Race and Pirates

[oyceter]

I ended up buying Beverly Tatum's "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?", despite already having borrowed it from the library because a) I wanted something to read in line while I waited to get a seat for Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and b) I want to financially support books like these and authors who tackle the subject of race.

I read a few chapters while standing in line, delighted by Tatum's definitions and her clear explanations and her compassion toward people of color and Whites alike.

Then I went in to watch Pirates.

And I watched, and I grew more and more uncomfortable. Jack Sparrow and crew run amok of cannibals. The cannibals, are, of course, Black. They have face paint and random piercings; they have made Jack Sparrow their king. He speaks to them in terms like, "Licka licka, savvy?" There are a few people of color in his pirate crew, but their speaking parts are small, and they all have very strong accents. Or they don't speak at all and lend their faces to the motley look of the crew. The main character of color is a Black woman, a voodoo witch or something, with eyeballs in jars, blackened teeth, and an accent so strong that I couldn't understand her half the time.

While I was noticing this and noticing the fact that there were no non-stereotyped portrayals of people of color, I was growing more and more uncomfortable with this awareness. I'm actually very ashamed to say this, but I kept thinking of things like, "Oh, is it really that bad?" and "It's just a movie" and "Really, it's about pirates, what can you expect?" and "It's all in good fun."

Except... it isn't.

And I can't get over the fact that even though I had been reading about race right before the movie, noticing the stereotypes and being critical of race in the movie made me incredibly uncomfortable and squirmy, so much so that I tried to rationalize it away. I spent the first half of the movie squirming and becoming more and more aware of the fact that my mind kept trying to slip away from the topic of race, kept trying to not confront it and come up with more and more reasons why it really wasn't that bad.

Except... it is that bad.

It is bad that I cannot think about race without this extreme uncomfortableness, that I cannot do it without attempting to rationalize and excuse, that I cannot do it even after reading about it and being fully committed to speaking out. And it is even worse, because I know if I had seen the movie without having read the Tatum beforehand, I would have noticed, but I would have let myself brush it off, let myself not post about it.

I didn't even post about this last night because it made me so uncomfortable.

Well, also, I wanted to make myself a "Not the magical minority fairy" icon.

But anyway. No more excuses from me, no rationalization. The movie is incredibly racist. I still had some fun watching it, but knowing that it was racist and knowing that most of the audience very likely wouldn't think so spoiled the majority of it for me.

I have difficulties just typing "The movie is incredibly racist," and I have to keep thinking about how I routinely notice the portrayal of women in nearly everything I read and watch (the movie is not as deeply sexist as it is racist; thankfully, Elizabeth gets to do stuff. But it is still very male). I have to keep thinking that for me, noticing sexism is ok, that pointing it out in my LJ is standard. And I have to keep thinking that I need to do the same about race, even though posting things like this frighten me because of the reaction to the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of DOOM.

Part of me doesn't even want to keep talking about this because it's so uncomfortable, because it causes such defensiveness in other people, because I am tired of being told that I am wrong for seeing these things. And that's the very reason I am making myself post this, making myself confront the nidginess and the squirminess, the problems that I have in just acknowledging that something that I am enjoying is racist.

ETA: Freezing some threads in which further discussion seems to be rather pointless.

ETA2: I'm now screening all anonymous comments to this entry, not because I don't welcome them, but because I've been getting stupid spam comments everyday. If you aren't a spambot, you should make it through the screening! This is for spam only, not opinion-filtering.

Comments

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

There are a few people of color in his pirate crew, but their speaking parts are small, and they all have very strong accents.

And, if you'll notice, they're all stuck in the *second* cage. You know, the one that cheats and tries to get ahead rather than wait for the guard to pass by, and then all those inside die? There's a nice closeup of all the colored faces grinning evilly just before they slip and die. After that, I *think* (I did only see it the once) the "main" crew of the Pearl is all white.

I know the movie is set in a freakshow, but walking out, all I could think was: What, they couldn't have *one character of color* dressed in normal clothing and speaking regular English and not eating people?

And it really, really bugs me that I have only seen two (not counting mine or that of the woman who went with me and was subject to my mutterings during the film) LJ reviews that even mention the subject amidst their torrents of enthusiasm. I mean, I doubt that the filmmakers had deliberately racist intentions, but a less critical mainstream appropriation of older racist tropes can hardly be spotted in this day and age.

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

I should have said more about my issues with the cannibal island part of the story in my review, and maybe I'll post about that at some point. I may just bundle it up with the Multiculturalism Yay post I've been planning ever since a business contact pissed me off with her rant on 'immigrants' (ironically it dawned on me afterwards that I'm nth generation English, while I'm sure she's mentioned in the past that half her ancestors are Finnish -- may have to drop that into conversation if she does that to me again). It just feels odd me ranting about race so much, when the family members doing our genealogy research are yet to find any branches of the family tree not originating in Yorkshire or Norfolk.

