Revenge of the Colored People/Night of the Non-White
Fri, Jun. 4th, 2010 09:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceterI 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 tocoffeeandink for the post title and deepad and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kate_nepveu and Mely for listening to me spout off on this yesterday)
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)Tags:
(no subject)
Fri, Jun. 4th, 2010 09:22 pm (UTC)(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.)
(no subject)
Sat, Jun. 5th, 2010 12:38 am (UTC)"I'm surprised you can laugh about this." "It's what Indians do."
Sat, Jun. 5th, 2010 12:54 am (UTC)BWAH. Speaking of Amazon reviews...
Sat, Jun. 5th, 2010 06:49 am (UTC)The way some of those reviewers are freaking out about Alexie's anger reminds me of an ex who really took serious umbrage with the Hothead Paisan comics -- even though there are lots of scenes where Hothead is full of rage and contempt for some straight women, bits where the author breaks the fourth wall to talk about the revenge fantasy elements being meant as catharsis, not suggestions for real-world behavior, or for that matter scenes in story where Hothead's friends are trying to get her to see that letting her anger control her life isn't healthy, all he came away with from it was grumbling about how she hates men so much. Expressions of justified anger from the oppressed, and media that aren't written to be reassuring to the those with the most power and privilege, must be soooo threatening to delicate feefees...