The representation
of 'race' in mass media by Mike Daley
York University
Introduction
To inquire into the representation of 'race' in media is to bring together a
number of disparate threads. First among these is the nature and history of
racism, of the stereotyping and essentializing of a group of people based on
race. As will be seen, the bond between race and racism is not airtight, and
the Othering of groups has more to do with power relations than any biological
truths. Racism itself has a number of streams that will be discussed here, but
perhaps first I should mention that this survey will focus on the American context
of racism and representation, and that the racial dialectic here will be primarily
between constructions of "white" and "black". The reasons
for the former are largely pragmatic, as this allows a focus for the historical
narrative. The latter qualification is connected to the geographical limitations
of the study, in that the primary racial dichotomy in the United States has
been between white Euro-Americans and black African-Americans. As James Snead
noted (paraphrasing W.E.B. DuBois), the 'Negro' is 'the metaphor
of the twentieth century, the major figure in which these power relationships
of master/slave, civilized/primitive, enlightened/backward, good/evil, have
been embodied in the American subconscious'(Snead 1997:26?. While the literal
population dominance of African-Americans is rapidly changing - the Latino/a
presence in the United States is becoming decisive in end-of-the-millenium U.S.
domestic policy - that change has not yet significantly impacted on the literature.
The split between "black" and "white" is still the defining
mark of American culture, and it will no doubt dominate discourse about race
in that context for some time to come.
I will look in this paper at the construction of whiteness since the 19th century,
a topic that is the essential complement to a study of representations of blackness.
The constitution of white identity is fully bound up in the ways that black
culture is described and represented in media and daily discourse. This separation
of white and black cultures becomes complicated and mitigated with the postwar
phenomenon of the so-called 'white negro', the bohemian who draws
on selected aspects of black culture as a salve for perceived deficiencies in
mainstream culture. Though the "white negro" seems at first like a
site of possibilities for cultural bordercrossing, we will see that the process
in many ways reinscribes the same racist assumptions as more overt stereotypes.
By seeming to be benevolent in his/her romanticized celebration of black life,
the white negro insidiously reinforces racism.
I will also touch on a number of media representations of racial difference,
starting with the first major crucible of raced representation in the United
States, the minstrel show. Minstrelsy instantiated the complex love-hate relationship
that nineteenth century white Americans harboured towards the black community.
With the dawning of the twentieth century, the discourse surrounding jazz, film
and the folk revival provided further manifestations of the changing representations
of black and white people. Greenwich Village after World War II was a site for
bohemianism and its specific racial attitudes to flourish in ways that were
to have a ripple effect on popular culture.
I have emphasized these sites of representation because they have yielded some
of the most interesting scholarship and inquiry. For this reason I give less
emphasis to literature, television and postwar popular music. Also, these mediums
can be, and have been, discussed using many of the same analytical models as
those that have been implemented in the study of jazz discourse, film, minstrelsy,
etc.
Race
The whole of the inquiry into race and representation hinges on an idea of 'race'.
This term has a long history of meanings, with little in the way of consensus
between different groups. Thus 'race' means very different things
at different times and even between different people at the same time. To Henry
Louis Gates Jr., 'race' is entirely a construct, with no reality
other than its usage in discourse.
'races', put simply, do not exist, and to claim that they do, for whatever misguided reason, is to stand on dangerous ground...For, if we believe that races exist as things, as categories of being already 'there,' we cannot escape the danger of generalizing about observed differences between human beings as if the differences were consistent and determined, a priori (Gates 1986:402-3).
I agree with Gates in
his rejection of "race" as a stable, coherent category. For that reason
I have followed his practice of using quotation marks for the word "race"
in the title of this paper, and occasionally in the body of the text. I would
ask the reader to assume the quotation marks around further occurrences of the
word in the text, as well as around "black" and "white".
Gates argues against definitions of racism that only allow contemptuous or aggressive
behavior to be classified as racist. To Gates 'Afro-American history
is full of examples of 'racist' benevolence, paternalism, and sexual
attraction,' (ibid.:403). Thus Gates defines racism as existing when
one generalizes about
the attributes of an individual (and treats him or her accordingly). Such generalizations
are based upon a predetermined set of causes or effects thought to be shared
by all members of a physically defined group who are also assumed to share certain
'metaphysical' characteristics...[this] can have rather little to
do with aggression or contempt in intent, even if the effect is contemptible
(but often 'well-intentioned') (ibid:403-4).
The "benevolent" racism that Gates describes has many faces in the
twentieth century context. The romanticization of black culture (often simultaneous
with the act of co-optation) has done little to reverse notions of certain "black"
attributes as unchanging, natural and instinctual - "in the blood".
White people have often represented black culture as separable from black people,
an object to be frozen in time and space. This has become especially prevalent
with the increasing commodification of cultural products. The jazz record, schizophonically
ripped from its performance context, became a fetish, a trace of blackness to
be studied, imitated and eventually superseded technically. Jazz films codified
the process mythologically, and it was re-enacted in the blues and folk revivals,
the rock and roll period, and in hip-hop.
Questions of representation can not be separated from an inquiry into systematic
racism and the power struggles that it instantiates. As Edward Said has written,
representations are put to use in the domestic economy of an imperial society...representation
[is a] discursive system involving political choices and political forces, authority
in one form or another (quoted in hooks 1990:72)
Mass media and mythical formations
The primary crucible for representation in the twentieth-century context is
the mass media. Media, according to Stuart Hall, is the arena where ideologies
are both produced and transformed; the mass media produces 'representations
of the social world, images, descriptions, explanations and frames for understanding
how the world is and why it works as it is said and shown to work' (Hall
1995:19-20). Ideologies work by representing 'common sense', by
seeming to model the way things are supposed to be.
Media representations often feed into the realm of social myth. I am using the
concept of "myth" here as "a narrative...that people collectively
believe in independently of its 'truth' or 'falsity'" (Rodman 1996:30-31).
Myths are always revealing about the fears, fantasies and desires of the people
that circulate them. They endure because "they resolve - by venting latent
social contradictions - conflicts that otherwise would remain troublesome"
(Snead 1997:4, after Levi-Strauss). Moreover, ideology is often reproduced in
mythical formations - "a set of related myths that revolve around a particular
point (or points) of articulation" (Rodman 1996:31).
