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

[oyceter]

I missed King Kong....

I think I need a big definition post for racism and prejudice, because I would say Peter Jackson is racist in that while he may not be actively racist, he is also not actively antiracist, which means he is passively racist, particularly in the problematic portrayal of people with dark skin (or orcs, y'know).

Which is not to say that he is the only person like that, because hey, I have been passively contributing to racism for most of my life, which I am not happy about.

But I think that opens a whole 'nother can of worms that shall have to wait till I have my definition post up.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I was going to write a bit on how one might have cast LOTR without having every actor be white except for those playing orcs or Sauron (I don't have a perfect answer-- I was going to chew over possibilities), but if you think it would be more on-topic in your next post, I'll hold off.

King Kong, I think I would have had Skull Island be uninhabited by humans. The movie was plenty long already without adding in human sacrifice.

[p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com]

I'm here via bonibaru, and I can't resist jumping in to say that for many years -- long before the Jackson LOTR went into production -- I have thought that if I were casting a LOTR production, I'd handle the race thing by making the Elves, the Numenoreans, or the Rohirrim black. The only issue would be which to choose (you know: it would be very cool to have it be the Rohirrim, because then you'd have Black Anglo-Saxons, only then you're dealing with the fact that canonically, they're considered closer to the barbarian past than either of the other two; it would be fun to have it be the Elves, because they're canonically more beautiful than the children of men, but then you've got issues with exoticizing the Other; if you have it be the Numenoreans you start getting undesirable Othello-type resonances with Aragorn and Arwen). But really, I still think that any of the three would have worked, not only helping to defuse any implicit racism but also working to preserve a genuine point in the books. The idea of the different races is prominent there, and it virtually disappears on screen when you cast everybody as generic white guys.

I still resent the extension of copyright term that means nobody but Jackson's ever going to get to do a version of those books. Or at least, nobody but Jackson is in my lifetime.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I was going to say, there are sufficient differences between humans, hobbits, elves, dwarves, and hobbits to make it perfectly plausible that they wouldn't all have the same color skin, so that was basically where I was going too.

Actually, the Rohirrim I would want to keep white (and blonde) because they're so clearly based on the Anglo-Saxons that it would otherwise be jarring, and the hobbits are so clearly based on Ye Olde White England that I'd probably want to do the same with them. But I'd say that everyone else is up for grabs. Middle Earth may be England, but it's England with elves. Why is it so much less plausible that there would be non-evil dark-skinned characters than that there would be magical pointy-eared characters?

The orcs are supposed to be corrupted elves, so it would be faithful to the logic of the book to have elves and orcs be played by actors of the same race. Having white elves and black orcs is faithful to one aspect of the book, but not to another; and as those are the sort of choices a director must make at every step of the way, coming back to the original post, if you have The Island of Dark-Skinned Cannibals, it's because someone decided to put it in; the Dark-Skinned Cannibals did not just magically descend upon the movie with no intervention from (non-cannibal) human hands.

[oyceter]

the Dark-Skinned Cannibals did not just magically descend upon the movie with no intervention from (non-cannibal) human hands.

Word.

[oyceter]

Ooo that is cool.

I wonder if you could make the Rohirrim, the Numenoreans and the elves all multi-racial? I don't know that much about Tolkien's world, since it's been forever since I've reread LotR, but given that different Hobbit families have slightly different looks (the forest Hobbits vs. the Shire hobbits), I bet there could be races portrayed by blacks, Asians, Latinos, Hispanics, American Indians and etc.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was thinking about that very point about hobbits, because your memory is correct: different... hmmm, families? ethnicities? of hobbits are supposed to look different and be culturally distinct-- note the extremely different naming conventions of the Tooks and the Brandybucks vs. everyone else. I tended to think of it as equivalent to English vs. Irish, but there is definitely a distinction, and one which the films (which I love in many ways, by the way) ignored completely.

If I did cast multiracially within the larger racial groups (elves, orcs, etc) I think I would divide it like that (all Brandybucks played by Hispanic actors, for instance) and make more of a point of intra-hobbit, etc, cultural differences.

Seriously, I don't see why that is any less plausible than having orcs played by Maori actors, or Elrond played by an actor who at the time was extremely associated with The Matrix's Agent Smith.

[daegaer.livejournal.com]

In fact the book!hobbits are not white, to the best of my recollection. As far as I can remember (it's been quite a while since I read the books) they are darker-skinned than the humans. Elves are hardly ever described, and when they are they seem to usually have dark hair (I don't think their skin tone is ever described, but the all-blond all-the-time Lothlorien of the films doesn't have a basis in the books). I think that orcs in the books come in a variety of skin tones too. The films flatten a lot of things in the books out to pretty whiteness (the same with the portrayal of women, of course. Giving Aragorn's critique of Rohirrim sexism to Grima makes it something that can be safely ignored, and that then weakens the fact that book!Eowyn would rather die than continue in the socially approved roles for Rohirrim women).

[vito-excalibur.livejournal.com]

Yes, I know this comment is a year too late, but you just linked to it. :)

Ever since Fellowship I've wished that they'd had Zhang Ziyi play Arwen and Angela Bassett Galadriel. I don't care that Galadriel's supposed to be blond. If they can have Aragorn fall off a goddamn cliff, and that weird necklace thing that they TOTALLY STOLE from DRAGONLANCE, they could make Galadriel have gold or copper streaks or something.

[oyceter]

Hey, I welcome all comments to this post that aren't spam and aren't "ZOMG slave oppressed my ancestors!1!!!111!"

Bwah! I love your suggestions! (also, I can totally see the fan uproar) But that would just be SO COOL.

[oyceter]

but if you think it would be more on-topic in your next post, I'll hold off.

Nah, it's interesting! But thanks for asking!

It would have so cool if there had been multiracial casting in LotR. Or, y'know, in most movies.

[lavendertook.livejournal.com]

I was going to write a bit on how one might have cast LOTR without having every actor be white except for those playing orcs or Sauron

Hey, Tolkien did describe hobbits as brown skinned. Aside from Tolkien's racist stuff in specifying the lightest skinned hobbits (Fallohides) as his racially superior group, PJ could have cast plenty of background hobbits as POC and even been true to canon, instead of relegating all the POC to the orc roles--he chose to whitewash the Shire. And of course, canon was not a limit for PJ, anyway. That bugged me--still, the stuff in POTC is so much more blatantly racist.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm coming in late to this, but...

If you look up JRRT's letters (the published volume), there's one where he tells someone who asked what Orcs looked like that they resembled Mongolians - high cheekbones, flat noses, slant eyes, brown skin: certainly *not* Africans. That makes sense, given that he apparently thought of Middle-Earth in terms of early medieval Europe (which was his professional stamping-ground) and of course what the post-Roman Empire states feared was not sub-Saharan Africans, but the Huns (from somewhere vaguely to the east of modern Hungary), the Mongols (around the 13th century) and, in Spain, Italy and southern France, the Moors (Arabs).

In another letter to a son stationed in South Africa during WWII - i.e. just before apartheid was legalised - Tolkien mentions that his mother had abhorred the usual white attitude towards "natives" (and he adored his mother, so I presume he shared her views). And do read his crushing letter to Unwin when a potential German publisher asked JRRT to declare that he was Aryan. It's the Oxbridge mind at its most cutting: Nazism is Fundamentally Unsound. (There's also a text he started but never finished in the 1930s, about the last days of Numenor, which also reads very much like a savage satire of Nazi ideas - can't remember the title now). - JennyN