[oyceter]

Hey, all voices are good voices! Tatum writes about racism and how it hurts everyone, no matter what color they are, from the awkwardness that white people feel in talking about race to aversive racism and etc. It's a very, very, very good book, and she's very thoughtful and compassionate.

Um, which is not to pressure you to post on it, but just to say that I very much do look forward to reading lots of people writing about race.

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

I'll see what I can come up with.

Sometimes I feel like I'm kind of the opposite to a lot of people with my background (I grew up in a small all-white community, although the village started to get a bit more mixed after I went to university) talking on the internet. I love diversity -- I want to celebrate everyone's background, including my own.

And while I still refer to her by her Greek name, Hestia, I'm far more in touch with my goddess of the hearth/home at the moment and kicking myself for being a bit disorganised about going up home for the well dressings (http://sinfin.net/welldressing/dates.html). I don't think the British identity is getting overwhelmed by the latest influx of new people, I think it's the people already here who can't be bothered to think about where their traditions come from at the end of the day. Everyone's ancestors were immigrants at some point and we ought to be all Multiculturism Yay!, rather than panicking about some imagined fate that will only happen through neglect.

That looks like I've got two posts to do. One on diversity, and one on tradition, although I don't think the two clash that much really.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Several of the pirates with speaking roles were people of color.

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

I think maybe you overlooked my next point? The black/West Indian/islander pirates all seem to have died as a result of "cheating" when they were in the cages on the islands. Of the "core" crew (Gibbs, the little person, the Greek chorus duo, and I think there were two more), the ones we follow through the rest of the film, I don't think any of them weren't white. I kept looking. (Admittedly, I did only see it once, very visually busy film, people were often drenched/filthy, etc., but it was bothering me.)

[silveraspen]

Saw this post linked from bonibaru, and my own comments on the film will be forthcoming, but I did want to add an observation here.

I saw it twice yesterday and the second time I specifically looked to compare the two cages.

In the cage holding the pirates who survived, in addition to Gibbs and the midget whose name I don't know, there were at least three people of other races/nationalities. I am going to try to match role to credited name later, but I wanted to say that no, not all those who survived were white. They were mostly "core" crew from the last film, I think.

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, I misspoke; you're right that there were other races in the first cage. However, the POC pirates *who had lines before* all died in the second cage, I believe. I honestly don't even remember seeing any of the POC pirates in the first cage again, though surely they must have been in the background!

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

(Also, the fact that there's legitimate debate as to whether there was *one* non-savage-stereotype, non-evil POC who had *any* lines is still pretty damn telling.)

[(Anonymous)]

I'm sorry; that was very sloppy reading on my part.

The core crew was established in the last movie. There was only one continuing character added since the last movie, and she was black.

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

Well, as you can see from comments below, I wrote sloppily myself. Goooo, basic reading and writing skills! ;)

I think Tia Dora (?) was quite problematic. She was a Mystical Negro living in the heart of the jungle, sexually voracious, with all the outer markings of the "savage," and yet essentially devoted, like all Mystical Negroes, to forwarding the white man's quest. If she were the only such type in the film, I might be inclined to judge it a little more charitably, but in a film where all the "audience identity" characters are white (and all but one are male) and all the POCs who get any real camera attention are "savages" or untrustworthy comrades who reap the just rewards of their treachery...I'm not inclined to be charitable.

[sabonasi.livejournal.com]

There was one Black guy in the cage with Gibbs. But he's definitely the exception, not the rule. And he dies later.

[jonathankorman.livejournal.com]

Aye. That puts me in mind of the lone black secondary character in Scream 2 who says early on that he's just going to leave town right away because “brothers don't last long in situations like this.”

[oyceter]

Ugh, yeah, I didn't even notice that bit about the second cage =(. The sad thing about the comments to this comment is that there is even debate about whether or not there were non-stereotyped people of color. It just makes it that much clearer that all the very memorable characters were white (or, uh, squid) and that the one memorable character of color is portrayed problematically enough that there is debate on whether or not she is stereotyped.

Very, very with you on the less critical mainstream appropriation of older racist tropes. I doubt most people have deliberately racist intentions, and yet... (I have just finished Tatum, so I use her vocab). If they aren't actively antiracist, then so much ends up being racist via passivity, just because of how society is structured.

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

P.S. I'm sorry if anyone gives you crap over raising this issue, as they did before. I think it's perfectly possible to disagree on this subject without anyone's getting nasty, and I believe it's white fans' responsibility to make a special effort not to shut people down when they raise questions of race in a reasonable way. That is, if we have any interest in fandom's being a better place.

[oyceter]

Thank you! It's not quite like the cultural appropriation debate (knock on wood), though I am half amused and half annoyed by comments saying that since everyone in the movie is stereotyped, the black stereotyping.. isn't that bad? Or.. I have no idea.