Stereotypes
The representation of race in media has been infused since the beginning with
a series of interlocked myths, a racist mythical formation. This racist ideology
includes a number of stereotypes, essentialized models of Otherness against
which cultures are aligned. Donald Bogle, in his groundbreaking study of blacks
in American films, developed a model of five African-American stereotypes as
represented by the cinema:
1. The Tom - the 'Good Negro'; Bogle notes:
Always as toms are chased, harassed, hounded, flogged, enslaved, and insulted, they keep the faith, nâer turn against their white massas, and remain hearty, submissive, stoic, generous, selfless, and oh-so-very kind. Thus they endear themselves to white audiences and emerge as heroes of sorts (Bogle 1973:3)1 .
2. The Coon - actually three types, the pure Coon, the pickaninny and the uncle remus. The pure coons were the most degrading of all black stereotypes. They were the
no account-niggers,
those unreliable, crazy, lazy, subhuman creatures good for nothing more than
eating watermelons, stealing chickens, shooting crap, or butchering the English
language (ibid.:8)
The pickaninny was generally a black child, a 'harmless, screwball creation
whose eyes popped [and] whose hair stood on end with the least excitement'
(ibid.:7). Probably the most well-known pickaninnies are Buckwheat and Stymie
from the Hal Roach Our Gang series, syndicated to television through the 1980s
as The Little Rascals.
Finally, the uncle remus is another harmless, friendly stereotype, given to
'quaint, naive and comic philosophizing' (ibid.:9). He was immortalized
in the Disney film "Song of the South"(1946), which Bogle calls "a
corruptive piece of Old South propaganda put together to make money" (Bogle
1973:191), yet it "glaringly signalled the demise of the Negro as fanciful
entertainer or comic servant" (ibid.:192).
3. The Tragic Mulatto - usually fair-skinned, trying pathetically to pass for
white. The Tragic Mulatto is a sympathetic character (as Bogle points out, this
is probably because of their white blood [ibid.:9]).
4. The Mammy - this is the predominant female black stereotype - the Mammy is usually loud, independent and overweight. Her offshoot is the aunt jemima, who is 'sweet, jolly and good-tempered' (ibid.:10).
5. The Brutal Black Buck - another pernicious and enduring stereotype, the buck was introduced to audiences the 1915 film Birth of a Nation. The character of Gus (played by a white actor, Walter Long, in blackface) occupied the buck role in this film. Bucks are always 'big, baadddd niggers, over-sexed and savage, violent and frenzied as they lust for white flesh'(ibid.:16). The buck stereotype played on the white audienceâs fear of black-white miscegenation, as the threatening black man was set in contrast to the idealized white woman. The buck is bestial, uncontrollable in his sexual appetite. The buck type was to reoccur as a subtext of the discourse surrounding the rock and roll craze of the 1950s.
As Stuart Hall notes,
these types of stereotypical images are deeply ambivalent - they are both comforting
and threatening to the white observer (Hall 1997). Either way, they provide
a series of convenient roles for the white representation of blak people. All
of them play into white fantasies of moral, spiritual and mental superiority.
Essentialism
Essentialism, in many ways, forms the backbone of what we mean when we investigate
race and representation. The idea that representations are informed by social
constructions of race and racism depends on the existence of stereotypes - that
'black' culture is essentially something (while 'white'
culture continues on as a 'nothing' or norm). While Kwame Anthony
Appiah and Henry Louis Gates proclaim at the outset of their volume Identities
their commitment to anti-essentialist critiques of identity, within the text
itself essayist Walter Benn Michaels offers that "there are no anti-essentialist
accounts of identity" (Michaels 1995:61ff). What he means is that the very
search for identity (which is based on the idea that "we need to know who
we are in order to know what past is ours" [Michaels 1995:59]) depends
on a notion of group-belonging that requires an essentialist approach. Merely
by aligning oneself with a definable group (white, male, heterosexual), one
assumes certain essential qualities that characterize that group.
This is still true when notions of 'culture' supersede notions of 'race', as
started to happen in the early 20th century. As Michaels points out, earlier
constructs of identity as based on race depended on the notion of a "common
scale", against which races could be compared. Different races were thought
to possess different measures of various traits - the traits were, of course,
unevenly distributed, which allowed for the existence of racial superiority.
Cultural pluralism replaced this, extending the earlier notion of racial identity
into a question of cultural identity - rather than race alone determining a
set of traits, culture (which could ostensibly cross racial lines) was the determiner
of those traits. Race became unmeasurable and inscrutable and thus the races
were not subject to comparison. But cultural pluralism merely introduced a new
breed of essentialism. "Who we are" remains at the center of what
is identified as culture, not "what we do". This is the hallmark of
essentialism. And Stuart Hall rejects the deployment of "strategic essentialism"
embraced in the work of Gayatri Spivak as ultimately self-defeating:
The moment the signifier "black" is torn from its historical, cultural, and political embedding and lodged in a biologically constituted racial category, we valorize, by inversion, the very ground of the racism we are trying to deconstruct...we fix that signifier outside history, outside change, outside political intervention (Hall 1997:130).
Keith Negus, in his Popular
Music in Theory, has described the crisis of identity that has characterized
cultural criticism for some years. What once seemed fixed - race, gender, class,
ethnicity - has become problematic. The interests of diversity and difference
sometimes clash noisily with the interests of community as identities become
confused, conflicted and sometimes maddeningly particular. Nonetheless, the
world outside of the academy continues to blithely label and compartmentalize
people and cultures. Negus cites music marketing labels as examples of the forging
of fixed links between social groups and musical sounds. He argues that essentialist
labelling is being replaced by the creation of identities through specific articulations,
but this assertion seems academic at best. Philip Tagg has effectively shown
how essentialist ideas about black music and white music are deeply flawed (Tagg
19 ), as they rely on the most static, stereotyped versions of these musics
possible. Yet essentialist ideas about music and culture continue to circulate
as the dominant mode of discourse.
Whiteness
Against a backdrop of white "normalcy", 'black' (and Asian,
Indian, Latino/a) are marked categories. They call attention to themselves by
virtue of being divergent from the norm. Whiteness itself remains largely unquestioned;
it is an absence of race. 'Whiteness is everywhere,' George Lipsitz
writes, 'but it is very hard to see' (Lipsitz 1995:369). It is 'unqualified,
essential, homogeneous, seemingly self-fashioned, and apparently unmarked by
history or practice' (Frankenburg 1997:1); a blank slate against which
difference and Otherness is constructed. This is the sine qua non of racial
hegemony, this privilege to occupy the null position. The white subject position
is transparent, present perhaps only as an underlay for a more nuanced identity
- Irish, American, gay, working-class.
