What is David Roediger asking us to contemplate with his term "colored white"?
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Module 5- Race Remixed
This module worked to complicate whiteness by interrogating its assumed homogeneity. By interrogating relationships of ethnicity to whiteness and power, we were able to identify the ways in which social, cultural and racial relationships to whiteness secure particular social, cultural and economic interests that are directly tied to the state. How do we read the journey "into whiteness” of particular immigrant communities in the United States such as Jewish, Irish and Polish Americans against immigrant communities of South Asian and Arab decent that,over many years, have shifted from being categorized as non-whites to sometimes "white"?
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John Vilanova
ReplyDeleteTHR702—November 9, 2011
Module 5 Blog
In reading this module, I sensed more nuanced challenges to both of the implicitly monolithic halves of what is commonly conceived as America’s racial binary. Obviously, attacking the notion of a black/white binary is something we’ve been doing all semester, but now it seems that rather than blurring the line between black and white, we are problematizing assumptions made about the two false signifier halves themselves through various points of vantage (most excellently among them Danny Hock.
David Roediger’s Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past examines critical whiteness studies, attacking the systemic moves made over the last 30 years to declare America “colorblind;” the postracial moment, he argues, is far from arrival. He argues that white privilege is a historically-determined reality, not “just another identity at the table of multiculturalism”(19). Through a series of essays, he frames black and white subjects within a historical discourse of racialized privilege. “America” has been colored white, but this identity “is decisively shaped by the existence of power”(23).
Extending Roediger’s conversation, blackness, too often, is discussed with a positivist orientation—it exists for many in its relation to whiteness. Here is where, for me, Naeem Mohaiemen’s “Fear of a Muslim Planet: Hip-Hop’s Hidden History” was most resonant. While Harry Allen once called Islam “hip-hop’s unofficial religion”(1), there is more to unpack here because America’s “official” religious stance toward Islam is so highly fraught. Mohaiemen reveals the contoured nature of American blackness here—in the process of “Americanization” of blacks though, Muslim roots have been abandoned or forgotten in this larger conversation. “American” should not mean white or black or Christian. The reality, though, is a fear of a non-white planet—a conflation of otherness-es and what that would look like.
The title of Eminem’s 2002 The Eminem Show implies that, because of his rise to fame, Marshall Mathers’ entire life has become a performance: the album meditates on the tensions, conflicts, and possibilities of the Eminem vs. Marshall Mathers dichotomy. Eminem takes on the subject of race directly in White America:
ReplyDeleteLet's do the math - if I was black, I woulda sold half
I ain't have to graduate from Lincoln High School to know that
But I could rap, so fuck school, I'm too cool to go back…
Like damn; we just swapped - sittin back lookin at shit, wow
I'm like my skin is it startin to work to my benefit now?
Eminem’s question at the end is difficult, considering the narrative of white privilege presented by this semester’s readings. Of course his skin works to his benefit. However, the economies of a black art form operate against any potential skin-based privilege. Without the intervention of Dre, functioning as a sort of envoy, Eminem would have never been given the opportunity to “perform” for the audience. Typical of his rap style, Eminem confronts race with a playful, subversive anger, much in the same fashion as Danny Hoch. The subject is indelibly written on their body, which is utilized as a site for a plurality of performances.
The question inherent in these performances is whether or not Danny and Eminem “transcend the racial past,” and move into a new landscape (the racial present? The post-racial?) I don’t believe they transcend the past, nor do I believe that’s the actual intention of these performances. Instead, as the module title suggests, they remix their race; the borders/past stop acting as impassable walls, and function instead as an open door, inviting (critical) passage and (critical) commentary on the past, present, and future.
Race remixed is a conversation about crossing. Whether crossing constitutes identification with various identities for political, economic, or entertainment purposes or an indication of the crossing that exists within cultural forms—like Hip-hop—it remains a contested site where the intersection of politics, aesthetics, and economics contribute to racial, gender, and identity formation. David R. Roediger’s discussion of “crossing over to nonwhiteness,” Danny Hoch’s Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop, Eminem’s CD The Eminem Show, etc. explore such crossings in ways that fuel and intervene in debates about racial authenticity, “love and theft,” and the politics of social justice.
