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

[nightowl]

(Delurking at last to comment.^^ I really liked your words during RaceFail '09 and I subscribed when I read a recent-ish entry you wrote about knowledge and who gets to know what. It resonated with me as I am in science and ideas about knowledge are obviously a constant presence.)

Hm, it has been ages since I read this series, but Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis's Deathgate Cycle had one book (I think it was the 2nd one, Elven Star), where a dwarf character loses his entire tribe (?), becomes really embittered, and when given a chance to help a human and an elf character, secretly plots revenge (when we have access to his thoughts, I recall them being pretty much, "Yes yes, suffer more, humans and elves!" although, IMO, he managed to remain sympathetic instead of "Scary! Must be put down!"). The humans and elves seemed pretty white to me, and they were definitely aristocratic, while the dwarf came across as much less so. I don't know if he was coded POC though, since he IS a dwarf. He winds up "redeeming" himself by dying to save the elf rather than getting killed because he was Out of Control Angry, so I guess it's a combination of this trope and the tragic self-sacrifice one you mentioned at the end. (Again, so many caveats because I last read these 10 years ago.)

Another one that occurred to me that (kind of sort of) fits is, er, Minekura Kazuya's Saiyuki? The youkai are obviously set up as some kind of "racial/ethnic minority" who are unfairly treated by the dominant humans, and they wind up going berserk and killing/eating humans. The comparison to minorities can get a little shaky because the youkai actually DO eat humans (though they can and in many cases, choose not to), whereas cannibalism in POC is just an outright fear-mongering lie. Additionally, I doubt that racism is going to be revealed as the motivations behind the big bads - HOWEVER, the grunt youkai cannon fodder often pull out the, "We are actually so much better than puny humans so JOIN US!" speech, which not only sets up "Us vs. Them," but points to underlying resentment of oppression behind their actions (if not the actions of their bosses).

For some reason it's really hard to come up with concrete examples of this trope even though I know I've seen it everywhere. I keep thinking of What These People Need is a Honky, probably due to the recent spate of movie casting fail that seems to play right into that.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Saiyuki's kind of complicated and ambiguous to try to fit completely into this trope -- Minekura's definitely using the youkai and humans and kami, and despised hanyou or "heretical" kami/youkai hybrids, to explore issues including prejudice and othering and revenge, but she's very cagey about not choosing sides too directly. The youkai have gone berserk due to the machinations of a selfish youkai queen and a renegade human priest who both treat other living beings, youkai and human alike, as nothing but pawns; and we see both humans and youkai who are resentful or vengeful against the other species due to past wrongs -- youkai characters like Banri, Yakumo, Pippi's and her village, etc., all resent or fear humans, but they're also often a little more sympathetic than the human villagers or monasteries that sneer at youkai, or blatantly prejudiced human youkai-slayers like Rikudo or Hazel; and there are sympathetic, honorable antagonists (Gat, the Kou-tachi) on both sides. She has a definite pattern of characters who are consumed by hatred and vengeance dying and/or being literally transformed into monsters (Yakumo, Rikudo, Hazel, Hakkai, Dougan), while characters who can take a step back from their prejudices to see others as individuals rather than prejudging them as members of a group (Seika, You) survive, and the Sanzo-ikkou itself is 3/4 characters who are betwixt and between human and youkai in various ways, and throughout their journey are alternately fighting and aiding both groups. There's a fair bit of "they're horrible, JOIN US!" and "whose side are you on?" coming from both humans and youkai, but the main ethos of the Sanzo-ikkou seems to be in line with Gojyo's "the only side I'm on is my own"...

(But Hazel, I think, would definitely count as an inversion of the "What These People Need Is a Honky" trope! Only white character in the cast, thinks he's crusading to save the world from the evil youkai and is initially welcomed as a saviour by the human villagers, but eventually ends up willingly depowered and shaken by the knowledge that all his life, he's been played and deceived by a more powerful force...)

[nightowl]

Yeah, in short I totally agree with you. I just threw Saiyuki up here because parts of it could fit, but I should've clarified even more than I did. It might qualify better as a subversion? I think she does an interesting job messing around with established fault lines - in particular, the Sanzo-ikkou pretty much judges on a case by case basis rather than siding with one group wholesale. However, they're moving about in a world where, as you've pointed out, everyone wants them to choose sides, that does have an Us vs. Them mentality, and on the surface, it seems like an oppressed peoples go berserk and need to be put down plot. The reality, of course, is two selfish people's machinations and a whole lot of other complications.

I didn't mean to imply that I thought Saiyuki was playing this trope entirely straight without any sort of awareness. It's a better series than that.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

*nods* I know there are at least a couple of other Saiyuki readers here (waves at Oyce and Rachel and glass-icarus), but I figured it couldn't hurt to expand on things a little for any folks who aren't familiar with the title. (And I must admit, the anime adaptations sometimes make me cringe a little when they go in for giving some of the cannonfodder-filler!youkai-of-the-week gray-green skin...)

[rachelmanija]

Here!

Not that I have anything intelligent to add, except that I too see it as more of a conscious working out and sometimes subversion of related tropes than an example of what Oyce is talking about.

[nightowl]

Saiyuki: More than meets the eye!

[nightowl]

Yeah, definitely, thanks for expanding on things - don't want people to think that Saiyuki fell hook-line-and-sinker to this trope, that would totally give the wrong impression of this series. I'm finding it unreasonably hard to come up with specific examples for this trope, somehow, and I currently cannot stop thinking about friggin' Saiyuki, which probably made me too eager to post about it.^^;

(Ah the anime. I really do not like those adaptations, and I made the mistake of seeing them before ever touching the manga. It had its moments but was mostly kind of terrible - I think watching the anime first almost single-handedly caused me to dismiss the entire series as melodramatic crap. Glad I gave it a second chance years later.^^)

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Ah ha ha, Saiyuki does that to people -- it's been EATING MY BRAIN for the last three years, so I understand the urge to meta about it completely! ^_~

[glass_icarus]

Hee! *waves back* :D I have been failing to catch up on Saiyuki for so long now, omg- bad fangirl, no biscuit.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

It's good timing! Ibun and Blast both started off slow but they are really getting interesting now, so you can binge on them all at once and end on a high note. (And the latest Blast chapter is the most glorious piece of crack since the "Wrestling King" omake!)