Counter-discourses
Throughout modern media history, oppressed groups have endeavoured to counteract
their systematic erasure through subversive representations. In the main, histories
of media have ignored this struggle, describing the Othered groups (when they
are mentioned at all) in terms of passive victimization. Jane Rhodes has attempted
to redress this wrong in her article 'The Visibility of Race and Media
History' (Rhodes 1995). She notes that while black people were absent from
early mass newpapers except as advertised chattel, black-run newspapers started
to appear in the nineteenth century. Rather than attempting to ameliorate racism,
though, these papers functioned primarily to unify the black community in discourse.
Nonetheless, one of the premier abolitionist voices of 19th century American
media was the black newspaper Freedomâs Journal, founded in 1827 by John
B. Russwurm. Twenty years later, Frederick Douglassâs North Star helped
to establish the tradition that was taken up in the twentieth century with the
Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and Crisis magazine (Neal 1999:9).
Meanwhile, an African-American literature tradition began to appear in the eighteenth
century. Those writers found themselves battling against a European structure
of representation that was oppressive, to say the least. The European representations
of black people were based on a racism that was seemingly confirmed by science,
and thus virtually irrefutable. Thus, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. recounts, 'This
helps us to understand why so very much Anglo-African writing...directly addressed
European fictions of the African in an attempt to voice or speak the African
into existence in Western letters' (Gates 1986:402-3).
It would be a mistake to assume from the relative dearth of African-American
media commentary during this time that a powerful critical process did not exist.
It has been a necessary condition for much of this time that the discourse has
remained underground, coded in metaphor and ciphers. Thus oral expression has
ruled with the black masses, and the expressive vocal arts have taken the lead.
Even in the antebellum South, black spirituals encoded narratives of critique
and community, while field hollers, blues, signifying and double entendre have
played similar roles for successive generations.
The black church
It makes sense that the spiritual would function as an important vehicle for
black social criticism, as the church was the locus of the black public sphere
up to the 1960s. As Mark Anthony Neal writes,
African-American acceptance or appropriation of Christian ideology allowed the black spiritual tradition to develop with relative autonomy, since Christianity was generally perceived among the white elite as a positive socializing force. The singular presence of the black Christian tradition within the context of plantation life allowed blacks to instill within the tradition and the institutions that promoted the tradition, narratives of resistance and critique, even as such narratives were largely shrouded in African and African-American rhetorical practices (Neal 1999:4).
Like the jook joint (but
with very different sentiments and motivations), the black church instantiated
a 'covert, but public, social space' (ibid.) where a community could
be constituted. These spaces are public in the sense that they are easily visible
and frankly communal, but are also covert in that they are decidedly separate
from the mainstream. Jim Crow laws denied blacks access to mainstream public
spaces, so the church became an all-purpose social space for both secular and
religious groups, including, according to Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, 'schools,
circulating libraries, concerts, restaurants, insurance companies, vocational
training [and] athletic clubs...The Church also functioned as a discursive critical
arena - a public sphere in which values and issues were aired, debated, and
disseminated throughout the larger black community' (quoted in Neal 1999:5).
The spiritual very often used an overt message of religious salvation to encode
a covert message of resistance to slavery. Thus, as Geneva Smitherman writes,
The slaves used other-worldly
lyrics, yes, but the spirituals had for them this-world meanings. They moaned
Îsteal away to Jesusâ to mean stealing away FROM the plantation
TO freedom (That is, ÎJesusâ). They sang triumphantly 'this
train is bound for Glory,' but the train they were really talking about
was the 'freedom train' that ran on the Underground Railroad'
(quoted in Neal 1999:2).
Following James S. Scott, Mark Anthony Neal calls these counter-discourses 'hidden
transcripts' (ibid.). The hidden transcripts of the slavery days allowed
a community-building, subversive discourse to circulate Îunder the radarâ,
as it were, of the oppressive slaveowner. And the line between hidden and public
discourse is not rigid. Depending on the proximity of the dominant racial-cultural
group, the linguistic, kinesic and musical codes of counterhegemony may be more
or less visible/audible (Neal 1999:2-3).
Signifyin(g)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. constructed a theory of African-American resistive discourses
in his The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism.
Gates argues that black literature should be analyzed by using the materials
of the black vernacular expressive tradition. His is a deconstructive strategy,
aimed at 'identifying levels of meaning and expression that might otherwise
remain mediated, or buried beneath the surface' (Gates 1988:xx). Signifyin(g)
is the double-voiced nature of the black text, the two levels upon which the
text speaks. This can be manifested in four ways ? the tropological revision,
or repetition with a difference, the speakerly text, or the representation of
the speaking black voice in writing, the talking texts, or the black form of
intertextuality, and rewriting the speakerly, or non-parodic signifying (Gates
1988:xxv-xxvi). Black texts function as signifying revisions of white canonical
texts and other black texts in a spirit of parody and pastiche.
Samuel Floyd characterizes Jimi Hendrixâs version of 'The Star-Spangled
Banner' as a musical version of Signifyin(g), with Hendrix 'Signifyin(g)
upon the call of the original tune with responses that echo the methods of African
callers and early bluesmen in their preoccupation with timbral distortion'
(quoted in Waksman 1999:n.p.).
Perhaps the ultimate signifier of African-American difference is Black English
itself, that durable language that continues to encode community for millions
of speakers. Black English also continues to be the site for a number of clashing
agendas, both black and white. To many it is a corruption of Standard English,
reflecting the ongoing disenfranchisement of many African-Americans from the
educated middle class. Thus the recent debate about Ebonics and the adoption
of certain English teaching strategies in Oakland, California.
Whiteness
While a few studies from past decades have approached the problem of whiteness
per se (see, for example, Horsman 1981, Dyer 1988), only recently has there
been a sustained critical effort to grapple with its meanings and implications,
a response to bell hooksâ 1990 call for 'a discourse on race that
interrogates whiteness' (hooks 1990:54). Anthologies like Displacing Whiteness
(Frankenburg 1997, see also Roediger 1991, 1994, Almaguer 1994, and Cohen 1997)
typify the emerging discipline of whiteness studies, examining constructions
of white society from both inside and outside the white subject position.
