Revenge of the Colored People/Night of the Non-White

[oyceter]

I came up with this theory after reading Cherie Priest's Not Flesh Nor Feathers, a mystery set in the South about a flood rising and the evils it uncovers. I've seen/read several examples of stories where an angry person of color (frequently a Black man) goes off on a criminal or killing spree, and it is later revealed that the angsty backstory is.... racism!

In Not Flesh Nor Feathers (spoilers), the eventual evil is... evil Black zombies! Controlled by a dead Black girl who was wronged by her White friend! I have also seen this in Ragtime (the musical), where Coalhouse Walker's car is torched, and he eventually retaliates by holding people hostage and threatening to bomb the city. There is also Orson Scott Card's Heartfire (spoilers), where it is finally revealed that the slaves in his alternate American South do not rebel because another Black man is using voodoo (I think?) to take his fellow Black people's will. Once their heartfires or something are restored, all the resentment bubbles up and they riot and torch the city. There are also multiple instances of Muslim characters of color who are either unfairly treated and end up getting recruited by terrorist organizations in crime dramas (Spooks/MI-5 has several episodes like this), or Muslim terrorists using injustice against Muslim people (usually POC) as an excuse for their attacks.

And of course there are non-fictional equivalents such as the way the Rodney King trial and resulting riots are framed. In Bay Area news, there have been protests gathering over the trial of the police officer who shot (and subsequently killed) a young Black man in the back, and the news reports I saw framed the protesters as almost threatening to riot if justice was not served.

Please feel free to list out more instances of this trope! I am particularly interested if this holds for non-USian countries/narratives.

My off-the-cuff theory is that there is a subconscious knowledge that POC are angry about racism and a subconscious fear that this anger will eventually result in the murder of White people, particularly White people who are not responsible for aforementioned racism. And thus, when POC are angry, it triggers this fear, which also leads to the unjustified thought that White people are unsafe from the Revenge of the Colored People. But the basis of the trope is "OMG these people were oppressed in the past, but not by me, and they are so angry that they turn their rage on undeserving targets, and look, we feel bad they were oppressed, but must they be so scary and angry and mean? See, they turn to violence, which clearly indicates that although they might have sympathetic motives, they go too far!" It is an extreme example of the tone argument or concern trolls, in which White people might actually feel for the injustice of racism if only those annoying brown people weren't so mean about it.

This is, of course, bunk, as a) it plays into the stereotype of angry and violent POC, particularly Black and Muslim POC, b) there is no such thing as being innocent of institutional racism when White privilege is so ingrained in the world, c) the notion that anger inevitably turns to violence and mass murder, and d) the idea that individual acts of violence have the same weight and effect as institutional oppression (I do not condone violence or think it is good, btw, but it is also not the same).

I suspect there are instances of the trope which end up being revenge fantasy, and I also suspect this holds true for other oppressed groups as well. I am also wondering if the flip side of this trope is the Tragic Mulatto narrative or narratives like it, in which POC are tragic and oppressed and conveniently off themselves at the end so White people can feel some guilt and sympathy to assuage their consciences, but not so much that they are actually inconvenienced by it or driven by it to do something about injustice.

(thanks to coffeeandink for the post title and deepad and kate_nepveu and Mely for listening to me spout off on this yesterday)

Comments

[cofax7]

... and I hate to say it, but this brings me back to Jaylake's remarkable statement about feeling unsafe at Wiscon. Because of (one must assume) the scary POC who would be there. Oy.

[oyceter]

Yes, very. I wasn't going to link it directly to that whole mess, since I've only heard about it second hand, but it's definitely inspired by the many comments I've heard about White people feeling unsafe around scary POC.

[vass]

It is an extreme example of the tone argument or concern trolls, in which White people might actually feel for the injustice of racism if only those annoying brown people weren't so mean about it.

Thank you, that makes a lot of sense.

[rachelmanija]

Spider Robinson's Night of Power may be an example, though it's about a hundred years since I read it. It's about a USA-wide race riot and takeover of the US by black nationalists, who, IIRC, are portrayed as having genuine grievances, but since (IIRC) the protagonist is a white guy trying to get his family to safety... well, it pretty much came across as you describe.

There was also a mini-genre movies in, IIRC, the 90s which were similar - they were clearly supposed to be saying, "Look how terrible racism is," but what they actually depicted were a bunch of well-meaning white people getting victimized by the POC hordes.

