that they are attempting to create. Something like that begins to prime viewers to view homosexuality, or bisexuality in the case of future Mrs. Gordon, as illegitimate. It becomes just another mysterious element of a character’s past as opposed to a sincere identity that can function within the hetero-normative hegemony of the rest of the show.

This is all only after the first episode, so it will be interesting to see what direction the show takes what was introduced here, but they have an opportunity to showcase a different kind of crime paradigm. Instead of showing the person of color vs. white victims that viewers are all too familiar with, there is an opportunity to diversify the face of crime in Gotham. This also means though that they cannot keep showing white perpetrators as poor whites, or as just insane and misunderstood. With origin stories for Batman’s Rogues Galery underway, the path of white folk who aren’t really criminals, just misunderstood, or financially poor white people who are just as much of a problem as other disenfranchised groups, could easily be followed. Gotham can break the mold that primes audiences to see certain types as perps and certain types as victims, but they have a long road ahead of them still.

You can watch GOTHAM for yourself here.