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

[oyceter]

Yes! Mely also mentioned the Indian curse trope. It's like a more PC version of being racist, like the White Savior trope... you get to say you are sympathetic to anti-oppression while simultaneously playing into all the tropes in the end anyway.

[oursin]

I have a feeling that British fictional narratives of the Indian (aka Sepoy) Rebellion of 1857 might well have similar tropes, but although I have read quite a number of these by different authors, I haven't read any recently enough to say anything particularly intelligent on the subject. Have a recollection that there does tend to be some initial sympathy over the grievances of the sepoys and the other groups involved (with a hindsight 'mistakes were made' angle, rather than an anti-imperialism message); though also pervasive motif of the Loyal Native who protects the white people after violence has erupted.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Yeah -- Cursed Indian Artifacts, Haunted Indian Burial Grounds, same diff -- they all play into the dominant trope that says we were all killed off in the distant past. In far too many narratives, the only space for a native character in a modern-day setting is as a ghost.

[wiliqueen.livejournal.com]

Mercedes Lackey's Burning Water definitely falls into this category, with the added bonus of living POC being brought under the vengeful Mayan god's sway. I reread it recently for the first time in about twenty years, and just kept thinking OH MISTY NO.

There are lots of points where you see she's trying to stay out of the pitfalls, like with major POC characters valiantly!fighting!theinfluence!, which... ends up not so much stay out of the pitfalls as going *splat* in them.

There was a time *koff*beforeRaceFail09*koff* where I would have thought "Well, this was published in '89, the industry has wised up a bit since then." But, well, not so much. I'm sure it's threaded pervasively through urban fantasy (of which the Diana Tregarde series is a root example, before the now-standard term for the genre came into being), well beyond the limits of my reading.

[wiliqueen.livejournal.com]

Aaaaaand, tag close FAIL. *facepalm* Sorry!

[wiliqueen.livejournal.com]

Oh! And also in the Vengeful Ghost category, in the horror genre proper (which, again, no doubt has plenty), I can't believe it took me until just now to think of Candyman.

Which, just to add an extra layer of WTF, reinvents the "Bloody Mary" folklore, which is widely associated with Mary Tudor (about the whitest ghost imaginable), and substitutes a black male victim of racially-motivated murder.