[oyceter]

Right. I was also going to say I'm sure it's in a lot of the crime/thriller genre TV, since it's frequently White police or investigators and POC are the guest stars and often cast as criminals. Which tangentially is why so many of those shows are problematic (even if there is a single POC in the cast), because they try for more equal casting and end up casting POC as criminals because the lead roles are already taken.

[furikku]

I had always thought of it as a kind of heavy-handed "this is why racism is bad and you shouldn't do it OK," but I think your interp is more likely.

Though either interp paints PoC as violent and liable to snap. Uuugh.

[oyceter]

Sadly, the creators probably think that is their message as well without realizing how many stereotypes it actually reinforces. Sigh.

[brigdh]

For another non-fictional example, this is basically Charles Manson's motives (which is kind of an extreme example of the problems of this trope, I guess!). I'm sure you have heard of him, but the basic details are: he thought a race war (specifically between blacks and whites; I'm not sure what the other races were supposed to be doing at the time) was inevitable, and his murders were intended to set it off. He wanted to start a race war because he thought that black people would win, and after it was over, he and his 'family' would be the only white people left, so they could emerge from hiding and rule the world.

[the_future_modernes]

He wanted to start a race war because he thought that black people would win, and after it was over, he and his 'family' would be the only white people left, so they could emerge from hiding and rule the world.


And how would Mr. Manson come to power if the black people had won the war?

[yeloson]

You should talk to coniraya. He was telling me about some episode of Buffy with an angry Indian Spirit going around killing people in return for the genocide.

Aside from the "ZOMG THEY ANGRYZ" aspect, I think there's also the fact that by painting all wrongs as a) unfixable, and b) all anger about wrongs only resolvable with the destruction of one side or the other, that it eliminates any responsibility to think about history, choice, or larger structures of racism.

In other words, by painting it as a US OR THEM situation, no one has to think about all the subtle bits between and what it means, as a human, to face this situation of grave crimes.

(There's also a second element that POC don't get to be humanized by normal motivations in media either, only by their Otherness).

[oursin]

I was going to mention that strand of trying to be revisionist Westerns which showed the oppression of Native Americans, breach of treaties, etc, and their justified reasons for anger during the canonical period - and still had them attacking the US Cavalry and a violent battle with all the usual tropes at the climax.

[nojojojo]

::sob:: Why do you pose these questions when I'm too busy to get into the conversatioooooon?! ::weeps::

I will offer Robert Heinlein's FARNHAM'S FREEHOLD, which -- aside from making me hate the man forever and never want to read anything he's ever written again -- is an in-your-face "race revenge" fantasy, and laden heavily with overt racism. In the story, a nuclear war catapults a white family (and their black servant) into the future via Handwavium (tm). There, they discover that black people have taken over the world and enslaved all whites, using the women as "bedwarmers" and even eating them. So, yeah. Not only are PoC (scratch that, just black people -- Heinlein didn't mention the existence of any other PoC as I recall) angryz, they are also cannibals and they looooove fucking white women. In a microcosmic version of the greater societal change, the family's black servant looks around this new world where people like him have power, and of course betrays the family to gain power of his own. Of course.

I'm told he also wrote a counter-fantasy to this, in which white people rule the future and are horrible to black people, but it's gone out of print. Probably because that's not exactly a futuristic idea.

[oyceter]

Arrrrrggggghh!!!!! It is like the manifestation of all fears about Black men! Also, cannibalism wtf?

[tablesaw]

This was very much the thinking of the White elites during and after the Mexican War of Independence (allowing for variable meaning of "white"). The fear was often framed as being opposed to the "excesses" that the indigenous (and those "closer" to indigenous) were prone to.

[oyceter]

Ugh. I should dig around to see if similar rhetoric sprung up around incidences like the Boxer Rebellion in China, where the invading imperialist forces could say stuff like "See how uncivilized and scary they are?"

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

I'd need to reread it to brush up on the details, but Sherman Alexie plays with multiple facets of this in Indian Killer. A serial killer is on the loose in Seattle and despite there being no letters to the press or other evidence pointing to the murderer's age, race, gender, etc., he is widely assumed by the press and public to be native because all the victims are white men, the bodies are scalped and an owl feather is left at each scene. A racist shock-jock uses the killings to whip his audience into a frenzy, and there may actually have been some explicit "this is unjustified revenge on innocents" talk in those bits, I can't quite recall -- it all sets off an increasing spiral of violence where some angry whites begin targeting natives for beatings, and then some angry young native guys lash out in turn and beat down a white guy, taunting him the whole time with a list of crimes starting with the beatings and hate-filled radio broadcasts and going back to the massacres at Sand Creek and Washita River.

