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

*via metafandom*

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

Lack of balance, yeah. (of course, after the first movie I was mad because nobody seemed to give a damn that the Marines and Navy got it wholesale, so. I don't know. I don't think balance is as simple as 'count the bodies over the course of the series and divide by colour', but I'm also stuck admitting that I don't know what I DO think it would look like in this case.)

See, I was uncomfortable about the cannibals, but delighted with Tia Dalma, because I'm a religionist, and I thought they handled that very well. I'm guessing they're riffing off Santeria, based on the trick with the jar of dirt and a couple other things. She didn't hit my OMG STOCK WITCH button at all.

Of course, I also don't know how to evaluate the "magical Negro" question when everyone seems to be magical. Or how to feel about a universe where the racially balanced crews seem to always be the bad guys. Or where 'green', or at least 'non-human' seems to function as a race as well.

Now I'm thinking, if the cannibals were actually true to history, you know, there's a LOT of research that went into that movie. And yet that balance is still not there. Tricky stuff...

Re: *via metafandom*

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

Now I'm thinking, if the cannibals were actually true to history, you know, there's a LOT of research that went into that movie.

Well, apparently the cannibalism thing is actually *not* true to history, and the descendants of the people pictured in the film consider it to be a pretty offensive slander (http://cacreview.blogspot.com/2005/04/national-garifuna-council-of-belize.html).

Re: *via metafandom*

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that changes things. A lot.

Though I think I should eat something before I try to think past that.

Re: *via metafandom*

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

Here's another interesting link from the same site (http://cacreview.blogspot.com/2005/04/cannibalism-as-cultural-libel.html)-- I'll quote the relevant part.

People with reputation of being cannibals were fair game for exploitation. In 1503, Queen Isabella of Spain decreed that Spaniards could legally enslave only those American Indians who were cannibals (Whitehead, 1984: 70). Spanish colonists thus had a vested economic interest in representing many New World natives as people eaters. Political expediency clearly motivated a number of early chroniclers who wrote about cannibalism, particularly among the Caribs (Caniba) Indians who lived in the parts of Venezuela, the Guianas, and the Caribbean islands.

Re: *via metafandom* following up on the qusrion of balance

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

*nods* Yeah, that bit I knew, hadn't put it together.

I am so asleep on my feet here, but.

Master and Commander was on when I went out for food. And I was thinking about balance, and thinking again that M and C really is an example of it done right, on the whole. (One consequence of that being that it's smooth to the point of invisibility. If you don't POINT OUT the black and Asian crewmembers, nobody sees them. Or nobody white does, for sure. I dunno what one does with that.)

Except no women. Ok, so M and C got ONE thing right, I'll take it.

But that's a realistic movie; it doesn't map well to POTC DMC.

And that's a thing: I can point to realistic fiction and film that I think gets race right, gender right, religion right...

Fantasy's a whole 'nother deal. Especially film, where so much is signified non-verbally.

Now, I am emphatically not defending POTC here. Actually, breaking it down, I think it handled women of all colours well and men of colour badly.

I'm more thinking that we're talking about it as if it had missed a clear mark that was agreed on, and in fantasy I'm not sure that's a true statement. I think we got bigger trouble than that.

I don't think we necessarily have even a rough shared vision of How To Do It.

So I'm still back at 'what does that look like, where everyone is magical and not everyone is truly human and there's all kinds of stereotypes/archetypes coming back to bits people in the ass?

If magic is real and curses are real and Hell is real, and Davy Jones is real, shouldn't Santeria and Santeria Priestesses be real and have real magical power? And if they're real, then should bloodthirsty cannibals (which on the one hand they handled BADLY and on the other hand is a cross cultural nightmare, in varying forms) also be real?

And I have no good answers. I think the cannibals is wrong (compare to Reivers in Firefly, which I thought was RIGHT) and the Santeria is right, but I'm just flailing in the dark here. That's my personal intuitive line, and so I don't trust it much.