Frankenburg immediately dispenses with the notion that whiteness has any static
meaning across spaces and places. She describes whiteness as a process, with
very different meanings - 'ensembles of local phenomena complexly embedded
in socioeconomic, sociocultural, and psychic interrelations' (ibid.). Rather
than being a biological fact, whiteness in fact can be conferred on groups of
people hitherto thought of as nonwhite/Other by virtue of upward class mobility
or political consideration. As an example of the former, Karen Brodwin Sacks
argues in her essay 'How Did Jews Become White Folks?' that American
Jews and other Euroamericans gained 'white status' after World War
II as a result of home ownership and suburban residence, among other factors
(Sacks 1994). As an example of the latter, David Roediger points out in his
book Wages of Whiteness that a sense of unifying whiteness coalesced around
European immigrants in the early twentieth century as a bulwark against competition
for work with freed slaves and freeborn blacks (Roediger 1992). This is an example
of what George Lipsitz calls the 'possessive investment in whiteness'
(Lipsitz 1995).
Rather more subtly, Roediger points out that the white invention of black stereotypes
in the 19th century was connected to an envy for what whites perceived as the
corporeal, carefree life of the black man. The life of the working man was rapidly
changing, as mechanization continued apace and the rural life was giving way
to urban factories. This brought with it no small degree of nostalgia for the
Îless civilizedâ times of agrarian country life. Conveniently ignoring
the oppressive, humiliating daily lives of black slaves, white workers saw in
the weekend recreations of black people the shadow presence of their own imagined
past. The working-class white began to see black people as 'embodying
the preindustrial, erotic, careless style of life the white worker hated and
longed for' (Roediger, quoted in Cantwell 1996:57). Taking a somewhat different
angle, Eric Lott argues that
Hatred of the other arises from the necessary hatred of oneâs own excess; ascribing this excess to the 'degraded' other and indulging it - by imagining, incorporating, or impersonating the other - one conveniently and surreptitiously takes and disavows pleasure at one and the same time (Lott 1993:482).
Whiteness in this form can be seen as an 'invented tradition' (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) in the sense that a tradition of continuous white history was constructed in order to create a sense of solidarity in a time of social upheaval. The point of such a tradition is the creation of a sense of invariance - that Îthings have always been this wayâ because of historical precedent and natural law. Meanwhile, blacks have been denied a history - as James Snead notes,
The message of black inferiority...was
addressed to viewers who desired a sense of clear-cut dominance within the often
confusing uncertainties of American history. Historical ambiguity requires some
sense of transhistorical certainty, and so blacks were as if ready-made for
the task. Onscreen and off, the history that Western culture has made typically
denies blacks and black skin of historical reference, except as former slaves
or savages (Snead 1997:3).
In fact, this ahistoricity most often came in the form of an equation of blacks
with nature. The connotation was that, like nature, blacks were suspended in
an enduring present, and their inferior position was a similarly "natural",
"eternal" state (ibid.).
The invention of tradition is highly relevant to the constitution of nation
(Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983:8) because it provides a rationale for social borders.
By the eighteenth century, a British claim to an Anglo-Saxon tradition could
be discerned, a claim that legitimated the voracious quest for land and power
that are the hallmarks of imperialism (Rhodes 1995). Furthermore, race and nation
were considered to be synonymous up to fairly recently (Pieterse 1995:25). Later,
in the post-Reconstruction era of the 1880s and 1890s, this process was renewed
in the battle for what Gerald Early called a 'usable American past'
(quoted in Neal 1999:9) where many of the post-Emancipation civil rights gains
would be reversed.
In fact, whiteness tends most often to be about power - the power to include
and exclude, the power to objectify and hold the subjective position. David
Roediger argues that whiteness is 'nothing more than domination and a
paradoxical longing for and rejection of other racialized groups' (quoted
in Panish 1997:xiv). Frankenburg further suggests that 'it is only in
those times and places where white supremacism has achieved hegemony that whiteness
attains (usually unstable) unmarkedness' (Frankenburg 1997:5). The construction
of a supreme white race was a necessary prerequisite to the rampant expansionism
of colonial Americaâs early decades. A discourse of 'race'
gradually appeared in the nineteenth century, replacing earlier nationalist
accounts. The people that stood in the way of American expansion were classified
as inferior races. This included native Americans, Africans, and Spanish-speaking
mixes of Spanish and native blood in the Southwest.
Construction of "race"
As Jan Nederveen Pieterse has observed in his article 'White Negroes',
race and racism are not static and are often mitigated or inflected by class
and gender issues. Black people have often been compared in media to various
Othered groups - Chinese people, women, Irish immigrants. This is especially
true of the Irish, who were represented in the 19th century with simianized
caricatures, as the English images of the Irish 'hardened in the context
of colonialism, migration and resistance' (Pieterse 1995:25). Likewise
the Filipino people were presented in black-like racist caricatures ('half
devil and half child') at the precise time that the U.S. was trying to
annex the Philippines. In this case political imperialism became equivalent
to cultural imperialism (ibid.). Pieterse writes:
it is not ethnicity, or 'race' that governs imagery and discourse, but rather, the nature of the political relationship between peoples which causes a people to be viewed in a particular light...Existing differences and inequalities are magnified for fear that they will diminish (Pieterse 1995:26)
Minstrelsy
and blackface
In the 19th century context, the minstrel show can be seen as a particularly
revealing artifact of black-white relations. Created and patronized by working-class
white people, minstrelsy hinged on the presentations of black stereotypes for
entertainment purposes. The arena of the minstrel show afforded whites to play
with the signifiers of race, while blacks were excluded from the process except
as the ostensible sources for stereotypes. The white, largely immigrant, working
class was already near the bottom of the oppression ladder, with only the black
slaves below them. Thus the culture of the African-American, with its African
retentions still quite foreign to the Euro-American culture, must have seemed
both a likely and inevitable target for parody. But minstrelsy was also the
indulgence of a white fetish for black culture - the cooptation of what in the
Other seems most capable of winning the oppressorâs favour (Cantwell 1996:60).
In a kind of sibling rivalry, the white working class took the language, entertainments,
and discourses of the black slave and distended their structures in a racist
funhouse mirror. Exaggerating some aspects while downplaying others, the minstrel
travestied black culture in a way that still resonates in American mass media.
In the doing, a community of whiteness was bolstered.
Part of this process involved a motivation to outdo the original, to effect
an erasure of the authentic expression that is being parodied. This motivation
resonates through the various folk revivals of the last hundred years, as interpreters
of folk culture has followed a general pattern of exactly copying, then speeding
up, amplifying, rendering more complex or more rationalized. The pattern of
mimesis and alterity2 (Taussig 1993) functions to supersede and render obsolete
the original model. In the minstrel context, blackface began to represent black
to the point that actual black performers had to Îblack upâ both
literally and figuratively to be accepted by a white audience (see Bernard Gendronâs
[1985] discussion of Little Richard sonically Îblacking upâ after
his first, unsuccessful recordings).