(Also, for a musical example leaning towards the revenge fantasy side of this trope, there's a rap song by Sudden Rush, "Night (http://www.myspace.com/realrush) Marchers" (http://www.tropicalstormhawaii.com/music/lj/night_marchers.txt), which explicitly casts dangerous ancestral ghosts as pro-sovereignty warriors: "...the souls of the past join those of today to take back e ku'u home o Hawai'i nei...")

As for the whole sympathetic-and-conveniently-doomed Tragic Octoroon narrative as the flipside of this -- for F&SF in particular, there's also the very strong subtrope where some non-human race is set up as the POC parallels, with all the struggles and guilt and anger safely displaced to an imaginary world -- and frequently mixed in with the What These People Need Is A Honky trope, to conveniently absolve this guilt. Avatar is of course the latest and highest-profile example of this, but in SF in particular there seems to be a lot of rather anvilliciously blatant "indigenous aliens vs. human colonizers = Indians and whites on the frontier" narrative. And in the ones that don't bring in the White/Human Savior figure, you often see Native characters who make the parallels between the aliens and their ancestors bleedingly obvious (Luc Wauno in Joan Vinge's Dreamfall, Tom Two Ribbons in Robert Silverberg's Sundance, Billy Singer in Roger Zelazny's Eye of Cat), and going "back to the blanket" in some way in their solidarity with the aliens and their often-tragically-doomed resistance to the human colonizers (Singer in Eye of Cat does this and dies at the end, Two Ribbons in Sundance is left struggling with a mental breakdown. Wauno in Dreamfall survives, but he's a minor character -- the half-alien protagonist Cat, OTOH, does somewhat "go native" as he becomes involved with a resistance movement on his homeworld, and while he does manage to help them wring out some concessions from the humans and survive the book, it's at great personal cost; he's exiled, permanently separated from his newly-found family and community.)

[delux-vivens.livejournal.com]

you did not go there with Indian Killer? I know its violent as hell but it also made me fall out laughing, because parts of it were funny as hell.

[jonquil]

I'm pretty sure the movie of "Live and Let Die" qualifies. Throughout it, Caribbean and Black Americans are the scary, scary Other. The supervillain who controls all their actions -- I'm pretty sure every black in the movie winds up dead, to be his agent, or both -- is revealed to have been motivated by racial discrimination.

The book is bad, too, going on and on about "chigroes". But the movie (1973) is all about white people's fear of angry black people.

I may be off-point on this. (Migraine drugs, sloppy thinking.) But it seems to me that your point is about the trope of "This rage is justifiable, but it isn't justifiable to aim it at ME."

[phosfate]

There is also the subplot about magical white girl Solitaire's virginity. Fortunately it goes to Bond and not one of those horrible black villains. I need to throw up now.

[delux-vivens.livejournal.com]

Skeery Moozlim fears play a large part in the treatment of Darwyn by other folks in the FBI in Sleeper Cell (yes! i can still meta SC into anything! *cabbage patch*)

great post.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Skeery BROWN Moozlim, oh noes, double the terror!

[ex_surcease513]

It is an extreme example of the tone argument or concern trolls, in which White people might actually feel for the injustice of racism if only those annoying brown people weren't so mean about it.


there's a novel by Stephen King i read a while ago, "Bag of Bones" i think it was called. it used that same REVENGE IS MINE theme except it was the ghost of an angry black woman, Sarah Tidwell, who is raped and murdered by some good ole boys and comes back to haunt them to death.

& maybe OT?

i was reading about "Internet Bullying" recently and then i saw it being linked to one of the Race Imbroglios, and though i sympathize with those who feel bullied, i couldn't help but wince and think, "the racist hydra just popped another pretty head."

[yifu]

(Jumping in) It's been a while since I read Bag of Bones, and I remember having mixed feelings about it. Sure, Sara gets to kill those bad boys and their descendants, but in the end she's sort-of reduced to this scary raging monster that must be put to sleep (...by white folks). While I'm aware that that's what people usually do to vengeful ghosts, I wonder if I'd feel so conflicted if Sara were white/Kyra weren't meant to be an adorable kid.

Teacher, teacher, pick meeeee

[jonquil]

Real-world example.

Suburban white teenager Ronald DeFeo, Jr., for reasons never disclosed, murders his entire family. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_DeFeo,_Jr.

Fictionalization: He did it because the house was built on an Indian graveyard full of vengeful spirits. The Amityville Horror. PROFIT!

So we go from a story about white-people-like-us do terrifying things to it was all caused by those dead POC who are angry at us and we didn't even do anything!

