On Viewing "Out of Africa" and Black Silences

This is in brief response to a great blog post over at A Historian Goes to the Movies*:

"The film never contemplates the possibility that this devotion might be a calculated strategy of self-interest, in which a lower status person chooses to serve a more powerful person as way of getting employment, shelter, legal protection, or whatever else might be needed. Instead, Africans just seem to love their benevolent colonial masters. "

One of the things I love most about film and watching movies is being taken through the looking glass and into someone else's experience. And I have to say that every time I see Out of Africa I am lost in the love story- Redford is the Best in the biz at playing the ever-alluring but emotionally unavailable man, then Meryl just kills me and I'm a crying mess. "He was not ours, he was not mine." 

However, despite my love for this film, I was so happy to come upon your post because it highlights one of the crazy experiences one has when the things you love do not love you back! As a Black, female, womanist academic I study literature and film as storytelling modes that both work for and against expectations rooted in our history of violence, oppression, and appropriation. But even before entering graduate school I was aware of the conflict of what Munoz calls disidentifications*, wherein one must negotiate the ways that something one is drawn to can also be hostile to who one is as a socialized person.

All that is to say, I have these moments all the time when  in the midst of pleasantly enjoying a film something happens on screen and I suddenly realize that the movie has no space for my spectatorship. All the silence surrounding the African peoples in the film is a painful slap, a reminder of the silencing constantly being perpetrated against Black voices. And all set amidst the most beautiful of scenery.

Your comment I have quoted at the start is something I of course assumed about the 'African'/Masai/etc characters in the film because people in oppressed circumstances must work with the limited demonstrative/agential resources available to survive. Who in this day and age still believes that these African peoples wanted to work in silence like human Rumbas and be moved about like so many chess pieces by Karen Blixen on her 'Farm, Toil, Love' journey of self-discovery?? But so many do not see these misrepresentations or actually know history well enough to understand, and so I thank you for your post! It is yet another reminder why our work as cultural critics is so important.

Jose Esteban Munoz's book goes into more glorious detail about this phenomenon, and it is called "Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics"


*A Historian Goes to the Movies

George Junius Stinney Jr.: Why "White-Wash" History of Child Execution?

In this blog post about the murder...

Aside: I say murder because a 14 year old Black boy found guilty and sentenced to death in one day by a court house full of White male jurors, all White spectators, and a White Judge in 1944 rural South Carolina is murder

...of George Junius Stinney Jr., I became horrified by the desire of the blogger to declare the system just despite all of the glaring evidence to the contrary easily discoverable on the internet with regards to this child's case. I had to post a response, especially as more may come to light about this case as a man in South Carolina fights to clear the child's name if only to bring to light our country's history of allowing the state to put children as young as 10 and 12 into electric chairs and hangman's nooses.

His entire blog post was filled to overflowing with ambiguous, ahistorical, and terrifyingly bad assessments of both the child's guilt and the course of events surrounding his ultimate execution. But it was his closing with the below statement that forced me to post some sort of response:

"However, nothing illegal was done during the investigation and prosecution of the case. All the procedures utilized by the police, courts, prosecution and prison system conform to the existing standards and legal requirements of the time and place."

And this was my response, we'll see if he allows it to show up on his blog:

What is at stake for you in making this ludicrous and patently false claim with regards to this child murdered by his own government? Why the insistence on his guilt and the right behavior of those who conspired to kill the boy?

To interrogate a child who just happened to be seen somewhere near where two girls were killed without anyone else there should horrify you! How difficult would it have been to intimidate a 14 year old boy in a time where even he knew that his life was worth less than nothing to those harassing him into confession? I saw a freakin' DiscoveryID show a few months ago where a fine upstanding White man from the midwest confessed to killing his own child when the cops interrogated him for 20hours - then a lawyer, DNA evidence, and his wife's support proved him completely innocent! The look in his eyes as he explained what it was like in that tiny room with those cops will haunt me forever. And that was a White man in 2000s America! This was a Black child in 1940's America.

What is your motive here? Because instead of honesty, compassion, and reality (because for some reason you need to believe race played no role and this child was not assassinated) this story compels you to defend a system which has many, many instances in even our current day and age of people (of all races!) railroaded by police and imprisoned or put to death when they were really innocent. This country has often made victims of innocents due to a system where, once the police decide you are guilty, you can forget any chance of reprieve unless you have the money to buy proper evidentiary procedure.

As a teacher, as a woman, as a human being, I am unable to adequately express my distress, sadness, and terror at the thought that after casually googling this poor child's name, I come across a blog that holds our history and this child's life so cheaply as to proclaim what happened to him just.

The Only appropriate, sustainable Path our country can take is to Own and Accept our history in all of its horror and ugliness and use it as a guide to avoid replicating the same mistakes and abuses of the gift of life and location. This begins with avoiding the desire to make history nice and ignore the incomprehensibly terrifying fact that seemingly nice people killed a child because they could not look at him and see a child and a human, but only their own fear, prejudice and hatred.

