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shadowkatRacism, is a topic that appears to continue to permeate my life, in an at times insidious manner and others more overt one. I think it does everyone's lives to some extent. Some clearly more than others. Much as homophobia, chauvinism, sexism and misogyny often do. It's a particularly annoying one, because I'm no longer sure it can be resolved or rather not in a manner that does not involve a great deal of sacrifice and change from people who do not want to change or sacrifice anything, including or especially how they think and what they value.
That said, I must say, we've made a lot of progress. Anyone born after 1980, probably can't see it - because they weren't alive during the period in which it was a huge deal to have minorities in lead roles on tv and film. Or to see someone who was a woman or a black man in a position of authority. It wasn't until I hit my teens that I began to see it more. The idea of a woman and a black man running for president, let alone being a viable canididate for president, was not something I thought I'd live to see in my lifetime.
Living in NYC is a bit like living in a community on the fringe of class/race war, yet somehow manages to back away from it at the last minute. The anger is certainly there - I feel it constantly, on my way to work each morning, on my way home, walking around the park at work, at work, on the streets around my apartment. After a while you learn to shut it out, you have to, in order to function.
Some people appear to be oblivious to it. I'm not sure if this is due to where they work and live or if they are just able to shut it out better.
The Sean Bell case continues to be reported in the newspapers, but interest is dwindling, as it starts to increasingly find itself relegated to a small column towards the back pages of the paper. Not the headlines, as it had at the start. I remain unconvinced that this is truly a civil rights case - I took civil rights litigation in law school and can vaguely remember what needs to be proven. The facts of the case support police misconduct and the potential use of excessive force. But not as a racist crime or a civil rights infraction. The situation was a recipe for disaster. A van, 4 am in the morning, outside a seedy strip joint, in a bad area of town, near the railroad tracks, drunkenly drives repeatedly into three undercover and somewhat inebriated cops, who turn and fire on it - fifty times. Not quite the same as Rodney King. The problem with the police force in NYC is that it so underpaid. They make about $25,000 a year as a starting salary, ending salary or top of the range? $55,000 or a little above. And in NYC, where rent is about $1300 - $3000 a month on a one bedroom apartment, and houses cost a million. They are losing their quality people to outlying counties which pay a lot more. What incentive is there? Outside of early retirement at 55 and a pension, which granted are nothing to sneeze at. I think it is criminal that a television writer and an actor on a daytime soap opera in NYC makes more on a weekly basis than a new york cop does.
If I had to choose between the two? I'd choose to have the cop. I can live without the daytime soap opera. Same thing is true about firemen. We want to be safe, but we aren't willing to pay the same amount to be safe that we are willing to pay to be entertained.
I was reading snatchs of Obama's book Audacity of Hope the other day, this chapter is on racism. In it he discusses how much things have changed since his youth particularly in Chicago. Something my father has attested to - we lived in Chicago during the race riots of the 1960s, my father vividly remembers streets being literally on fire and people out in them protesting. In the late 1950s, he toured the Jim Crow South with his black roommate. He tells me that I don't know how it bad it was, I can't imagine it. Or where people like Rev. Jeremiah Wright have been.
I don't think Hillary Clinton knows either, or she wouldn't be making some of the dumb statements she's made lately. One of my uncles, dead now, good man, but racist, hailed from West Virgina. He liked to call Basketball - Ni**er Ball. It always made my father and the rest of my immediate family wince. And when we showed photos of my niece or sis-in-law to him or told him she was half Cherokee, he said, well, they go a little "dark" - might want to watch that. It was ignorance, I knew this. He'd never really had his racial stereotypes blasted. And I found this sad. A good portion of the population of the US has never traveled or if they have, they've done it in tour buses or cruise ships, without actually experiencing the people and culture in which they are going to - travel by postage stamp or picture book I like to call it. To me - it's hell. To them - it's a vacation. My grandparents have never been outside the US. And many more, that I've met here and in Kansas City, never really traveled the US - they haven't been further than their own state or the one right next door. Some people in Kansas City have never met a black person, known them. It's bewildering, but true.
Obama discusses this in his book. How people fall into habits. And how he has to be there for those who fight them. His friend Robert who entered a social club in Cairo, Illinois and walked out when he realized no black were allowed. Obama states he appreciated the courage it took Robert to do the right thing. He points out how insidious racism is - that we'll have our minds changed by ads about how affirmative action steals jobs (which it doesn't actually do, affirmative action is a lot more complicated than most people know), and the black man who was shot down by white cops - making everyone angry, but not constructively so. Wrath is called a deadly sin for a reason - it can motivate us to do very destructive things.