*flails off to bed to sleep and then think more*

Re: *via metafandom* following up on the qusrion of balance

[oyceter]

I think it handled women of all colours well

Or just better? Though I did like Anamaria a lot, and am very glad that people saw Tia as much more than standard Voodoo witch and liked her power. The other part of me is just irritated that there's only one woman of color per movie (or with a speaking part). Which of course isn't to say that it's fair to only have one main white woman character as well, because that also annoys me.

I think my problem with the cannibals is that a) just portraying people of color as cannibals, no matter how historically accurate and despite the fantastic setting, still plays into reasoning behind slavery and colonialism and all that good stuff and b) even if just having people of color as cannibals weren't problematic (though I think it is), the way they did it was just so bad and unthinking and uncritical.

I wish that the Santeria were much clearer so that uneducated people like me wouldn't mistake it as a stereotype =(.

Re: *via metafandom*

[serenada.livejournal.com]

I didn't consider the cannibals Carib, but a Carib analogue. I understand that the cannibal designation is rejected by Carib descendants, but I just don't know. That's why I'm not overly bothered by the cannibal thing--more likely to be twitched by the idea of them adopting a dog to fill the same role.

Then again, I have less against cannibalism than most people.

Re: *via metafandom*

[randomblade.livejournal.com]

Huh. I thought the cannibals had a sense of humour and fun, and that was why they were chasing the dog. I seem to have read them against the grain, seeing the tendency of these comments.

Re: *via metafandom*

[oyceter]

Hee!

I think a lot of my problems with the cannibals weren't that they were just cannibals (though I think it is problematic to portray most of the people of color in the movie as cannibals, given historical events and etc.). A lot of it was how they were used as the butt of jokes, as people whose language was so simple and mockable, and etc.

Re: *via metafandom*

[serenada.livejournal.com]

History suggests that Jack Sparrow and the Caribs would have been speaking pidgin. Simplicity was the point, since neither side had time to learn the other's language to any great degree.

Re: *via metafandom*

[oyceter]

It may be historically accurate for the characters to be speaking pidgin, but on the other hand, the movie very much portrayed it as a laughable matter. I'm guessing that the moviemakers were more intent on having the simplistic language in there not to be historically correct, but to be funny.

Re: *via metafandom*

[sabonasi.livejournal.com]

Of course, I also don't know how to evaluate the "magical Negro" question when everyone seems to be magical.

I can help you out there a bit. The "Magical Negro" must be...

1. Black. Or at least not white, as there are racial variations to the "Magical Negro". i.e. "Magical Native American".

2. Magical. This covers both literal and figurative magicalness.

3. Exist solely to help the white protagonists evolve and/or achieve a goal.

4. Have little to not back history and/or personal motivation. They're there to help whitey.

If you're hitting more than a few of those points in one variation or another, you're in "Magical Negro" territory.

Re: *via metafandom*

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

Thanks. It's one of those concepts I've picked up by context and never seen formally defined, so I was focussing on no.2, the 'magical' part, a lot. Hence my confusion.

In fantasy, no.2 gets kind of complicated, I think. Not insoluble, by any means, but more complicated.

Re: *via metafandom*

[sabonasi.livejournal.com]

Certainly. One thing you got to keep in mind is that the "Magical Negro" is an established archtype, so they end up in stories - especially fantasy stories - without the author really stopping to think about the implications of the character. i.e. The portrayal of black character as servile to a white character.

But it is possible to have a Black fantasy character who has magical powers. If anything, it's an underrepresented area because of the subconsious aversion so many authors have to having the main character be Black.

Re: *via metafandom*

[oyceter]

If anything, it's an underrepresented area because of the subconsious aversion so many authors have to having the main character be Black.

Word.

Also, I figure the Magical Negro trope came about as a way to have POC in a story in the most marginal way possible. One thing that keeps annoying me is the argument that PotC did make the attempt to make the one original character not from the first film black, while ignoring the fact that this only stands out because all the leads are white (or can be read as white, in the case of Johnny Depp).