Please, henceforth if you discuss this type of situation as "fair," and make pleas on behalf of the "differing social mores" of our past, remember that those "different" mores do not make the actions produced any less worthy of condemnation! Injustice of this kind, just because it's in a "different time" is no less deserving of the full extent our of horrified disavowal of this thinking. Human life should never be so casually written off that this is called fair or acceptable.

College Women Use Sex Work to Pay For School, People Use it to Judge Them Harshly

In this Huffington Post article about women, and some men, entering sex work to pay off student loan debt, a lot of the commenters are engaging in uber-judgmental and harsh commentary. So this is my response to one comment that seemed tone deaf and ill-advised at best.

"HHGodd: How is your credit more important than your dignity and self respect? Whatever happens to them they deserve it."

Ouch. Your above comment feels a little apathetically judgmental.

And since when has society/popular culture in America/the West celebrated or encouraged women to have/maintain dignity, self-respect, positive body image, or any other attitude that would have lead to a different sort of social outcome?

Women are mocked in comedy as not begin funny, mocked in sports as not being as able or as fun to watch, mocked in science as not being as bright (heck, that transgender Harvard prof said the major difference between being a woman versus a man is that as a man she is allowed to finish a sentence without interruption), mocked as being too emotional...

Women are mocked for all sorts of reasons beyond what I have mentioned here and which contribute to women being seen as objects. Objects of ridicule and sexual objects.

So not only is saying these women deserve some unmentioned but presumably horrible outcome a nasty and despicable thing to say, its also stated without consideration for the fact that one can only do what one's society has taught you to do, and wishing harm on other people is part of that culture too.

An Ode To Travel

Some folks were complaining over at NYMag on a post about a woman who doesn't know how to pack to fly in America about traveling being too consumery and there's no need for it. But that seems crazy to me as a reason not to see the world! So I had to post a response.
Why travel?

If you have ever seen Oahu sea turtles nesting on a beach that a seal just left in a "bad neighborhood" that still manages to have breathtaking natural beauty...
if you have ever seen whales breaching in the waters off Maui...
if you've ever seen the sun set in the Ocean from the Pacific Coast Highway in Nepenthe, CA...
if you've ever seen the glowing waters at night in the bio-luminescent bay in Vieques...
if you've ever stood in crystal clear waters with dolphins leaping out of waves a hundred yards out under the warm Caribbean sun as the sea gently laps at your body like a blessing....

If you have seen any of these things then you would understand that, despite my Abhorrence for all travel related elements - especially the TSA's insistence on defiling my person, sexually assaulting me, and invading my privacy - I still tough it out and will continue to as long as I can scrape the money together to voyage beyond my beloved NYC whenever I can!

Because traveling to new places leaves you new as well, and touched by the different energies, experiences, people, and points of contacts in ways profound and important.

Plus only through the attempt to learn and accept things, places and people different/other than yourself can you know how to see yourself in context, place your life in perspective. Through travel you come to understand that you are where the global and local meet, and you decide the rippled outcome.

This is why since the dawn of man people have felt compelled to venture out beyond their homelands.

Well, that, and to get drunk on white sand beaches and have steamy sex with hot strangers.

Summer's Eve Marked by Arrival of an Angry Vagina!!

So, Summer's Eve which is well known for creating ridiculous, mildly insulting commercials for their seemingly unnecessary crap has gone one further. They've made three ads which seem not only creepy but racist, stereotypical, and overall plain insulting too.
Sigh.

The Black women's version talks about hair because no other women have hair or spend time on it right?:



I don't know which is more Odd:

1)The fact that somehow Summer's Eve thought that using a Talking Hand as a stand in for women's Vaginae totally made sense, or

2)That they thought producing commercials implying that selling hygiene products for women's vaginal spaces requires a Talking Hand that speaks in stereotypical 'whooo sista' girl' accented commentary made sense.

And thank you Summer's Eve for giving the Black Vagina/Hand an Afro because I was wondering what the hair was like down there on myself! Oh Yeah, I hope they do the same for the other racial groups!!

Sigh.


Oh and that's just my feelings about the commercial targeting Black women... there's versions for White and Latina women too!


The White Vagina/Hand talks about going to the gym, and is White so I guess maybe it has an eating/body-dismorphic disorder:



Advertising Mad Men: Oh Boy, we'll have the White one mention working out because only White women do that! We all know those minorities are so Fat!


The Latina Vagina/Hand talks about wearing a leopard print thong, complains about having children, and goes "Ay, ay, ay", of course:



Advertising Mad Men: Oohh lets have the Latina's subtly reference the Anchor Baby conversations by having her complain about being mistreated despite the hard work of having had babies!!

Sigh.

I wonder where the Summer's Eve Asian women's commercial is - you know, one with a slightly yellowed Vagina/Hand advocating for a good cleaning of their vaginae after they've spent the day cleaning other people's laundry?

Or the Muslim women's version - with a Vagina/Hand in hijab that just mummers quietly, unintelligibly through the heavy, black fabric.

Why not pull out all the insulting stereotype stops!!


"I don't want to live on this planet anymore."
-Professor Farnsworth