[stewardess]

This is, of course, bunk, as a) it plays into the stereotype of angry and violent POC, particularly Black and Muslim POC

Yes, but the fear some whites have of being unsafe from the Revenge of the Colored People is a real thing. My theory is this is why some whites completely lose their shit when called out on racism; somewhere in their brains they think a target just got painted on their back.

Charles Manson tried to live out this trope in real life. *shudders*

[la_vie_noire]

the notion that anger inevitably turns to violence and mass murder,

Also, pretty ironic that white people are the ones systematically making genocides in non-white populations.

[la_vie_noire]

Also, dude, what about that Buffy episode about Thanksgiving? Arg, I still can't think of that one without having nausea.

[pandarus]

V. smart post, and horrifyingly interesting comments too. Brava!

[surpassingly]

Here via inkstone! You brought up a lot of very good points, thank you.

Please feel free to list out more instances of this trope! I am particularly interested if this holds for non-USian countries/narratives.

This is definitely in play here in the Philippines. I'm not sure if it is as visible a trope in narratives (it probably is, just that I've tried to avoid it in my reading so I can't speak authoritatively on that), but I've often heard white people speaking of how most people here are lovely, but why do some people have to be so resentful and rude when they [white foreigners] just want to visit the country and help the native tourism business? Add in paranoia about getting hurt because "some Filipinos just hate white people" and how daaaangerous the whole place can be if you're white. Reprise good intent and just wanting to see the beauty of the country and actually "feeling bad for the natives". Cue a lot of feedback about the country that praises its beaches and over-exaggerates violence in it (which: does not happen just to white foreigners, btw) and harps on the unwelcome received from some quarters, thusly: "why are these people so short-sighted they can't look beyond the color of my skin to see my good intentions?! Why the anger that makes me feel so threatened and unsafe? It's such a shame because they have really nice beaches..."

ack, forgot examples, sorry!

[surpassingly]

In media: ''A Western man marrying a Filipina is also marrying her family,' a local policeman told her privately, 'and he may find the sweet kitten becomes an angry tiger if things do not go her way. You must be careful.' #

I don't know if this fits. It's written by a Filipino, but ugh, I just find it so terribly, terribly problematic. It's a riff off the "mail-order bride" issue, which I think (based on observations of the couples I've seen) does have a lot of embedded guilt, awareness of the exploitation inherent in it, and hypersensitivity to possible backlash on the part of the white male.

Someone mentioned aliens needing white dude to save them, and I suddenly thought...

[nyarlathotep]

...Dune.

I mean, Arab-analogues need a honky to save them, and when they do get saved, they unleash the JIHAD across the Known Universe, and make said honky Emperor.

Does that count?

Re: Someone mentioned aliens needing white dude to save them, and I suddenly thought...

[jonquil]

OMG WINNER!

[sqbr]

(Here via my network)
I am very sleepy today (and afaict likely to just get worse for a while, so I may not reply to comments for some time), so I apologise if I misstep or just make no sense, but this is something I've been pondering for while.

I think this is part of a broader pattern of the mistreated Monster, it comes up all the time with disability and to a lesser extent gender and sexuality etc. There's the Angry Mutant, the Angry Cripple, the Angry Sexual Abuse Survivor (possible also bisexual), the Angry Mistreated Woman etc. (I wrote a bit about it here)

But I do think race is particularly popular, I guess because there's already the whole "POC/non-white people are scary" thing. That Buffy episode about the Indians was particularly egregious given the show usually had more nuance.

I'm sure some writers see it as a Deep Race Commentary or whatever, but on the whole I think it's a cheap way of creating a slightly sympathetic yet truly scary villain: have them different and mistreated in some way that the (white, able bodied etc) audience intellectually sees as not their fault and a legitimate reason for anger but deep down finds genuinely scary. It is catharsis for white guilt: yes they're angry, and mistreated, and maybe Someone should have done something in the past, but at this point they're beyond reason and have to be killed. So there's tragedy but also a sense of satisfaction when they are punished and destroyed: the audience did feel sympathy, but they also get to revenge themselves of their guilt.

Also white people can say: see! Given the chance they'll be just as horrible to us!

(Plus the stuff you said)

[harborshore]

Isn't there an element of this in Twilight? I know, looking at offensive tropes in that series is way too easy. But the (scary and violent) werewolves are also Native American, no? And they're definitely described as angry over racist injustice, which makes them scarier...

[ladyjax]

A possible antidote to this trope is when the "angry violent" (depending on your point of view) POC are real and that they are in service to the community. I'm thinking of the film/book, The Spook Who Sat By the Door.