Moreover, a metaphorical reading of blackness came to stand for Americanness.
What Walt Whitman called a 'picturesque looseness of carriage' was
a metonym of black culture as filtered through minstrel shows, ragtime and jazz.
The incursion of black performers into blackface minstrelsy eventually sounded
the death knell for that specific form, as white minstrels were redirected into
entertainments less representative of southern life (Cantwell 1996:64). Blackface
in the 20th century was principally performed by Jewish-American performers.
This may have been partly for the same reasons that immigrant whites seized
on blackface in the 19th century - that the second-lowest rung on the social
ladder (for in the early twentieth century influx of European immigrants, the
Jews took the rung previously occupied by the upwardly mobile Italians, Irish
and Germans) was parodying the lowest, but Irving Howe has argued that Jewish
blackface was 'a mask for Jewish expressiveness, with one woe speaking
through the voice of another' (quoted in Cantwell 1996:64).
Eric Lott (1993) further traces the genealogy of blackface to the postwar context
as manifested in such cultural articulations as Elvis Presley, Norman Mailerâs
essay 'The White Negro' (1957) and Howard Griffinâs 1961 book
Black Like Me. All, according to Lott, are part of a blackface tradition of
homosocial ritual between white and black men. This is a negotiation, admittedly
favouring the dominant group, across racial lines at times when those lines
seem hardest to cross. The divides between black and white culture are first
reified, then transgressed; this, of course, requires an acceptance of racial
essentialism and the 'belief in the complete suturing together of the
markers of 'blackness' and the black culture, apparently sundered
from the dominant one, to which they refer' (Lott 1993:475).
Finally, the blues revival of the 1960s and white rap in the 1980s and 90s provides
a postscript to blackface. Blackface declined, according to John Szwed, because
of the gradual loosening of the connection between race and culture. Black expressive
culture became separable from black faces; thus Mick Jagger and Vanilla Ice
could perform a sonic blackface without fulfilling the visual requirements.
Szwed writes;
The fact that, say, a Mick Jagger can today perform in the [blackface] tradition without blackface simply marks the detachment of culture from race and the almost full absorption of a black tradition into white culture (quoted in Lott 1993:475-476).
Black masculinity
Black men have been consistently portrayed in the white media in a sexualized,
primitivist manner. bell hooks writes that 'representations of black
men in mass media usually depict them as more violent than other men, super-masculine...these
images appeal to white audiences, who simultaneously fear them and are fascinated
by them' (hooks 1990:71). The myth of black men as sexual supermen has
held a central place in the white representation of black culture, from the
roles of black actors in pornographic films to the critical reception of artists
like Jimi Hendrix.
A good example of recent racist constructions of black male sexuality can be
seen in a sampling of the critical reception of Jimi Hendrix. Albert Goldman,
after describing Hendrix as some sort of Tomming psychedelic dandy, tellingly
characterizes his music as 'ominously circling, coiling and striking
home...the motions of a great black snake' (Goldman 1968:57) and later
dubs him 'SuperSpade, a mythical Black Man committing acts of violence
before fascinated audiences of English and American teenies' (ibid.:58).
Quasi-African stereotypes litter the contemporary Hendrix press notices - one
piece is punningly titled 'Wild, Man' and Newsweek, without context
or explanation, quotes a British paperâs naming of Hendrix as 'Mau-Mau'
(Newsweek, October 9, 1967, quoted in Potash 1996:13). Eric Clapton responded
to Hendrix by suggesting that Hendrix traded on white (English) fantasies of
black male sexuality:
You know English people have a very big thing towards a spade. They really
love that magic thing. They all fall for that kind of thing. Everybody and his
brother in England still think that spades have big dicks. And Jimi came over
and exploited that to the limit...and everybody fell for it(quoted in Murray
1990:68).
Clapton's suggestion should not be wholly discounted; by the time he arrived
in England in early 1966, he was well aware of his effect on white audiences,
and may very well have engaged in a minstrel-like 'blacking-up'
of his already black face. Paul Gilroy interprets the sexualized reception of
Hendrix as a conflation of sexuality with authenticity by his predominantly
white audience. He seems uneasy with a wholesale reclaiming of Hendrix, however.
Whether or not Hendrixâs early performances were parodic of the minstrel
role or simply confirmation of its enduring potency, his career points to the
antagonism between different local definitions of what blackness entails and
to the combined and uneven character of black cultural development (Gilroy 1991:115).
Eric Lott argues that white working class manhood has depended for some time
on 'imitations of fantasized black male sexuality' (Lott 1993:484).
He sees this dialectic at play in the early Elvis Presley, who projected sex
by invoking markers of blackness in his dress, singing style, choice of material,
and body movements.
In the years following Emancipation, sexualized stereotypes of black women led
to institutional measures aimed at policing their bodies in the city. These
stereotypes are exemplified in novels like Carl Van Vechtenâs Nigger Heaven
(1926) and Claude McKayâs Home to Harlem (1928) - novels that situate
the black woman as sexually volatile and thus threatening to the upward mobility
of the black man. Hazel Carby (1995) has traced the way that institutions like
the Phyllis Wheatley Association - a kind of YWCA for young black women - fought
the 'commercialized vice' that threatened the virtue of the corruptible
young migrant women from the South newly transplanted to the Northern cities.
This vice included the brothels and the dance halls of the city - as an alternative,
young women were trained for domestic service, one of the few viable vocations
for a black woman in 1920s America.
Jazz
The 'jazz' of the jazz age, to be sure, was not the music of King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and Fletcher Henderson. Paul Whiteman, who led the most popular band of the 1920s and sold millions of records, was the acknowledged 'King of Jazz.' 'Mr. Jazz Himself' is a 1917 Irving Berlin song, and Jolson gave Bostonâs first jazz recital in 1919 (Rogin 1992:447)
One of the foremost crucibles for the negotiation of racial identity during the first half of the twentieth century has been jazz. From the beginning, discourse in both praise and condemnation of jazz has been in racialized terms. Black jazz musicians have been constantly described in primitivist terms - in the early years of jazz, as purveyors of 'jungle rhythms'. The idea of jazz as 'jungle rhythms' reveal two telling white assumptions about the music: that it was primarily rhythmic and that it represented a wholesale African retention. That jazz would be held up as an African retention is odd in light of the racist idea, also prevalent at the time (and elaborated above), that African-Americans had no history. Black ahistoricity was the basis of, for example, the rejection of Black English as a legitimate language. If linguists had accepted that certain phonetic and syntactic constructions were remnants of West African languages, then the idea that Black English was a corrupted variant of Standard English would not have held. The equation of jazz with rhythm is interesting in that it was just one of many non-Western musical traditions to be dismissed as non-music on the basis of a purely rhythmic character.
