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

[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.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_swallow/]

> 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.

Mm, yeah. I was really freaked out by that.

I kind of wonder if anyone else in the world other than me had the idea, at the end, when she says (essentially) "You'll need someone experienced in mystical creepy stuff to be your captain for the next movie!", that she was suggesting herself? I had a moment of thinking, "Oh, wow, that's interesting!" And then the camera panned away.

[rosefox]

No, you're not the only one, and it really annoyed me too.

[oyceter]

I totally thought she was implying she was going to be the captain as well!

And then Barbossa, who was really not half as interesting a choice as Tia would have been.

[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.”