Transcript Slide 1

‘Race’ and Representation
Leah Wild.
The Nature and History of Racism
• Essentialism
• The tendency to discursively reduce a
whole group of people to a number of
essential characteristics (negative) which
are then taken to explain that groups
behaviour, values, attitudes, cultural
practices and material circumstances.
• Debate around ‘old’ and ‘new’ racism
‘New’ and ‘Old’ racisms
• ‘Old’ racism rooted in assumptions about
biological difference and racial hierarchy.
• (Barker 1981) ‘New Racism’ about
‘Cultural difference’ -supposedly bereft of
notions of superiority and inferiority
• Pathologising of the culture of the ‘other’ in
‘new’ racist discourse.
• Is ‘New’ racism really that different?
Victorian trade Cards
• ‘Ching Collection’- 400
cards.has over four
hundred trade cards
• produced mostly in the
United States
• contain racist depictions
of Chinese and Chinese
Americans.
• provide a glimpse into the
history of racism toward
the Chinese in America.
• Chinese people depicted
eating dogs, rats and
mice.
‘Benevolence, Paternalism and
Attraction.
• Gates (1986) rejects the notion ‘race as a
stable, coherent category.
• Points to ‘benevolence’, paternalism and
sexual attraction in history of attitudes
towards the ‘other’
• BUT benevolence, attraction and
romanticisation of the ‘other’ are often part
of the same complex racist symbolism
• Hottentot Venus an Example
Sara Baartman- The Hottentot Venus.
(1810)
Racism and Ambivalence 1
• Wright et al (1998) young black men are
positioned ambivalently by white teachers
and male peers
• Jenkins (1986) white managers hold
posyive and negative stereotypes of Asian
job applicants
• Troyna and Hatcher (1991) many white
children who perpetuate racism also have
ambivalent attitudes .
• Ten Little Niggers a
children's poem, that
celebrates the deaths of ten
Black children, The Three
Golliwogs was reprinted as
recently as 1968, and it still
contained the above
passage.
• ‘Ten Little Niggers’ (1939)
Agatha Christie cover
showed a Golliwog lynched,
hanging from a noose.
• During World War II the
word wog was used by the
British Army in North Africa,
mainly as a slur against
dark-skinned Arabs.
• British regiment- Argyll and
Sutherland Highlanders,
wore a Robertson's golly
brooch for each Arab they
had killed.
Racism and Ambivalence 2
• benevolence and malevolence can co-exist
• ‘other’ is often simultaneously revered and
reviled
• Harris (2003) in ‘Coloured Pictures’ notes that
‘Even the Bible, if read literally, treats black skin
with disdain’
• Solomon's song (Song of Songs 1:5), "I am
black, but comely," a statement that indicates a
beauty that conflicts with being black.
• Racism in Children’s books
Embodied Racism
• Racism profoundly embodied.
• Exoticisation, infantilisation, ascription of
hyper-sexual identities.
• Fears around smell, dirt, and contagion.
• Anxiety around the difference of the body
of the ‘other’- manifested in disgust and
desire.
• Fears around strange foods, different
eating habits
Racism and the Enlightenment
• Enlightenment project attempts to
categorise and rank human groups
• part of the project of ordering, describing,
defining, cataloguing and ultimately
manipulating and controlling the natural
and social worlds.
• Drew on pseudo-scientific theories to
hierarchically rank human beings
• Link to imperialist project.
‘The White Man’s Burden’
• First appeared in
McClure's Magazine
(1899).
• Text reads ‘Pears soap is
a potent factor in
brightening the dark
corners of the earth as
civilisation advances
while among the cultured
of all nations it holds the
highest place…
Racism and Dualism
• Individual bodies symbolise membership
of the social body or body politic
• racist discourse saturated with
dichotomous and dualistic separations
between black/white, self /other, good/bad,
human/animal, master/slave, purity/
pollution, civilised/primitive, cultured/
barbaric, enlightened/backward, good/evil;
Constructions of ‘Whiteness’.
• Neglected issue in sociological thought
• bell hooks (1990) ‘We need a discourse
on race that interrogates whiteness'
• (Frankenburg 1997 ) examines
constructions of whiteness from both
inside and outside the white subject
position- Whiteness has no static meaning
• embedded in socioeconomic,
sociocultural, and psychic interrelations'
‘Whiteness’ and ‘envy’
• Roediger white invention of black stereotypes in the 19th
century
• envy for perceived as the corporeal, carefree life of the
black man.
• Rapid industrialisation and mechanization creates
nostalgia for the ‘less civilised’ times of agrarian country
life.
• Ignoring the oppressive, humiliating daily lives of black
slaves, white workers saw their own imagined past.
• White working-classes 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).
• Lott (1993) hatred of the other linked to hatred of ones
own excess
Imagined Communities
• Whiteness an 'invented tradition' (Hobsbawm
and Ranger 1983)
• imagined community’ (Benedict Anderson)
• narratives of a continuous and homogeneous
white history constructed in order to create a
false sense of collective identity in times of great
social and economic upheaval
• 'Whiteness is everywhere but it is very hard to
see' (Lipsitz 1995)
• ‘It is a blank slate against which difference and
Otherness are constructed (Harris 2003).
