blackpolitics.co.uk » race

who wants a black barbie?

Dominic — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:08:43 +0000

News that a Walmart store in the US had halved the price of a black Barbie doll while retaining the regular full price on an identical white Barbie was greeted with some outrage.

The store management explained that the decision was taken to reduce the price in order to clear the stock for a new line of dolls.

Many commentators expressed their upset that the pricing policy of the store could inadvertently send the message to young black children that the dolls that represented ‘their colour’ were somehow of a lesser value.

Undoubtedly there are concerns that that may happen. Black people, and black girls in particular, have long suffered the indignities of seeing lighter skin, smaller lips, and straighter noses being praised as the epitome to which they must aspire.

However, the remarks of the store management is also telling- A spokesperson said the doll was marked down because fewer people were buying it.

White and black parents, it seems, aren’t that keen on buying their children black dolls. It reminded me of the bias that has affected glossy magazines as well.

White women tend not to buy a glossy magazine with a black woman on the cover. There are, of course, exceptions to this – Beyonce, Halle Berry, and Rihanna occasionally grace the covers of popular magazines and they sell well. As a general rule of thumb however, stylists and editors shy away from putting a black woman on the cover- it simply doesn’t sell as much. That’s why there was such a fuss when Italian Vogue went for a special issue using black models. An underground campaign to get people to buy it and highlight just how groundbreaking a move it was, circulated widely and was reported in the media.

But how can we call for beautiful black models to grace the covers of our magazines, if we won’t even buy beautiful black dolls for our daughters? Through sheer unavailability over the years, black girls may be more likely to own white dolls- how bout getting more white girls playing with black dolls?

Precious

Dominic — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:04:58 +0000

Like many people, I got caught up in the hype about Precious. I had heard about the film adaptation some time ago and looked forward to seeing the film. After viewing it however, I was left with the feeling that I had been party to some sort of pornographic escapade- getting off on the misery of an obese black woman. I struggled to find the right words that could convey my concerns…until I came across this post which captured my feelings perfectly:

The Nerve of Precious

Son of Baldwin

http://www.sonofbaldwin.blogspot.com/

This is a criticism of the film Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. Many black people will not abide such a thing. We are very protective of most black achievements. It does not matter that the film presents our community in an extremely negative light. We prefer poor representation to no representation at all. Also, we seem to find this type of subject matter “authentic,” whether we have had similar experiences or not. This may be because we have internalized beliefs that legitimize certain views of the black experience. We consider healthier depictions, like The Cosby Show for example, pure fantasy. Even those of us whose lives are more like The Cosby Show than Precious believe this to be true.

Black gay people, in particular, refuse to hear any disparaging words about the film. Understandably, we feel a strong solidarity with director Lee Daniels, who is, himself, openly gay. We also appreciate the positive portrayal of gays in the film. And because we endure a peculiar persecution from the black community at large, we freely support any vehicle that takes black people to task.

So blacks almost uniformly rejoiced when, on Sunday, March 7, 2010, The Academy awarded Precious with two Oscars—one for Best Adapted Screenplay and another for Best Supporting Actress. It was a sad day. Here is why:

I. Precious Agenda

The Oscars have a well-documented history of rewarding films that confirm damaging black stereotypes. This is not to suggest that some of these stereotypes have absolutely no basis in reality. There are a few blacks who—sometimes proudly—embody them. The problem is that Hollywood (in conjunction with the mainstream media) makes it seem that the stereotypes are the norm and non-stereotypes are the exception. Coupled with the fact that Hollywood and the media largely ignore or do not assign the same weight to these same images in the white community and you have the makings of the white superiority/black inferiority paradigm. With its story and imagery, Precious helps to cement these philosophies in ways that rival shameful American works like The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind.

II. Precious Flaws

It is a challenge to evaluate Precious as a work of cinematic art because beyond its flawed racial politics, there is little else there. Set in the 1980s, it is a cornucopia of black stereotypes: pig’s feet, collard greens, fried chicken, non-parenting, predatory violence, sexual deviancy, Mammy images, abortion clinics, welfare offices, obesity, shoplifting, disdain for intellect, gambling, out-of-control children; it is all in there. But what it does not have is context or an intelligent examination of the characters’ lives.

We never get to see why Precious’s mother (“Mary Jones” played by comedian Mo’Nique a.k.a. Monique Imes-Jackson) is the woman she is. We never understand why she lives the life she lives. As far as the film is concerned, poor black people—and only poor black people—live this way because they are barbarians who use whatever cunning they possess to exploit the American public assistance system. Most importantly, it is the white man’s burden to endure and, perhaps, civilize these creatures. We never get to see what roles Reagan-era economics and institutionalized racism play here.

