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.

[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]

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.

[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.

[rachelmanija]

Yeah, that's something I've thought about a lot (for obvious reasons.) A single choice early on (casting all or nearly all white people as the recurring cast) makes it extremely difficult to not be racist for the entire run of the show: you either end up with tons of POC criminals, or else you have no POC at all.

I've seen some shows do a fairly good job of avoiding that by casting POC in other types of guest roles (other cops, consultants, witnesses, etc) but they are struggling against the stream, and that could completely be avoided by not making all or most of the leads white in the first place.

[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.

[sparkymonster]

I am very "!!!!" face at Spider Robinson writing that. On so many, many levels.

[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.

[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).

[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?

[brigdh]

Apparently, he thought black people would be incapable of ruling the world themselves. His plan had a few problems with it, I'd have to say, in addition to the whole murdering people thing.

[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.

[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]

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

[oyceter]

I remember that! Mely also mentioned the entire subgenre of Native curses, where you get to have scary angry POC without even having live ones around.

[oyceter]

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

[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?"

[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]

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.)

[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.

[nojojojo]

I wonder whether Egyptian tomb curses, and voodoo curses, would count? I think the voodoo curse stuff definitely, because curses don't even make sense in vodun -- that whole genre is bullshit.

[nojojojo]

And now that I think of it, I wonder whether there's a whiff of this in Suzy McKee Charnas' WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD et al? I haven't finished the series yet -- it's a hard, painful read, though well worth it -- but from what I've heard, at the end of the series, the culture of monstrous white men (who enslave, rape, and *eat* their women) and nearly-as-monstrous white women (who reproduce parthenogenically by screwing horses, and leave their kids to grow up feral), encounters another surviving culture for the first time. And they're shocked and horrified to find out that these people *are PoC*, because the men have spent centuries villifying PoC and women for the apocalypse that destroyed the world (which they implemented themselves). My suspicion is that this implied revenge fantasy is intentional on Charnas' part; she doesn't strike me as the type to pull punches. (::pause for obligatory fangirling at Charnas::)