Race and Pirates
Sat, Jul. 8th, 2006 11:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceterI 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.
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.
Tags:
Re: *via metafandom*
Tue, Jul. 11th, 2006 03:38 am (UTC)*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*
Thu, Jul. 13th, 2006 05:52 am (UTC)Re: *via metafandom*
Thu, Jul. 13th, 2006 11:35 am (UTC)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.
Quote I was looking for earlier
Thu, Jul. 13th, 2006 05:44 pm (UTC)General Wolfe, on the Highland (Scots) Regiments, 1759. (So reasonably contemporary with POTC, the the degree it is possible to pin down the year those are set in.)
Different context. Different outcome. Different expression. Different consequences.
Same thinking.