I find his take on the subject inspiring. He is not a person who likes the adversarial system. He seems to prefer one of mediation, or discussion. To persuade without violence. An alien concept to a lot of people in this day and age. An age in which we appear to get all uppity if someone says fuck you or goddamn on tv, but have no problems watching someone brutally cut out someone's heart or shoot someone to death. We get all flustered with a bit of nudity or a sex scene, but shrug when we see people killed on our favorite tv shows. The fact that Prince Caspian - a movie with children killing things is considered fine, but Juno which did not contain any violence, just sex and foul language is not considered fine for children. We see violence as a solution, when in truth it only excerberates the problem. One of the best and most inspiring films I saw on this topic, a true anti-violence piece, was the documentary film "No More Tears Sister" at the NY Film Festival for Human Rights - about a woman who realized, perhaps too late for her own life, that violence was tearing her country and people apart and that there was another way to combat the issues she cared so deeply about. Her attempt to find that way, and her vocal condemnation of the prior one, the violent one, ended in her death and her family's exile. Opposing violence in our society is not easy, it never has been. Regardless of what color skin or ethnic or national background you happen to come from. Just look at the US Presidential election. We still believe that violence is the only way to resolve our conflicts, to protect ourselves, all evidence to the contrary. Look at the Middle East - has over two million years of fighting changed anything for the better? I wonder sometimes what would happen if everyone in that land chose for just one year to resolve their problems without picking up or using any weapons. Could they do it? What would happen if someone waved a magic wand and made it impossible for them to fight one another without searing pain?
I think the only way you can change things is through education, information, and persistence. Make people question things they don't want to. Change thinking patterns. This takes time. It doesn't happen overnight. But it is happening, or Barack Obama would not be on the road to President of the US, with a woman, Hillary Clinton, close on his heels. If things weren't changing - that wouldn't happen. It would not have happened in 1999 or 2000. It is happening now.
Then there's the whining I see regarding perceived and in some instances obvious racism in television shows. People, I want to scream, will you stop whining about the symptom and look at the cause. The debate should be about the overall and at times overt racist casting choices Hollywood makes as an organization and has for years. Institutionalized racism as opposed to perceived racisim in a story's metaphors, which can be interpreted in more than one way depending on the subtext you are bringing to the proceedings.
Why for example is the entire cast of "How I Met Your Mother" - white and upper middle class? Why are the romantic leads of Grey's Anatomy - White? Why wasn't Christina and Burke the lead characters? Why is the entire cast of the West Wing, with the possible exception of the aid, who was a minor character and Jimmy Smits, white? (Don't say it's realistic - look at Colin Powell and Condeeza Rice - both have lead roles in Bush's White House). Why is the main cast of Supernatural - white? Why are the main leads of Smallville - white? Why is the casts of Desperate Housewives, Brothers and Sisters, and the Office, mainly white? Why are all the people in Sex in the City - white? Why are the only shows that feature African Americans or Hispanics as leads either comedies, procedurals, shows like Heroes/BSG or Lost, or violent action dramas (which by the way is a huge improvement over the television landscape in the 1980s and 1990s and a lot more shows with minorities than there used to be)?
Why did the casting director, producers, and network execs tell Whedon that he had to cast Charisma Carpenter as Cordelia and not Bianca Lawson? Why wasn't Whedon permitted to cast Bianca as Buffy? She was up for the role, allegedly, while Gellar was allegedly up for Cordelia at one point. They state they brought her back on the strength of her auditions for Cordy and Buffy. Why wasn't a black man chosen to play Giles?
Why was the Cosby Show such a huge breakthrough and why did it get so much criticism at the time? Many claimed it was too white?
Why was Hill Street Blues and St. Elswhere so groundbreaking in its casting choices?
What was wrong with the casting of the X-Files?
Do you know how groundbreaking DS9 and Star Trek were with their minority casting choices?
Why are the vast majority of characters on all the daytime soap operas, Gossip Girl, 90120, Melrose Place, and One Tree Hill - white, with only a handful of exceptions? The only daytime soap opera that has a lead romantic couple that is black is All My Children - and that couple is the same one they had in the 70's. (Y& R used to, not so much anymore.) They brought them back on AMC, even though the male character, a cop, had been shot to death on screen, because they couldn't find anyone else. Young and The Restless may be the only soap that has incorporated on an on-going basis, black actors in its cast and in lead roles.