I do mean to post later about comments that make me uncomfortable in discussions on race and why, so that'll be interesting...

[adrienneherbst.livejournal.com]

I know the movie is set in a freakshow, but walking out, all I could think was: What, they couldn't have *one character of color* dressed in normal clothing and speaking regular English and not eating people?

Regular English? The film is set in the Carribe in the 18th century; the dialects spoken by Tia Dalma (and presumably the man who gave Will directions) *are* regular English. Even white people who have been born in the region speak in some version of this dialect-- listen to the dwarf crewman. The other accents and languages in the film (various kinds of British English; French, Indian, Italian, etc) are all spoken by recent immigrants-- not the norm for the region at all.

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

Yes, but somehow, miraculously, we are given a set of white people dressed in recognizable, if "adventure-style," clothing and speaking with standard European accents who just *happen* to be our heroes. *They* are the regular people of the film to the audience's mind, regardless of who are the historic inhabitants, and they are set against people of color coded hard for "other." Including heavy accents, outlandish clothes, taboo behavior, and, oh yes, the willingness to take a dog as temporary king. The filmmaker did not bother to give us one person of color for audience identification. They're all "exotics," and all conforming to one unfortunate stereotype or another. It's not like such people were unavailable, either historically (as if this were a great work of historical realism anyway!) or within the universe itself (Ana Maria, non-stereotypical character of color who functions as a regular crew member of the Pearl in the first movie, does not appear).

[furikku.livejournal.com]

Hi there, surfed in from metafandom.

While there's a lot of good points as far as racism (or at least racist depictions) in the movie, I don't think that it's a unilateral thing. Frankly, all the non-main characters pretty much conform to various "other" stereotypes. After all, most of the white crew types had exaggerated accents and all as well.

I did miss Ana Maria, though I enjoyed Tia Dalma a whole lot (but that's due to my being gay for hot Voodoo Lady stereotypes).

I think the movie's biggest problem in this respect is that it's hard, under the formula for this kind of movie, to show a whole lot of non-stereotypes; characters are either "Main Character" or "Everyone Else," and there's not a lot of room for a new MC to be non-white. Unless like they hook up Jack and Elizabeth and then introduce some awesome black girl for Will to hook up with or whatever. There's not a lot of call for new main characters, really. (Of course, the MCs aren't all that good at evading the stereotype thing, either.)

[oyceter]

I agree that there were a lot of other stereotypes in the movies, but because of the historical and societal inequities that accompany racism and racial stereotypes of people of color, I think portraying people of color in a racist and stereotyped manner is very different from portraying pirates in a stereotyped manner.

Also, the sequel didn't come out of nowhere, the decision to make all the main characters white in the first one was also a decision, even though it was probably a decision by omission instead of a deliberate decision to exclude people of color. But that's what happened anyway.

And I think they were breaking some stereotypes with Elizabeth, though I wouldn't go so far to argue that it's a feminist movie. But there were attempts. So I don't think it would have been too difficult to make an attempt to break some stereotypes. They could have had a funny moment in which everyone assumes that the cannibals are savages and have them be geniuses or something, or... I dunno. I'm just making stuff up. But they chose not to, even if the decision wasn't deliberate, it was still a decision.

[(Anonymous)]

You know, I was actually looking at this when I saw the movie the second time, and I swear I saw at least one person of color who was with the first cage. But who knows.

POTC # 2 a RACIST FILM ?

[(Anonymous)]

Do some research - 1700 - 1800 +/-
What Blacks race wasn't (*Wrongly) being used as slaves - there were NO educated blacks that spoke The KINGS English, who were ALSO "PRIVATEERS" or Pirates !
As Far as the Canablism is concerned - I'm VERY sorry to inform you , but canabalism DID exist, it WAS practiced but several "NON-White" Island native populations, and thats all there is to this STUPID Blog about POTC # 2 being a RACIST Film.
You want to talk about RACISM ?
Lets talk about the "ESSENCE" awards, or better yet, How about the "LATIN GRAMMYS"........................

Re: POTC # 2 a RACIST FILM ?

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

Oh, go crawl back beneath your rock. You'll go blind in the sunlight.

Re: POTC # 2 a RACIST FILM ?

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Hello, anonymous coward. Please correct your grammar (for instance, "What Blacks race wasn't"), spelling (the word is "cannibalism"), stuck caps lock (for instance, "KINGS") and overall stupidity (your entire comment) before calling anyone else stupid.

Re: POTC # 2 a RACIST FILM ?

[lavendertook.livejournal.com]

Well, one thing's for sure, there were no octopus-faced people speaking the KINGS English, back then, but the producers and viewers seemed to have no problem getting their heads around that. Of course, things are a lot better for the octopus-faced population now, which is why no one now seems to have a problem imagining them as focal characters, even in a period-piece. Too bad the white mainstream's imagination can't extend to people of color, too.