Re: *via metafandom*

[oyceter]

I agree; I do think that the portrayal of the Marines and the Navy in the first movie was stereotyped and silly and not at all interesting.

On the other hand, I think it's difficult to compare the two because of the historical and social inequities associated with stereotypes of people of color and how those stereotypes continue to play into racism (I swear, "historical and social inequities" is my new chorus).

I didn't know about Santeria, thank you! I will go look that up and read more on it.

Re: *via metafandom*

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, I think it's difficult to compare the two because of the historical and social inequities associated with stereotypes of people of color and how those stereotypes continue to play into racism (I swear, "historical and social inequities" is my new chorus).

*nods* It's absolutely a difficult comparison; with the Marines and Navy stuff, on the one hand they're (quite ahistorically, actually) all white; otoh, class gets in there, and not just class by the historical boundaries of one of the most stratified cultures of all time.

So it's not the same... and yet it's not unconnected. The stereotypes about the enlisted man and the ordinary seaman that you find in that era are unnervingly close to the racial stereotypes: you have to rule them with brute force, they don't FEEL hardship like we do, they wouldn't be in the Army/Navy (or they'd be officers) if they weren't the scum of the earth ... (we're supposed to feel sorry for Will over FIVE LASHES? That's a tenth of what you could pull for simple _drunkness_) no, it's not the same. For one thing, the markers are subter and slipperier than skin colour, and could alter over time, even there -- officers came up from the ranks, 'gentlemen' ended up in them, from all sorts of causes. There was mobility, of a sort.

"There were seamen and there were gentlemen in King Charles' Navy; but the gentlemen were not seamen, and the seamen were not gentlemen." (Macaulay)

Re: *via metafandom*

[oyceter]

Huh, that's interesting, I didn't think about that!

Re: *via metafandom*

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

And I'm really not sure what it means. Beyond the fact that it's suggestive that in each case there was a created underclass and the tropes applied as justification for their condition were STARTLINGLY similar. Sort of 'There's Us and Not Us and all Not Us have the same traits.'

Except for very broad and handwave-y "they both fit into colonialism" (did I mention that the Army and Navy were historically disproportionately Scots and Irish?)

I even found it interesting that the merchantman captain was Scots. Just in that sense of 'nobody except the English (and Jack) gets out alive'.

I digress. Or maybe I don't. I suspect that the more subtle layering of stereotypes based on class and nationality and gender as well as colour (practicaly the first word's out of Beckett's mouth: "It's LORD, now.") helped to support and disappear the racism for a lot of viewers. Because you can say 'well, they didn't get it much worse than the Marines...' and that's arguably almost true. But it doesn't mean either was excuseable.

Re: *via metafandom*

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Thank you for mentioning the relationship to Santeria! I didn't know anything about the religion.

Re: *via metafandom*

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

Representations of Voudoun and Santeria present some interesting difficulties:

1) They've been presented carelessly and in a bigoted way so often that a) they legitimately get people's hackles up whenever they appear, and b) a lot of entirely legitimate practice has been appropriated so many times that now when it DOES appear it has a distinct flavour of 'exoticism' right away.

2) They're both syncretic with Catholicism: Santeria is a syncretisc blend with Spanish Catholicism, Voudoun with French.

3) They're both syncretic within AFRICAN religions; when you get a group of people from different regions of Africa practicing underground religion together and transmitting it by word-of-mouth, you're going to get mixing. There's a tendancy to define Santeria as an offshoot of Yoruban religion with "impurities", but that's denying the experience and erasing the history of practitioners.

4) As underground religions, they survived by playing to white stereotypes of Blacks. And so a faithful portrayal will show those stereotypes.

Someone was commenting somewhere about Tia Dalma's 'bad Jamaican' accent. I'm not sufficiently up on accents to know how close they got, but it ought to be closer to be Cuban or Hatian, actually. Probably Cuban -- "Tia" is Spanish.