Remember all of the great American novels and other media that contained Mammy figures? Remember how Mammy was presented as someone who existed solely to serve the whites for whom she worked? Remember how her toil was presented as a necessary and redeeming part of her character? Remember how her personal life was never investigated? In Mary Jones, we have both the New Millennium Mammy and the justification for past Mammy portrayals. Mammy had to toil away for white folks so that she would not become a welfare queen. Her home life was ignored because as kind as she was to her employer’s children was as evil as she was to her own. According to Precious, Mary Jones is what Mammy becomes when she is left to her own devices.

Precious (played by newcomer Gabourey Sidibe) is a figure of almost pathological passivity who does what she is told by everyone around her. She would have evoked pity if the filmmakers had not poured the pathos on so thick. Instead, her experiences are comical before they become absurd.

Precious is not just a receptacle for the AIDS virus or the monstrous things her father, mother, and boys in the neighborhood do to her. She is also a vessel for the self-hating messages of the filmmakers. “I want a light-skinned boyfriend with curly hair,” she narrates. The film never investigates her reasoning. It never gives her the opportunity to understand how or why this line of thinking is self-destructive or that it should be overcome. Quite the contrary, the film confirms that this is what she should want—and what the audience should want, too. The casting makes that abundantly clear. If the film is to be believed, dark-skinned black people are either evil or unlovable, take your pick. Only light-skinned black people or white people are worthy, and only they can be saviors.

Moreover, the film’s narrative is incomplete: Precious’s journey is truncated, unfulfilling, and offers no catharsis. She goes from bad at the beginning of the film to bad (maybe even worse) at the end of it. The literacy theme that was the novel’s saving grace is almost completely abandoned in the film. Given primacy is a voyeuristic sadism that seems to revel in what Precious endures. The audience is encouraged to await Mary’s attacks on her with the same curiosity and thrill they experience when Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street thrashes one of his victims.

Despite the critical acclaim, most of the cast’s performances are painfully one-note. Mo’Nique is an angrier, darker, heavier version of the character Halle Berry played in Monster’s Ball. Her portrayal lacks breadth and nuance. Gabourey Sidibe is a darker, female version of Coronji Calhoun’s character in Monster’s Ball. And given her enormous presence, it is rather astounding how little of her shows up on screen. Critics laud her performance as “quiet,” but “silent” is perhaps more apt. The other characters in the film (Precious’s teacher—played by Paula Patton—and her fellow classmates) are cardboard cut-outs from any generic afterschool special. Only one person in this film shows any range. Surprisingly, it is Mariah Carey as Precious’s welfare case manager. She is able to capture both the bureaucratic distance and fleeting empathy of a social worker (and she is the only human being in this film.

As the cumbersome title does its best to remind us, the film is based on the novel Push by poet and author Sapphire (a.k.a. Ramona Lofton). For years, Sapphire declined offers to turn Push into a film because she believed that given American racist perceptions, the results would be disastrous. With the election of Barack Obama, America’s first non-white president, she thought now was the time for a film adaptation. She believed Obama’s presence would balance out anything revealed in the film. Sadly, she was wrong.

First, the counterbalancing burden is far too great for any one individual. Second, Obama is thought of as an “exception”; his light skin, white upbringing, and possible lack of ancestral slave ties allow whites a guilt-free way to relate to him. Third, it is possible that Obama actually confirms the most consistent message in Precious: The lighter your skin, the better you are. In permitting this film to be made, Sapphire made a dreadful mistake for which we will pay an exacting price.
Perhaps that would not have been the case if the film had been given to anyone but Lee Daniels to direct. Daniels’s psychopathy is written all over his work. He is obsessed with sexual abuse, incest, interracial relationships, and light-skinned black people. In a New York Times interview ironically entitled “The Audacity of Precious,” Daniels had this to say:

Precious is so not P.C. What I learned from doing the film is that even though I am black, I’m prejudiced. I’m prejudiced against people who are darker than me. When I was young, I went to a church where the lighter-skinned you were, the closer you sat to the altar.

This is clear to anyone who watches the film. He continued:

Anybody that’s heavy like Precious — I thought they were dirty and not very smart.