There are many mansions
in the house of the muses·melody· harmony·this inner court
of harmony is where nearly all the truly great music is enjoyed·In the
house there is, however, another apartment, properly speaking, down in the basement,
a kind of servantsâ hall of rhythm. It is there we hear the hum of the
Indian dance, the throb of the Oriental tambourines and kettledrums, the clatter
of the clogs, the click of Slavic heels, the thumpty-tumpty of the Negro banjo,
and, in fact, the native dances of the world. Although commonly associated with
melody, and less often with harmony also, rhythm is not necessarily music·'('Jass
and Jassism,' The Times-Picayune [New Orleans], June 20, 1918. Quoted in
Walser 1999:6).
Other writers made the connection between jazz and a fantasized Africa even
more explicit. As Anne Shaw Faulkner wrote in a 1921 issue of Ladies Home Journal,
'Jazz originally was the accompaniment of the voodoo dancer, stimulating
the half-crazed barbarian to the vilest deeds' (quoted in Walser 1999:34).
It only takes a short leap of intuition to see jazz as potentially reawakening
the savage black masses (and, slightly more benignly, white youth) to revolt
and violence. Jazz became the proverbial wolf at the door of genteel white society.
Female jazz singers were subject to the myths of unfettered black womanhood
- sexual promiscuity, roughness, Îdirtinessâ. This is present in
commentary on women singers from Mamie Smith to Billie Holiday. Rather than
fulfilling the comfortable stereotypes of Mammy or Aunt Jemima, these women
presented images that were most disturbing in their unavoidable sensuality.
In the case of Holiday, the media reacted by celebrating her tragic downfall.
But Holiday was not a helpless dupe in this process, as David Brackett has pointed
out.
Perhaps out of necessity,
Billie Holiday displayed an astuteness toward the business of self-representation
from an early age·African-American women, because of a specific articulation
of class, sex, and racial oppression, have had to struggle against certain negative
'controlling images,' specifically those of 'the Mammie,
the Matriarch, and Jezebel' (Brackett 1995:48).
Holiday recognized that the public assumed a tight correspondence between an
artistâs life and their work, and that she could create an authentic,
appealing image through a certain amount of self-definition. Through her increasingly
dramatic repertoire and performance style (not to mention her autobiography,
Lady Sings The Blues, which 'dwells on the sensational and tragic'
[Brackett 1995:49]) Billie Holiday created her own mystique. This is not to
deny the very real hardships and tragedies of her life, but to suggest that,
in the latter part of her career, Holiday recognized the public investment in
her as a tragic figure and turned it to her advantage.
Of course, black and white Americans have fundamentally differed in their understandings
of jazz. In many ways the discourse on jazz has been a bellwether of the struggle
between black and white conceptions of American vernacular culture, as separate
views of jazz have coalesced around racial lines. The critical discourse has
been overwhelmingly weighted in favour of white viewpoints, as a result of the
white stranglehold on avenues for jazz criticism.
Jon Panish points out that the transculturative process that has brought black
culture into contact with white mainstream culture has always been controlled
by white people. Thus the potentially empowering multicultural mix of jazz has
nonetheless been used in ways that reinscribe the old power relations. Panish
writes:
In the most general terms, white texts tend to romanticize the jazz musicianâs
experience, stereotype jazz heroes, dehistoricize and decontextualize the development
of the music, and emphasize competitive individualism over any sense of community.
Black texts, on the other hand, tend to present the jazz musician as an admirable
but complicated figure; set the development of the music in a clear tradition
that is continually repeated and revised; make connections between the music,
the musician, and social experience; and inextricable link the accomplishments
of the individual with the success of the community (xix)
Nonetheless, the social
and musical assimilation that facilited the 1920s florescence of jazz challenged
prevailing essentialist notions about race. Culture was instantiated in 1920s
jazz as transferable and historically contingent.
as white culture moved to coopt jazz, they needed to cool the racialized discourse
on jazz in favour of an Îautonomousâ music, which necessitated the
removal of jazz from social context...This is perhaps best exemplified in the
nineteenth century practices of minstrelsy.
As Panish has noted, the
vaunted prosperity of black urban workers in the postwar period was 'tenuous
at best' (1997:3). Racism had been preserved through a number of public
and private statutes; this was the result of a gradual retrenchment of white
supremacy after the turn of the century. Supposedly race-neutral social democratic
reforms attacked inner city populations, helping to segregate the suburbs. Segregation
in general increased during this time, which had the double-edged effect of
increasing social distance between blacks and whites while also concentrating
blacks geographically, thus bolstering their political power.
Within the context of postwar jazz, Panish points out that a policy of 'colorblindness'
was becoming operative in white critical circles - that certain black jazz musicians
were conditionally accepted into white culture. Colorblindness included an effacing
of overtly racialized discourse, in contrast to 1920s jazz criticism. The flipside
of this was that racism was simply hidden between the lines of the text.
The primary catalyst for this new policy of colorblindness was bebop. Dizzy
Gillespie and Charlie Parker were routinely connected to European high culture
by dint of their exacting, complex music and refusal to Îentertainâ
in the sense of a Louis Armstrong. But this was also a time of intensified black
opposition to racism, and there were at the same time black discourses that
naturally received less exposure. These subordinated discourses, according to
Panish, included the critique of racism inherent 'in the music'
of Parker and Gillespie - not only that the sound of bebop evoked feelings of
restlessness and intelligent critique, but that the decisive stylistic break
from prewar swing (a form that had been largely co-opted by white bands) was
representative of a generational break and a rejection. This generational break
also found expression in the ways and means of the struggle - the middle-class
NAACP, which used the courts to try to effect change, was giving way to church-based,
dramatic protest, including boycotts, marches, and the use of Îauthenticâ
black cultural forms like the spiritual.
Amiri Baraka commented on the politics of jazz representation in 1963 with his
article 'Jazz and the White Critic' (Jones 1967:11-20). He identifies
a large part of the problem of the representation of jazz with the fact that
jazz criticism was almost totally white-controlled - Baraka himself (then known
as Leroi Jones) was one of the few African-American voices. He notes the colorblindness
of jazz writing as being a deracinating force, separating jazz from the attitudes
and experience of black people. Musicological articles using notation, writes
Baraka, further decontextualize the music and attempt to judge jazz by irrelevant
European conventions. Baraka also notes a class disparity between middle-class,
'middlebrow' jazz critics and the working-class blacks who are the
source of the music. Finally, he calls for a socially-based criticism.