I posed these questions to a friend once, and her response was: Well, Whites are the majority demographic. It's who the advertisers and marketing people want to sell to. It's the group that will buy the most.
This is true. It was not until recently such as in the last ten years, that the film and tv industry began to catch on to the fact that there were two huge demographics they were ignoring, who bought products and film tickets and watched tv. The African-American/Black market, and the Hispanic market. UPN - was amongst the first to pick up on it, creating tv shows and comedies that capitalized on this untapped market. When they acquired Buffy, they worried that the show didn't fit their audience demo and requested Whedon take steps to alter that problem - he did so by introducing several minority actors in the Seventh Season, which unfortunately were a bit obvious. Token casting at it's worse. The show was too far along to change the casting. Don't blame Whedon, blame the WB and others who had a hand in the original casting of the series. Blame the system that was in place.
At any rate, slowly but surely, with the success of Will Smith, Eddy Murphy, Bill Cosby, Denszel Washington, and Tyler Perry - not to mention Martin Lewis and Jamie Fox - the television and film landscape slowly started to change. Women unfortunately haven't been able to break the barrier as easily, but that's another story. But we do have Sondra Rhimes - one of the few television head writers that is an African-American Woman, and we have Oprah, who has also changed things. There was a time when all the talk show hosts were men or Dinah Shore, when Phil Donahue ruled the talk show circuit. Unfortunately late night tv still is ruled by white men...Dave Chappell barely made a dent. Asian Americans are also struggling, very few soap operas cast them in lead roles, few prime time shows do, but there are more than there used to be. I can think of at least five shows off the top of my head that have Asians in lead roles, in the 90s, I could think of maybe one.
Things are changing, this next generation - the one between 13-32, is even less tolerant of racism than mine currently is. Which means the baby-boomers and those individuals in my own generation who decided to have children did their job, or more likely, with the advancement of technology and the ability to communicate faster across long distances, we no longer have the luxury of sitting around in a brain dead stupor nursing old stereotypes. They get blasted to smithereens every time we go online or plug into YouTube.
It's not nearly enough...we aren't quite at the point in which we have stopped negatively judging people by appearance or cultural differences alone, or worrying about who has the power or the most economic clout, but it's better than it was. The anger is still there and it may never go away, not when there are still those who lash out at others in ways that are bit worse than just a random rant on lj. But I've got hope. I think things are slowly but surely getting better.
That said, I must say, we've made a lot of progress. Anyone born after 1980, probably can't see it - because they weren't alive during the period in which it was a huge deal to have minorities in lead roles on tv and film. Or to see someone who was a woman or a black man in a position of authority. It wasn't until I hit my teens that I began to see it more. The idea of a woman and a black man running for president, let alone being a viable canididate for president, was not something I thought I'd live to see in my lifetime.
Living in NYC is a bit like living in a community on the fringe of class/race war, yet somehow manages to back away from it at the last minute. The anger is certainly there - I feel it constantly, on my way to work each morning, on my way home, walking around the park at work, at work, on the streets around my apartment. After a while you learn to shut it out, you have to, in order to function.
Some people appear to be oblivious to it. I'm not sure if this is due to where they work and live or if they are just able to shut it out better.
The Sean Bell case continues to be reported in the newspapers, but interest is dwindling, as it starts to increasingly find itself relegated to a small column towards the back pages of the paper. Not the headlines, as it had at the start. I remain unconvinced that this is truly a civil rights case - I took civil rights litigation in law school and can vaguely remember what needs to be proven. The facts of the case support police misconduct and the potential use of excessive force. But not as a racist crime or a civil rights infraction. The situation was a recipe for disaster. A van, 4 am in the morning, outside a seedy strip joint, in a bad area of town, near the railroad tracks, drunkenly drives repeatedly into three undercover and somewhat inebriated cops, who turn and fire on it - fifty times. Not quite the same as Rodney King. The problem with the police force in NYC is that it so underpaid. They make about $25,000 a year as a starting salary, ending salary or top of the range? $55,000 or a little above. And in NYC, where rent is about $1300 - $3000 a month on a one bedroom apartment, and houses cost a million. They are losing their quality people to outlying counties which pay a lot more. What incentive is there? Outside of early retirement at 55 and a pension, which granted are nothing to sneeze at. I think it is criminal that a television writer and an actor on a daytime soap opera in NYC makes more on a weekly basis than a new york cop does.