Which explains why he was astounded by Sidibe, a nearly four-hundred-pound, dark-skinned black woman who is highly articulate. Generally, when people imagine overweight black women, they think of someone like Mo’Nique: a crass, loud, funny, overweight sister-girl who can cook and is always hungry. Though, Mo’Nique’s appetite also manifests itself in other ways.

Mo’Nique is an opportunist. Examining her body of work—The Parkers, Soul Plane, Domino, Shadowboxer, the voice of “Jamiqua” on The Boondocks, and now Precious—one thing seems clear: Her willingness to embrace and defend demeaning stereotypes of African Americans is closely tied to her desire for economic security. She would not show up to promote Precious, despite all of the accolades and acclaim she received, unless the producers agreed to pay her for her appearances. With Precious, she reveals that she is not even above exploiting her own experiences for material gain. She will tell anyone who will listen that she can vouch for Precious because, as a child, she was molested by her older brother. Her assertions, meant to lend the film authenticity, come across, instead, as self-indulgent. As journalist and author Jill Nelson keenly observed:

Can you imagine Meryl Streep revealing she used to be a bushy tailed, carnivorous mammal or editor-in-chief of Vogue to market the authenticity of The Fantastic Mr. Fox or The Devil Wears Prada? Mo’Nique is not the only celebrity to exalt and exploit her abuse. Oprah Winfrey has made a billion-dollar industry of it. It should come as no surprise, then, that Winfrey—who, in many ways, functions as the ultimate Mammy figure (whenever Oprah steps outside of her Mammy position, she is quickly checked by her white following)—is one of the executive producers of this film. However, it is rather odd that Tyler Perry has co-signed on this. Yes, he, too, has spoken, in great detail, of the abuse he suffered as a child. Yet, on the other hand, in one of his most lucrative films (Madea’s Family Reunion), Perry uses incestuous lust as comedy (the scene involves a group of uncles imploring their young, scantily clad niece to bend over to retrieve beverages so that they can, unbeknownst to her, get a better look at her private parts). Hypocrites, it seems, always want to play innocent.

IV. Precious Truths

Precious seems to operate as a collective therapy session for its celebrity pushers; and because there is no professional psychiatrist to arbitrate the gathering (where is Dr. Robin Smith when you need her?), Daniels, Mo’Nique, Winfrey, and Perry have no way to discern reality from their delusions. So, they offer up the film as representative of the black experience. “We are all Precious,” they claim. They mean themselves and “us black people.” They are, of course, insane. The error they make is clear and is deftly summed up by an Arthur Schopenhauer quote:

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

The truth is this:Precious is, as Armond White said, pornography. For what was sold as a sympathetic depiction of someone’s nightmarish experiences has, instead, all the makings of someone’s dysfunctional x-rated fantasy; its value limited to getting some of its audience off and some of its audience off the hook.

Ethnic minority women facing ‘double discrimination’ in the criminal justice system

Dominic — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:56:10 +0000

Ethnic minority women facing ‘double discrimination’ in the Criminal Justice System, finds new report

A new report published by the Fawcett Society reveals how the needs of ethnic minority women are frequently rendered invisible in the Criminal Justice System as offenders, victims and workers in the justice sector, as they face double discrimination on the grounds of sex and race.

Ethnic minority women, particularly foreign national women, are over-represented within the female offender population with nearly one third of women in prison in England from an ethnic minority background.
Ethnic minority women are under-represented as workers within the criminal justice system particularly at senior levels. There is only one ethnic minority woman in the senior judiciary and only 0.2 percent of police officers at Chief Inspector grade and above are ethnic minority women.
The needs of ethnic minority women who experience violence are frequently overlooked – nine out of ten local authorities have no specialist services for ethnic minority women who have experienced violence.
Evidence on ethnic minority women’s experiences continues to be patchy and inconsistent. There is a lack of reliable statistics giving the full picture of the intersection of race and gender, let alone the experiences of women from different ethnic minority backgrounds.
On many issues, such as ethnic minority women’s experience of sexual violence or the health needs of women offenders, there is a complete dearth of evidence, pointing to low prioritising of these women’s needs and experiences.

Commenting on the report, Sharon Smee, Justice Policy Officer at the Fawcett Society, said: “More than ten years on from the Stephen Lawrence enquiry and over five years since the appointment of the first ethnic minority female high court judge, the criminal justice system is still failing to respond to the realities of ethnic minority women’s lives. This is compounded by the limited number of ethnic minority women in senior positions in the justice sector.

