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

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* following up on the qusrion of balance

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

Or, as you say, just better. Though I did think Tia was great; am going again tomorrow, shall see what I think then. But she just radiated strength and power and danger to me; absolutely a major player in the politics of the, hmm, 'underground society' of the area.

Cannibalism: I do think 'O Brien gets it right in the Master and Commander books. Of course, by the time Jack and Stephen meet up with any cannibals, we've already had a scene where Jack has to deal with the social emergency of being rescued after a month adrift with, um, 8 crewmembers -- and a half. Which is itself kind of a shuddery scene, but it does sort of get the moral highground thing out of the way.

So they meet up with cannibals, and Stephen very politely conveys to them that due to a religious restriction none of the Naval party can have any meat but beef at supper.

I'm describing it badly, but they're just no othering. O Brien has that trick of treating English culture, and especially the Navy, as an odd exotic culture as well, and so when he brings in other cultures it's like everyone's problematised. It's a hell of a trick, and I hope someday to be half that good at it.

They're not bloodthirsty savages, and nobody sees them as such. I think one crewmember expresses the opinion that a piece of meat as might be anything, when especially hungry, is one thing, but hands is going too far.

It's easier in a book, though. You don't have that colour difference staring out at you, and you can take a lot of pages if you need them. I can't begin to imagine how they'd film that scene.

But -- hmm. You know, I thought the whole tribal portrayal sucked retail and wholesale. The fact that they sometimes engaged in ritual cannibalism wasn't the thing that bugged me, at least not in isolation. But it did add to the problem, the way they did it.

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

[oyceter]

Eh heh, and I just realized what I said in the previous comment. I didn't mean that people should feel the need to educate me about Santeria! Le sigh. But thank you for the link!

I think I need to read O'Brien now. Well, move him up on the list of books to be read.

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

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean that people should feel the need to educate me about Santeria!

it's not like it was any trouble. As long as it was interesting. :)

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

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

Here's a decent Santeria resource:

http://sparta.rice.edu/~maryc/Santeria

And, yeah. The thing that tipped me over to it being Santeria and no Voudoun was the dirt. (though it ought to have been a small bag of it, not a damned jar). Voudoun uses dirt, but not generally as protection. That, and the way red kept showing up. It was, in short, pretty damn subliminal.

(Also, a lot of the stereotypes are misunderstandings of real behaviour, which muddies things tons)

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

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting that! I was just coming back to ask if there were any resources on Santeria or Voudoun or African syncretist religions that you'd recommend when I realized I should check the other comment threads first. :)

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

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

I try to be useful. *g*

(Montreal, Quebec, two hours from me, is now the (by number of practitioners) Voudoun capital of the world. Comes of being the number one destination for French-speaking emigrants and refugees. How weird is that?)

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

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

Having now seen the movie twice:

Jesus, WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?

That whole sequence is pretty vile. AND it's really spectacularly pasted on from an advancing the narrative perspective.

And the 'cookie' at the end of the credits made it worse. Much.

My love for Tia continues to grow, though. Which just makes me madder, in a way: if they could get THAT right, there's just no damned excuse.

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

[oyceter]

I had no idea there was even a cookie at the end of the credits until this whole post! Although I'm very glad I didn't stay, given that it involved cannibals and a dog. Good lord.

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

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

Part of the problem with that is that Santeria, Voudoun, and the other afro-diasporic religions of the world were in their infancy then, and if you were to show people doing in the early 1800s what we know they did in Cuba in 1952, or in Haiti in 1978, that would be a sort of cultural projection as well--the stuff that Maya Deren and Migene Gonzalez and Wade Davis have written about has had a few hundred years to simmer and percolate and absorb various native traditions and bits of Catholic practise and bits of white people's occult practises.

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*

[serenada.livejournal.com]

As long as it's historically accurate for the scene they portrayed, I think it's perfect fodder for comical exploitation.

It's not always funny because it's true, but if it's funny and true, I'm hypothesising ahead of the evidence to ascribe motive.

Re: *via metafandom*

[oyceter]

Well, I think things can be true, but still be hurtful when people make fun of them. For example, people may think it's funny that my Chinese has a horrible American accent, but after it's been mocked for a few years, it got a little old. When someone being mocked or made fun of asks for the jokes to stop, it behooves people to listen.

Re: *via metafandom*

[serenada.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm coming from a place where pidgin isn't a tribe thing or an Englishman thing. It's a tribemeetsEnglishman thing.

What they all were saying in the movie was a bit funny, but it was no reflection on the tribe. That's why I don't see it as a bad/racist thing.

Did Carib descendants object to pidgin humour? I knew about the cannibal characterisation, but that was it.

Of course the writers put it in to be funny. It's a comedy. Did they put it in to mock aboriginal tribes? I can't come to that conclusion from the evidence at hand.