If I had to choose between the two? I'd choose to have the cop. I can live without the daytime soap opera. Same thing is true about firemen. We want to be safe, but we aren't willing to pay the same amount to be safe that we are willing to pay to be entertained.
I was reading snatchs of Obama's book Audacity of Hope the other day, this chapter is on racism. In it he discusses how much things have changed since his youth particularly in Chicago. Something my father has attested to - we lived in Chicago during the race riots of the 1960s, my father vividly remembers streets being literally on fire and people out in them protesting. In the late 1950s, he toured the Jim Crow South with his black roommate. He tells me that I don't know how it bad it was, I can't imagine it. Or where people like Rev. Jeremiah Wright have been.
I don't think Hillary Clinton knows either, or she wouldn't be making some of the dumb statements she's made lately. One of my uncles, dead now, good man, but racist, hailed from West Virgina. He liked to call Basketball - Ni**er Ball. It always made my father and the rest of my immediate family wince. And when we showed photos of my niece or sis-in-law to him or told him she was half Cherokee, he said, well, they go a little "dark" - might want to watch that. It was ignorance, I knew this. He'd never really had his racial stereotypes blasted. And I found this sad. A good portion of the population of the US has never traveled or if they have, they've done it in tour buses or cruise ships, without actually experiencing the people and culture in which they are going to - travel by postage stamp or picture book I like to call it. To me - it's hell. To them - it's a vacation. My grandparents have never been outside the US. And many more, that I've met here and in Kansas City, never really traveled the US - they haven't been further than their own state or the one right next door. Some people in Kansas City have never met a black person, known them. It's bewildering, but true.
Obama discusses this in his book. How people fall into habits. And how he has to be there for those who fight them. His friend Robert who entered a social club in Cairo, Illinois and walked out when he realized no black were allowed. Obama states he appreciated the courage it took Robert to do the right thing. He points out how insidious racism is - that we'll have our minds changed by ads about how affirmative action steals jobs (which it doesn't actually do, affirmative action is a lot more complicated than most people know), and the black man who was shot down by white cops - making everyone angry, but not constructively so. Wrath is called a deadly sin for a reason - it can motivate us to do very destructive things.
I find his take on the subject inspiring. He is not a person who likes the adversarial system. He seems to prefer one of mediation, or discussion. To persuade without violence. An alien concept to a lot of people in this day and age. An age in which we appear to get all uppity if someone says fuck you or goddamn on tv, but have no problems watching someone brutally cut out someone's heart or shoot someone to death. We get all flustered with a bit of nudity or a sex scene, but shrug when we see people killed on our favorite tv shows. The fact that Prince Caspian - a movie with children killing things is considered fine, but Juno which did not contain any violence, just sex and foul language is not considered fine for children. We see violence as a solution, when in truth it only excerberates the problem. One of the best and most inspiring films I saw on this topic, a true anti-violence piece, was the documentary film "No More Tears Sister" at the NY Film Festival for Human Rights - about a woman who realized, perhaps too late for her own life, that violence was tearing her country and people apart and that there was another way to combat the issues she cared so deeply about. Her attempt to find that way, and her vocal condemnation of the prior one, the violent one, ended in her death and her family's exile. Opposing violence in our society is not easy, it never has been. Regardless of what color skin or ethnic or national background you happen to come from. Just look at the US Presidential election. We still believe that violence is the only way to resolve our conflicts, to protect ourselves, all evidence to the contrary. Look at the Middle East - has over two million years of fighting changed anything for the better? I wonder sometimes what would happen if everyone in that land chose for just one year to resolve their problems without picking up or using any weapons. Could they do it? What would happen if someone waved a magic wand and made it impossible for them to fight one another without searing pain?
I think the only way you can change things is through education, information, and persistence. Make people question things they don't want to. Change thinking patterns. This takes time. It doesn't happen overnight. But it is happening, or Barack Obama would not be on the road to President of the US, with a woman, Hillary Clinton, close on his heels. If things weren't changing - that wouldn't happen. It would not have happened in 1999 or 2000. It is happening now.
Then there's the whining I see regarding perceived and in some instances obvious racism in television shows. People, I want to scream, will you stop whining about the symptom and look at the cause. The debate should be about the overall and at times overt racist casting choices Hollywood makes as an organization and has for years. Institutionalized racism as opposed to perceived racisim in a story's metaphors, which can be interpreted in more than one way depending on the subtext you are bringing to the proceedings.