“We need a justice system which is representative and responsive to the needs and experiences of all people in the UK and which draws on the talents of all women. It is time to listen to ethnic minority women and learn from their experiences and the best practice initiatives already in operation.”

Ceri Goddard, Chief Executive of the Fawcett Society, said:

“The Criminal Justice System continues to fail to consider the specific needs and skills of ethnic minority women. Whereas previous policies have targeted ‘women’ and ‘race,’ there has been little focus on the multiple discrimination faced by ethnic minority women, who have tended to fall between the gaps.

“Progress for ethnic minority victims of violence has also been frustratingly slow: nine out of ten local authorities still have no specialised ethnic minority service for women who have experienced domestic and sexual violence.

“This report demonstrates how important it is more broadly for equality law not to ‘box’ individuals into categories but to recognise the multiple discrimination which is often at play. The dual discrimination provision in the Equality Bill currently before parliament is crucial in this regard.

“Fawcett’s election campaign will be asking the parties how they will be addressing multiple discrimination in the justice system and within equality policy more generally.”

Key Statistics

Women offenders

29 percent of the female prison population is made up of ethnic minority women.
19 percent of female prisoners were foreign nationals in 2009.
26 percent of ethnic minority women reported victimisation by prison staff compared to 16 percent of white women.
Ethnic minority women are more likely to be remanded into custody than white offenders.

Women Workers

As of March 2009, only 0.2 percent of police officers at Chief inspector grade and above were ethnic minority women.
At the end of 2008, ethnic minority women made up only 3.8 percent of the total number of self-employed barristers.
Women working in private practice earned 28.9 percent less than men in 2008. This gap appeared unaffected by ethnic background.
There is only one ethnic minority female High Court judge and none in the Court of Appeal or Supreme Court.
There are 36 ethnic minority women judges as compared to 700 female judges and 2901 male judges. Ethnic minority women therefore make up just 1 percent of judges.
Only 7 percent of women working in the prison service are from an ethnic minority background.

Female victims and survivors of violence

Nine out of ten local authorities have no specialist ethnic minority service for women who have experienced violence.
1 in 4 ethnic minority women experience domestic violence during their lifetime.
In 2008 the Forced Marriage Unit had over 1,600 reported cases of forced marriage.
It has been estimated that nearly 66,000 women with female genital mutilation (FGM) were living in the UK in 2001, and over 20,000 girls could currently be at risk.
30 percent of gun crime victims are young females, compared to 2-5 percent of these crimes having female suspects.
The cost to society of violence against ethnic minority women has been estimated to be at least £1.5 billion.

Lots of fun down under

Dominic — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 01:25:31 +0000

Australia is in the news yet again for a race related story- this time over fried chicken.

KFC has pulled a controversial advert from down under after complaints that it was racist.The ad features a white Australian cricket fan looking exasperated as black supporters- supposedly West Indian- are loudly cheering. The white fan asks aloud how to get out of an “awkward situation.” He then whips out a bucket of KFC chicken, and the black fans greedily stuff their faces.

The white guy then says: “Too easy.”

The racist stereotype of black people and fried chicken is pretty well known.

Some people, outraged at the outrage, have defended the international corporation, arguing that if it was Australia playing England, the ad would have shown the Barmy Army stuffing their faces. Somehow I just don’t see that happening. The ad works because it plays to the stereotype of black people loving fried chicken. In order to work in a Barmy Army context, it would need to be promoting tea, or some other English stereotype.

At the end of 2009, it was predicted that Australia would see a 20% drop in the number of Indian students choosing to study there, following perceived racist attacks. The Australian economy is expeced to lose about $70m (44m) in revenue.

And if that wasn’t enough,who could forget Harry Connick Jr speaking out against racist stereotyping in October 2009 on a highly rated Australian TV show.

On the judging panel for Hey Hey It’s Saturday, he was forced to endure an act by the ‘Jackson Jive’—six dancing white men in blackface.

Connick was less than amused, giving them a zero out of ten.

Host Daryl Somers apologized later in the show, noting “I know that to your countrymen, that’s an insult to have a blackface routine like that on the show.” Connick responded, “I just wanted to say on behalf of my country, I know it was done humorously, but we’ve spent so much time trying to not make black people look like buffoons, that when we see something like that, we take it really to heart. I know it was in good fun, and the last thing I want to do is take this show to a down level—because you know how much I love this show and this country—but I feel like I’m at home here, and if I knew that was going to be part of the show, I probably—I definitely wouldn’t have done it.”

Looks like it’s all fun down in Oz.