Dominant forms of
representation.
• Hall (1995) Media produces and reproduces
ideologies
• Media and cultural and symbolic ‘myths’
• Link to Durkheim on myth and ritual- Myth &
Ritual allow people to vent their emotions in a
fairly safe and controlled manner
• Myths galvanise otherwise heterogeneous
groups by providing a sense of collective
identity.
• Bogle (1973), in a study of representations of
Black people in American cinema, suggested
that there are five dominant African-American
stereotypes
The ‘Uncle Tom’
• Humiliatingly subservient.
• Loyal but stupid.
• Childlike, unthinking and
fearful.
• The ‘good servant’
• In some African American
communities "Uncle Tom"
is a slur used to
disparage a Black person
who is humiliatingly
subservient or deferential
to White people.
The ‘Coon’ Caricature
• Derived from raccoon.
• 3 types- pure coon,
pickaninny and uncle
remus
• Most derogatory
stereotype.
• Black men depicted
as lazy man-child.
• To blame for own
position.
The ‘Pickaninny’ caricature.
• Infantilisation of black men
and women.
• Pickaninnies portryed with
bulging eyes, wild hair, red
lips, and wide mouths into
which they stuffed huge
slices of watermelon.
• routinely shown on
postcards, posters, and
matchboxes being chased
or eaten.
• portrayed as buffoons often
running from alligators and
toward fried chicken.
Uncle Remus
• harmless, friendly
stereotype, given to
'quaint, naive and
comic philosophising'
The tragic Mulatto
• Mostly women.
• Ashamed of own
blackness
• Attempting , hopelessly,
to pass as white.
• Often a seductress
whose beauty drove
White men to rape her
• Would be deserted when
her true ‘racial’ origins
were discovered.
The ‘Mammy’
• Aunt Chloe (uncle
Tom’s cabin’) nurturing and
protective of "her"
white family
• Neglects own
children.
• self-sacrificing, fat,
asexual, goodhumored, a loyal cook
and housekeeper
‘The Brute caricature’
• Portrays Black men as innately
savage, animalistic,
destructive, and criminal
• The brute is a fiend and a
sociopath,
• Black men are depicted as
hideous, terrifying predators
who target helpless victims,
• White women potential victims
• "A bad negro is the most
horrible creature upon the
earth, the most brutal and
merciless." (Charles Smith
1897)
• these types of stereotypical images are
deeply ambivalent - they are both
comforting and threatening to the white
observer (Hall 1997).
• they provide a series of convenient roles
for the white representation of black
people. All of them play into white
fantasies of moral, spiritual and mental
superiority’ Harris (2003).
• These stereotypes repicated in
contemporary contexts
Modern racist Images
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The black dope fiend
The Muslim ‘fanatic’.
Ganster rapper.
The ‘other’ represented
as dangerous, violent and
deviant.
• ‘New racism’ or ‘Old
racism’?
• How much has changed?
Eroticisation
• Black men are consistently portrayed in the
white media in a sexualized, primitivist manner
• super-masculine images appeal to white
audiences, who simultaneously fear them and
are fascinated by them' (hooks 1990)
• Black Women as promiscuous, sexually
insatiable, exotic, wild, alluring and morally
corrupt.
• David Pilgrim (2003) ‘Jezebel’ stereotype ‘used
during slavery as a rationalisation for sexual
relations between White men and Black women,
especially sexual unions involving slavers and
slaves.
The ‘Jezebel’
• Promiscous and
predatory.
• seductive, alluring,
worldly, beguiling,
tempting, and lewd.
• used during slavery
as a rationalisation for
sexual relations
between White slave
owners and Black
female slaves.
1973
Impact of representation
• Hall (1995) Black men often adopt what he
calls a caricature in reverse a kind of
exaggerated hyper ethnicity which
appears to conform to many of these
stereotypes
• Eg ‘Black macho of Blaxploitation cinema,
gangsta rap
Impact of representation 2
• Julien and Mercer ‘Certain myths about Black male
sexuality are maintained not by the imposition of force
from "above," but by the very people who are dominated
by them however the hegemonic repertoire of images of
Black masculinity, from docile "Uncle Tom" to
"Superspade" heroes like Shaft, have been forged in and
through the histories of slavery, colonialism and
imperialism.
• macho" or "toughness" used as a means of survival to
cope with the repressive, violent and destructive power
• West- machismo and toughness are necessary tools for
survival in a hostile and violent white culture.
Conformity, subversion and
resistance.
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Apparent conformity
Subtle subversion of images
Rascist stereotypes ‘turned upside down’
Appropriation of ascribed labels
Not passive acquiescence
those that are ascribed an ‘other’ identity
are active in subverting meanings and
appropriating symbolic constructs.
Conclusion.
• Debates around representation are complex.
• Images highly ambivalent.
• Processes and practices of representation have to be
situated in an historical context.
• Not just about hatred but Power.
• Dominant images have their roots in our colonial history
• Racist representation involves what Hall calls ‘fetishism
and Disavowal’
• Fetishism involves the substitution of an object for some
dangerous hidden force.
• Disavowal is a strategy by means of which a powerful
fascination or desire is simultaneously indulged and
denied.
• Not enough just to replace negative images with postive
ones.