ReplyDeleteCrossing or remixing can be a valuable strategy for both scholarship and art; however, there are moments when such crossings become problematic. For example, Danny Hoch’s “cripping up”(1) in his film Jails, Hospitals and Hip-hop utilizes the medical institution’s desire to cure disability to suggest how rap might contribute to the normalization of a disabled man’s speech. Rap becomes part of a cure instead of a means of expressing the social situation, identity, and experience of a disabled person. Why not instead introduce a disabled character that raps about his disability? Why not remix what Jim Ferris terms “The Enjambed Body”(2) with Hip-hop and formulate an empowered character instead of a cured one? As Carrie Sandahl points out in “Why Disability Identity Matters” the choice to cast a non-disabled actor who will “crip up” in performance—while obviously not preferable—can be important and useful if done to enhance another disabled person’s work or to further the advocacy of disability as identity instead of metaphor (3). Crossing over into another identity is always riddled with stereotypes and assumptions, but it also can be a moment of exploration, an attempt at understanding, and a location of political advocacy and collaboration.
(1) Sandahl, Carrie. “Why Disability Identity Matters From Dramaturgy to Casting in John Belluso’s Pyretown.” Text and Performance Quarterly. (28.1-2) Jan.-Apr. 2008: 236. According to Sandhal the term was originally coined by Kaite O’Reilly, a disabled U.K. playwright
(2) Ferris, Jim. “The Enjambed Body: A Step Toward a Cripple Poetics.” Read online at: http://www.cstone.net/~poems/essaferr.htm
(3) Sandahl, Carrie. “Why Disability Identity Matters From Dramaturgy to Casting in John Belluso’s Pyretown.” Text and Performance Quarterly. (28.1-2) Jan.-Apr. 2008: 225-241.
The difference between perception and reality is slippery, particularly when examining whose interests are invested in the presentation of perceptions as realities. Roediger’s Colored White examines various perceptions throughout American history and culture that have shaped the idea that whiteness is normative, often ignoring the reality “that whites too carry and act on racial identities” (15). In one example, Roediger reminds us that even a “map is a production imagined…not a reproduction of reality” (175). America and Europe placed in the center of a world map is not a necessity, but rather an indication of Eurocentric and imperialistic “hubris.” Edward Said’s work also explores how maps act “as both literal power fields in which imperialism unfolded, or even as metaphors for thinking through the process by which power, empire, and resistance operated” (Daulatzai 26).
ReplyDeletePost 9/11 the perception of Muslims and the Middle East was shaped by hatred and fear, facilitated by the rejection of people practicing Islam as outsiders. Hip-hop, shaped by the “cultural force” of Islam, and the ignored/unperceivable large population of black Muslims in America shows how “Black Muslims and hip-hop are frozen out of the larger debate over Islam because they would problematize the entire conversation” (Mohaiemen 314). The perception of Islam as an encroaching danger that is infiltrating our borders with ‘outsider’ agendas needs to be reshaped by the reality that Muslims have had an influence on American music, culture, and society for decades. Danny Hoch and Sacha Baron Cohen playfully shake up the perception/reality dichotomy. Hoch’s characters illustrate that the crafting of one’s own identity can defy perceptions, such as the white teenager Flip declaring “I’m black.” Ali G. rapping with Mohammed El Fayed proves that the perception of El Fayed as a suave Egyptian billionaire can dissolve in a moment of unbelievable reality.
In "Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past", David Roediger offers a variety of reasons why “the ‘race is over’ stance ignores existing inequalities” (14). One concerns Roediger raises is that the post-racial might be equated with “an end of African American racial identity” while white privilege remains unquestioned and unchallenged (13).