Jamaica, being colonised by the English, wasn't a centre of Santeria OR Voudoun, except insofar as the English were the least likely to convert or encourage conversion in slaves. (This is not especially praiseworthy; converting them to Protestantism would have entailed teaching them to read, which was regarded as dangerous.) So what religious activity there was arrived with slaves from elsewhere and spread irregularly.

Also, the Caribbean is TINY. At least, if you have a ship. I don't know where Tia Dalma is meant to be, but I don't think it's Jamaica.

Re: *via metafandom*

[polykleitos.livejournal.com]

The actress who played Tia Dalma said in an interview that she was going for a Jamaican accent and that her mother (who is Jamaican and has an accent) had helped her with it.

Re: *via metafandom*

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

*nods* I didn't have a clue what it was meant to be, but it didn't sound bad to me.

I'm not sure she and the scriptwriter ever talked about it, though; her actual word order sounded French to me.

Re: *via metafandom*

[livinglaurel.livejournal.com]

Oh, v yum. Thank you.

More on Voudoun/Santeria Priestesses and "Historical Accuracy"

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

You know, I've reached that wonderful stage where I'm really not sure if I'm just making excuses here.

But somebody brought up my old bugbear Historical Accuracy, somewhere in this thread that I can't find atm, and it got me pondering more.

(As did rereading several of Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January books over the last few days. Recommended, by the way.)

OK. Tia Dalma as a priestess? TOTALLY "historically accurate". There were not a lot of options for women, nevermind women of colour, who had to make their own way in the world in that place and time.

Woman pirate was one. Prostitution was another (and TALKING of questionable portrayals, wouldn't you just think that their lives were all just one long party, based on those two movies?)

And Priestess was a third. There were and are Hispanic and White Santeria and Voudoun practitioners; one of these days it'd be nice to see that in a movie, too.

You didn't get access to the mainstream sorts of power, so you made your living by doing something that you could only get by living on the margins.

You stole. Or you sold sex. Or you sold magic. Roughly, women who WOULD NOT fit in tended to become criminals. Women who did fit in but then suddenly landed on the social margins tended to become prostitutes. Women who COULDN'T fit in ... in cultures that have magical practitioners, that's what they tend to become. In Christian cultures, they land in nunneries.

And that's why Tia didn't read as a 'Magical Negro' for me any more than the various vodoun priestesses and the occasional priests in Hambly do: because, well, yes, she helps white folks. And probably black folks, too, and anyone else who can find her, at the highest price she can command, which I get the feeling is considerable, given the level of magical help she's got to sell. By the looks of it, she's got a community to help support, after all. (Am I the only one who thought that that community was probably meant to be a 'maroon colony', a collection of escaped slaves and outlaws living under the radar?)

Because that's what she does to live. Doesn't mean she's on your side; and I think the appearance of Barbossa says very clearly that she's NOT necessarily on Jack's side, even if she does like, or respect, him enough that his death is a cause for grief.

But within that... okay, so, that's historically accurate. But there are a wide range of ways you can PRESENT the facts of an era. It's accurate that the British were, mostly, incredibly racist, yes. It's also historically accurate that the people of colour at the time knew it was bullshit just as well as we do. For that matter it's historically accurate that there were such things as abolitionists, even then. Whose point of view you gonna show, and how critically?

I write historical stuff myself, so I get quite desperately steamed when I see someone citing "accuracy" as an excuse for a-critically presenting racism, sexism, homophobia, religious bigotry.

You can present events and attitudes accurately without endorsing them. You can even make a character hold quite authentically sketchy attitudes and still make them sympathetic. You know, some of Hambly's sympathetic characters are slaveholders. And, you know, you see them go through all these incredible mental contortions to have actual friendly or polite relationships with free coloured people and still hold slaves and you see them be aware of it and get embarrassed and go right back to what they were doing before, and you see the viewpoint character see this and know how fucked it is and you like them, but you never for a moment forget that they are wrong, wrong, wrong and that good, decent, nice, likeable people who genuinely want to do good in the world can do truly terrible things -- if doing terrible things is the custom of the country.

So no, historical accuracy is no excuse at all. And possibly I shall blog that in the next week, actually.