To many cultural critics of the 1960s, the 'New Thing' or 'free
jazz' was the foremost musical expression of black subjectivity. Indeed,
free jazz may have been the most powerful of the all the so-called 'Black
Arts' because it was the black form least derivative of European modernism.
It provided the strongest refutation of the plantation myth by dispensing with
dance and movement in favour of cerebral, abstract invention. Thus the essentialist
idea of black music as body music was challenged.
Mainstream films about jazz have both exemplified and reinscribed white conceptions
about black expressive culture. A common thread noted by Panish in these films
is the ascendancy of white musicians based on the cooptation and control of
blackness. Most typically, the white musician turns to the black musician first
as a source of nourishment. He then takes the musical materials of the black
man, and using his superior refinement and intellect, takes them Îbeyondâ
what the black man ever could. He is then judged with approval by the black
musician, who then gets out of the way to make room for the career ascendance
of the white musician. Black musicians 'baptize and legitimate'
the nascent white star (Panish 1997:46). This is similar in many ways to the
role of the black maid in mainstream films. She "elevate[s] by contrast
[the white actress'] white and ethereal beauty" (Snead 1997:67). The black
maid also dresses and grooms the white woman, thus literally and contrastively
maximizing white beauty.
Film
Michael Rogin further argues that blacks function in a larger symbolic capacity
in mainstream film: 'Each transformative moment in the history of American
film has founded itself on the surplus symbolic value of blacks' (Rogin
1992:417). Rogin traces the major innovations of the early American cinema in
tandem with white representations of black life, including Edwin S. Porterâs
Uncle Tomâs Cabin (1903), D.W. Griffithâs The Birth of a Nation
(1915), and the Al Jolson talkie The Jazz Singer (1927). As Rogin argues, 'American
film was born from white depictions of blacks' (1992:419). That is, the
white American male is made from conflict with blacks in film.
Donald Bogle argues that The Birth of a Nation
not only vividly re-created history, but revealed its directorâs philosophical concept of the universe and his personal racial bigotry...Griffith seemed to be saying that things were in order only when whites were in control and when the American Negro was kept in his place (Bogle 1973:11)
Griffithâs message, as well as his stunning technical and creative achievement, was both widely influential in subsequent filmmaking and roundly criticized for its anti-black sentiments. The NAACP picketed the premiere showing as well as the many rereleases of the film in the following years. And Valerie Smith relates that
Antiracist individuals and organizations alike believed that Birth, released during the height of Jim Crow segregation and lynching, enhanced tolerance of racial, especially Klan, violence (Smith 1997:1).
James Snead sought to
move beyond the more descriptive black film scholarship of writers like Bogle
by invoking semiotic analysis in his work on images of black people in mainstream
films. Snead rightly saw film as a site for the reproduction and development
of ideology, with filmic codes as the text. Summarizing the history of black
representation in film, Snead writes:
In general throughout the history of coding the color black in mainstream
American films, it is precisely the intentional confusion of narrative, cinematic,
and extra-cinematic codes that tends to undermine the color black on screen.
Roland Barthes calls these "referential codes" - references to a generally
accepted notion of "common sense" or the established knowledge of
the time: they enable all manner of extra-cinematic ideologies to hide under
accustomed codes of narrative closure...the principal mechanism of cinematic
racism - certainly in the films we are considering here - is precisely to sublimate
itself under the stronger compulsions of romance, revenge, or sensation that
belong to the allure of film narrative (Snead 1997:38).
Thus D.W. Griffith used
the then-innovative techniques of panning, montage, and close-ups in a way that
captivated the audience in narrative pleasure, and the extra-cinematic codes
of racism were accepted (Snead 1997:39).
Utilizing Umberto Eco's conception of "code" ("a set of conventions
defining perception in limited and predictable ways within any given culture"
[Snead 1997:2), Snead reads black roles in films as articulations of mythification,
marking, and omission.
Mythification involves the use of filmic codes to place images of whiteness
and blackness along a hierarchy of human value. It asks the viewer to identify
themselves in relation to the image, to either identify with or distance oneself
from it. Through repetition, the mythified images become positive or negative
models for behaviour, suggested the parameters of possible action by white and
black people (Snead 1997:4-5).
Marking is the practice of exaggerating or highlighting racial difference -
it is necessary because in life, the reality of blackness can not always be
determined but by "non-whiteness". Thus black actors have often been
"blacked up" to increase the visual impact of racial difference (Snead
1997:5-6).
Omission is "exclusion by reversal, distortion, or some other form of censorship"
(Snead 1997:6). Because omission is characterized by an absence, it is the most
difficult of these three tactics to identify. It can be manifested by the literal
absence of black people or by the absence of black people in roles that are
coded as white - doctors, lawyers, etc.
Snead's approach is effective because he exposes the structure within which
the stereotypical images of blackness - the Mammy, the Coon - operate. Film
is an especially seductive medium for the dissemination of ideology because
of its extraordinary resemblance to real life and it has thus been a most pernicious
vessel of racist ideology.
Black directors have long recognized the prevalence of stereotypical imagery
in mainstream film and have fought to present more accurate, authentic black
subjects. One stream of this work, as characterized by Valerie Smith, has sought
to simply replace negative black characterizations with positive ones. Thus
the black characters in the Colored Players Companyâs The Scar of Shame
(1928), James Clavellâs To Sir, With Love (1967) and the 1980s situation
comedy The Cosby Show are presented as 'diligent and morally upright
if not also refined and prosperous' (Smith 1997:2). The second stream of
black filmic representation responds both to 'negative' and 'positive'
character images, with reclamation occurring through a 'reanimation'
of stereotypes and a celebration of black vernacular culture. Smith cites as
examples Duke Ellingtonâs Black and Tan (1929) along with Spencer Williamsâ
The Blood of Jesus (1941) and Dirty Gertie from Harlem USA (1946).
Greenwich Village
By the 1950s, Greenwich Village was coming into its own as a significant site
for cultural exchange. As Panish points out, the bohemians flocking to the Village
were both black and white, sharing a dissatisfaction with mainstream white culture
and its conformist, consumerist values. Undoubtedly, there was a great deal
of cultural exchange within the Village, and, within the neutral ground of the
sub-society, something of a respite from the overt racism of the time. But the
rules of cultural exchange continued to be guided by the unequal power relations
endemic to the entire country. Within the problematic Îrespectâ
for black culture by white bohemians, the old rules continued to operate - the
internalization of black culture by whites was never uncomplicated and innocent.