Why for example is the entire cast of "How I Met Your Mother" - white and upper middle class? Why are the romantic leads of Grey's Anatomy - White? Why wasn't Christina and Burke the lead characters? Why is the entire cast of the West Wing, with the possible exception of the aid, who was a minor character and Jimmy Smits, white? (Don't say it's realistic - look at Colin Powell and Condeeza Rice - both have lead roles in Bush's White House). Why is the main cast of Supernatural - white? Why are the main leads of Smallville - white? Why is the casts of Desperate Housewives, Brothers and Sisters, and the Office, mainly white? Why are all the people in Sex in the City - white? Why are the only shows that feature African Americans or Hispanics as leads either comedies, procedurals, shows like Heroes/BSG or Lost, or violent action dramas (which by the way is a huge improvement over the television landscape in the 1980s and 1990s and a lot more shows with minorities than there used to be)?
Why did the casting director, producers, and network execs tell Whedon that he had to cast Charisma Carpenter as Cordelia and not Bianca Lawson? Why wasn't Whedon permitted to cast Bianca as Buffy? She was up for the role, allegedly, while Gellar was allegedly up for Cordelia at one point. They state they brought her back on the strength of her auditions for Cordy and Buffy. Why wasn't a black man chosen to play Giles?
Why was the Cosby Show such a huge breakthrough and why did it get so much criticism at the time? Many claimed it was too white?
Why was Hill Street Blues and St. Elswhere so groundbreaking in its casting choices?
What was wrong with the casting of the X-Files?
Do you know how groundbreaking DS9 and Star Trek were with their minority casting choices?
Why are the vast majority of characters on all the daytime soap operas, Gossip Girl, 90120, Melrose Place, and One Tree Hill - white, with only a handful of exceptions? The only daytime soap opera that has a lead romantic couple that is black is All My Children - and that couple is the same one they had in the 70's. (Y& R used to, not so much anymore.) They brought them back on AMC, even though the male character, a cop, had been shot to death on screen, because they couldn't find anyone else. Young and The Restless may be the only soap that has incorporated on an on-going basis, black actors in its cast and in lead roles.
I posed these questions to a friend once, and her response was: Well, Whites are the majority demographic. It's who the advertisers and marketing people want to sell to. It's the group that will buy the most.
This is true. It was not until recently such as in the last ten years, that the film and tv industry began to catch on to the fact that there were two huge demographics they were ignoring, who bought products and film tickets and watched tv. The African-American/Black market, and the Hispanic market. UPN - was amongst the first to pick up on it, creating tv shows and comedies that capitalized on this untapped market. When they acquired Buffy, they worried that the show didn't fit their audience demo and requested Whedon take steps to alter that problem - he did so by introducing several minority actors in the Seventh Season, which unfortunately were a bit obvious. Token casting at it's worse. The show was too far along to change the casting. Don't blame Whedon, blame the WB and others who had a hand in the original casting of the series. Blame the system that was in place.
At any rate, slowly but surely, with the success of Will Smith, Eddy Murphy, Bill Cosby, Denszel Washington, and Tyler Perry - not to mention Martin Lewis and Jamie Fox - the television and film landscape slowly started to change. Women unfortunately haven't been able to break the barrier as easily, but that's another story. But we do have Sondra Rhimes - one of the few television head writers that is an African-American Woman, and we have Oprah, who has also changed things. There was a time when all the talk show hosts were men or Dinah Shore, when Phil Donahue ruled the talk show circuit. Unfortunately late night tv still is ruled by white men...Dave Chappell barely made a dent. Asian Americans are also struggling, very few soap operas cast them in lead roles, few prime time shows do, but there are more than there used to be. I can think of at least five shows off the top of my head that have Asians in lead roles, in the 90s, I could think of maybe one.
Things are changing, this next generation - the one between 13-32, is even less tolerant of racism than mine currently is. Which means the baby-boomers and those individuals in my own generation who decided to have children did their job, or more likely, with the advancement of technology and the ability to communicate faster across long distances, we no longer have the luxury of sitting around in a brain dead stupor nursing old stereotypes. They get blasted to smithereens every time we go online or plug into YouTube.
It's not nearly enough...we aren't quite at the point in which we have stopped negatively judging people by appearance or cultural differences alone, or worrying about who has the power or the most economic clout, but it's better than it was. The anger is still there and it may never go away, not when there are still those who lash out at others in ways that are bit worse than just a random rant on lj. But I've got hope. I think things are slowly but surely getting better.