[spiralsheep]

I'm still trying to digest this and I agree with your post but... on naming the trope.... I know this is statin' the bleedin' obvious but, I dunno, I feel it needs saying explicitly.

In most of the examples people are giving (apart from ladyjax's brilliantly subversive contribution, heh) the story is presented as Night of the Living Non-White or Revenge of the Coloured People BUT the story is actually Night of the Dying Non-White (KILL THEM ALL!!) or Revenge of the White Guilt (on Coloured People) which, y'know, is different cos it still centres the Heroic White Protagonist (which, yes, as you analysed, is the point of the trope).

It's like vampires (rich white men) being centred as protagonists while zombies (the poor/poc masses) are always the Other (except in Joan Frances Turner's upcoming YA novel Dust, to name one subversive example).

/bleedin' obvious

offtopic

[jonquil]

I have read the JFT in advance and it's unbelievably good. Vividly, vividly written, great characterization, a page-turner, with a plot. I've read two good fantastic novels in the last 12 months, this and A Madness of Angels.

[issenllo]

Am I muddying the waters if I mention the recent white-washing of a TV series which was meant to portray the life of an Australian-Chinese sniper (he was a war hero)?

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/director-slammed-for-white-out-of-legendary-gallipoli-sniper/story-e6frg6nf-1225862770626

[monanotlisa]

Trying to think of German examples of this trope, but with a different culture and history - if still in a Western context, of course - I'd expect the coding of this or similar tropes to vary.

National Socialist propaganda is a given, and the only thing I could find in abundance during the last half-hour's net research, but from your list above, I take it you're looking at more contemporary motifs. With German colonialism not at all present in today's citizen's mind, and without any visible impact on society (visible! Of course German imperialism had, uh. Lots of impact), I suspect I'd find a more generalised xenophobia rather than an uprising from disenfranchised people of colour within, if that makes any sense? Orcen hordes rather than black zombie armies.

But I could, as always, be talking out of my ass, and very certainly just need to think a little longer about German books I read and German movies I've watched...

[spiralsheep]

With German colonialism not at all present in today's citizen's mind

Hmm, no "gypsy" curse equivalents to the indigenous American Indian examples mentioned above? No revenge of the Turks/Muslims? If that's true then it's interesting wrt to the speculations in comments about white guilt cos if Germans rly have buried their Imperialism and racism sooo deep that they don't feel guilt about it then there'd be no subconscious prompt to scary-not-us-people revenge fantasies, perhaps?

[veejane]

I just remembered a funny quasi-counter example, which I bet nobody else on your flist has ever seen. It's Assault of Precinct 13, the original from the 70s not the French reworking about which people write fanfic.

It's directed by John Carpenter, so firmly with one foot in the horror genre. And it's a Revenge of The Oppressed scenario, where a couple of harmless teens run afoul of nasty cops and get killed, resulting in The Gangs Deciding To Do Something. They cruise the neighborhood in a late-model Ford looking menacing; they shoot an ice-cream vendor for no reason (killing a little blonde girl by accident, but with no remorse); and then at sunset they settle in for a siege of the titled precinct.

And on the one hand, you're recognizing the plot, right? They bust in windows and shoot everything in sight and eventually break down doors like a surging horde. It's so obviously a real-world ripoff of Night of the Living Dead that Carpenter owes somebody royalties.

On the other hand, the protagonist is an ambitious black cop (same as in NOTLD), sent to close down the precinct. The Incorrigible Prisoner Who Becomes An Ally is white. The gang invaders are represented in groups of four (white, black, Asian, and Hispanic, and if they'd needed a fifth ethnicity-representative somebody would have been stuck in the jump seat of the Ford).

So it's a weird document of its time: overtly overturning racial stereotypes, while still buying into the underlying plot-eventuality. We see plenty of bad cops, but there's no moment when the protagonist is given the opportunity to question the idea of cops as imposers of order. And of course our modern, gentle, quick-thinking cop-protagonist would resolve the situation safely, if only the gangs hadn't resorted to violence first. He is reluctantly drawn into the violence, like a gunslinger of old, rather than seeking it as a first-line strategy.

And if you find that entertaining I can try to interpret The Warriors in similar fashion: a consciously deracialized gang-mob story (although in the case of the Warriors, their response is flight to home territory rather than overt violence).

[phosfate]

Also Fort Apache, the Bronx.

I loved Assault on Precinct 13 back in the day, because it was the first thing I ever saw where bullets actually put asplodey, bloody holes in people instead of just making them fall down.