Black culture was routinely altered to conform to white needs and values; for
example, collective values were discarded in favour of the cult of the alienated
individual. An alteration like this constitutes a major cultural shift, and
casts light on the bohemian transculturative process as rather shallow. The
bohemians took the superficial aspects of black culture while rejecting anything
that would drastically alter their worldview or way of life. This is a recurring
theme even today, as white high school kids adopt hip-hop culture while retaining
a strong ambivalence towards actual black people.
Norman Mailer, in his influential and oft-quoted essay 'The White Negro'
(1957), distilled the idea of the 'hipster' as the quintessential
white adopter of black culture, while simultaneously providing a romanticized
black stereotype.
Knowing in all the cells of his existence that life is war, nothing but war, the Negro (all exceptions admitted) could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body, and in his music he gave voice to the character and quality of his existence...so there was a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black manâs code to fit their facts. The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synopses of the Negro, and could thus be considered a white Negro (quoted in Murray 1989:78).
Even the more radical
expressions of black subjectivity have often been fodder for white co-optation.
bell hooks has noted that the white avant-garde often seeks to appropriate expression
of black subjectivity 'as though [they exist] solely to suggest new aesthetic
and political directions white folks might move in' (hooks 1990:21).
In her essay 'Madonna: Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister?' (1995),
hooks argues that Madonna, a white woman, freely plays with the signifiers of
white beauty while at the same time deconstructing the beauty myth. She plays
the innocent white girl being 'bad', in part by appropriating myths
of black male phallic masculinity. But like the bohemians in Greenwich Village,
she has freedom to play because she is white. This same freedom is denied to
the working-class women and people of color that she exploits and humiliates
in her film Truth or Dare.
Black Arts
The conditional acceptance of black people and black culture in the Village
eventually led to something of an exodus of black artists by 1965. By that time,
the Black Arts Movement was coming together in Harlem, fueled by many former
denizens of the Village. Black Arts, or the Black Aesthetic, was the cultural
arm of the Black Power movement, the drive towards black autonomy. More to the
point, the Black Arts movement was an effort to wrest back control of the representation
of blackness to the black community. This struggle required that a strong black
identity be explicated, and that the Arts should conform to that identity. As
Walter Benn Michaels noted (see above), essentialism is a necessary prerequisite
to identity politics, and the Black Aesthetic was no different. To jazz critic
Ron Wellburn (writing in 1972),
Black musicians do not really think about the aesthetic; they simply project it. Soul is a manner of dancing, walking, speaking, interpreting life as we see and know it...We should all, then, re-establish ourselves as musicians: every black American can at least become a drummer or learn to play on a simple reed flute, just as every black person can dance'(quoted in Waksman 1999:n.p.).
Wellburnâs frankly
essentialist account of black culture proposes a vague 'black thing'
that crosses the line between the avant-garde and the popular and between bourgeois
and working-class black culture. In the effort, Wellburn reinforces a myth of
an undifferentiated black mass just as pernicious as that of the white bohemians.
To Larry Neal, the black aesthetic stood for 'the collective conscious
and unconscious of Black America' (quoted in Waksman 1999:n.p.).
The folk revival
Parallel to the bohemian embrace of jazz, the folk revival arose in the 1950s
in part as an embracing of 'authentic' black music. In the process,
much black music was appropriated and reinterpreted by white urban performers,
and many older southern black musicians were brought out of retirement to play
folk festivals and record new product. Again, unequal power relations were at
play, and the uses of black culture were infused with the taint of minstrelsy.
To folklorist John Lomax and his son Alan, folk revivalism and song preservation
were nothing less than the search for natural man - the innocent primitive of
manâs distant past, who in turn is nostalgically projected by modern urban
man as a vision of himself before the fall. This conceit guided the Lomaxesâ
selections of artists for recording and study, as well as the tone and content
of their influential writings. Works like Alan Lomaxâs The Land Where
The Blues Began are virtual textbooks of the romanticization and idealization
of Southern black culture. Likewise John Hammond attempted to write the history
of black music with his ÎSpirituals to Swingâ concerts (1938-39)
as a narrative extending backwards to a holy grail of black cultural origins.
Robert Cantwell (1996) has traced the origins of the folk revival; like the
continuous history of the white race, the folk revival involved the creation
of an invented tradition. In some ways, the folk revival represents the efforts
to create a history for a people that have experienced upheaval, namely the
mechanization/industrialization/rationalization of daily life. In part, this
depended on a search for authenticity that necessitated a stereotyped, essentialized
conception of rural people and cultures.
Thus patriarchal stereotypes (not just of black culture, but of Southern, rural,
working class culture in general) were often unwittingly reinscribed by folklorists
and the people who participated in the folk revival as consumers and producers/interpreters.
This does not exclude black performers and consumers, who were very often complicit
in this process.
Livin' La Vida
Loca
As I write this paragraph, Ricky Martin's "Livin' La Vida Loca" is
in ubiquitous high rotation on pop radio. Martin is the golden boy of the industry-driven
Latin craze in current pop music, and his hit single is a kind of theme song
of the trend. A former member of the teen pop group Menudo, Martin shot to fame
after an appearance on the 1999 Grammy Awards telecast. "Livin' La Vida
Loca" is an uptempo, brass-driven song with English lyrics but for the
titular Spanish phrase.
The lyrics of the songs,
written in the second (and briefly first) person, describe a tempestuous, hot-blooded
woman, with "skin the color mocha." This woman, who is presumably
Latina, takes the presumably white male protagonist/listener on a roller coaster
ride of high living and sex. The promised 'walk on the wild side' is a metonym
of the implicit promise of Latin pop; an offer for repressed, bored white people
to tap into the sensual, less introspective Latin culture.
In closing this paper, I offer that "Livin' La Vida Loca" exemplifies
the changing face, but constant heart, of white representations of Othered,
fetishized blackness. The female character is the (black) woman as Jezebel,
with some voodoo thrown in for good measure. While white/African-American acculturation
is in an advanced state in the United States, the largest influx of Latin immigrants
is fairly recent. Thus Latin culture best serves the role of exoticized Other
at the end of the century, fulfilling much the same capacity as black culture
in the early part of the century.
Representations
of 'race' in mass media
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