ReplyDeleteAcademic scholar Touré published an article in the New York Times yesterday titled “No Such Place as ‘Post-Racial’ America.” In this opinion piece Touré makes a poignant plea to end the use of a “bankrupt and meaningless term” that represents a “mythical idea that should be as painful to the mind’s ear as fingernails on the chalkboard.” The post-racial concept allows one to turn a blind eye to continuing institutional racism and white privilege. Touré writes, “So you may not be racist but still receiving the spoils of racism. That still doesn’t make you racist. But it makes you part of the system and reveals why it’s also your responsibility to interrogate and examine how your society works.”
While I was reading this article I was listening to "Camp", the first full-length release by Childish Gambino, actor Danny Glover’s hip-hop persona. In the song “Hold You Down” Glover spits the line, “you’re not not racist cause The Wire’s in your Netflix queue/subtle racism, it’s hard to pin it/cause you’d only understand if you were me for just a minute.” The case has been made on other texts that political organization around issues of race might not be as successful as organization around class, gender, or sexuality. Glover also speaks to this issue when he insightfully argues, “culture shock in barber shops cause I ain’t hood enough/we all look the same to the cops ain’t that good enough/the black experience is black and serious/cause being black, my experience is no one hearing us.” Glover complicates the monolithic myth that all blacks are poor; however, he also points out that institutional racism affects all blacks regardless of class.
In "Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past", David Roediger offers a variety of reasons why “the ‘race is over’ stance ignores existing inequalities” (14). One concerns Roediger raises is that the post-racial might be equated with “an end of African American racial identity” while white privilege remains unquestioned and unchallenged (13).
ReplyDeleteAcademic scholar Touré published an article in the New York Times yesterday titled “No Such Place as ‘Post-Racial’ America.” In this opinion piece Touré makes a poignant plea to end the use of a “bankrupt and meaningless term” that represents a “mythical idea that should be as painful to the mind’s ear as fingernails on the chalkboard.” The post-racial concept allows one to turn a blind eye to continuing institutional racism and white privilege. Touré writes, “So you may not be racist but still receiving the spoils of racism. That still doesn’t make you racist. But it makes you part of the system and reveals why it’s also your responsibility to interrogate and examine how your society works.”
While I was reading this article I was listening to "Camp", the first full-length release by Childish Gambino, actor Danny Glover’s hip-hop persona. In the song “Hold You Down” Glover spits the line, “you’re not not racist cause The Wire’s in your Netflix queue/subtle racism, it’s hard to pin it/cause you’d only understand if you were me for just a minute.” The case has been made on other texts that political organization around issues of race might not be as successful as organization around class, gender, or sexuality. Glover also speaks to this issue when he insightfully argues, “culture shock in barber shops cause I ain’t hood enough/we all look the same to the cops ain’t that good enough/the black experience is black and serious/cause being black, my experience is no one hearing us.” Glover complicates the monolithic myth that all blacks are poor; however, he also points out that institutional racism affects all blacks regardless of class.
David Roediger’s “Colored White” analyzes relatively recent events and figures in American culture (Rush Limbaugh, Rudolph Giuliani, O.J. Simpson) and the ways in which they perpetuate white privilege and identity. By placing these events in conversation with historical contexts (what Roediger refers to as being ‘present-minded’), the author is able to chart the continuities of racial oppression in the United States. This process allows him to show readers “how historians bring their work to bear on contemporary issues” (16). This is his key contribution, and resonates especially well given current claims about ‘color-blindness’ and the ‘post-racial’. Roediger effectively demonstrates that, when all is said and done, many contemporary issues in the United States are steeped in race, whether explicitly stated or not. In the same fashion that Roediger re-examines Whiteness, Naeem Mohaieman’s piece on the Muslim influence in hip-hop also forces the reader to take a second look at the way we confine Blackness in America to certain stereotypes. Mohaiemen charts the profound influence of Islam on the development of rap music. What may have been perceived as two different worlds, Islam and Hip-Hop, are shown to be intrinsically linked.
ReplyDelete