Writes Karen Attiah in The Washington Post... and this is well worth a free-access link.
Attiah asks the AI character, "How do you celebrate your African American heritage?" This nonexistent person — billed as "a Proud Black queer momma” — answers:
Through music, food and tradition! My family loves cooking soul food for holidays like Juneteenth and Kwanzaa — my mom’s fried chicken and collard greens are famous! [...] How about your heritage? Any special traditions?
Annoyed at AI's posing as a real person — which seems like blackface — Attiah conducts an interrogation:
"An early Walt Disney movie featuring the first appearance of Mickey Mouse is among the copyrighted works from 1928 moving into the public domain on Jan. 1, 2024.... 'What is going into the public domain is this particular appearance in this particular film,' [says Kembrew McLeod, a communications professor and intellectual property scholar]. That means people can creatively reuse only the Mickey Mouse from Steamboat Willie. Not the Mickey Mouse in the 1940 movie Fantasia. Nor the one on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.... New versions of Mickey Mouse remain under copyright. Copyright applies to creative characters, movies, books, plays, songs and more. And as it happens, Mickey Mouse is also trademarked.... 'And of course, trademark law has no end, adds Harvard Law School professor Ruth Okediji.... As long as the mark remains distinctive in the supply of goods and services, the owner of the trademark gets to protect that trademark. 'It's something copyright scholars like myself have been concerned about.... This effective undermining of the public domain by allowing trademark law to effectively extend the life of a copyrighted work.....'"
The most NPR part of that article is telling us that in "Steamboat Willie," as opposed to later versions of Mickey, "his roots in the blackface minstrel shows of the time are more apparent."
"... could be heard from the spacious backyard in Western Los Angeles on Friday. More than 1,000 people gathered at a nearby park to criticize his approach in Israel and Gaza.... Mr. Biden did not mention the conflict in either of his fund-raiser addresses. But Dr. Biden didn’t skip a beat when faint echoes of the protesters could be heard over her speech on Friday. At one point, she remarked, 'I’m so grateful Joe is our president during these uncertain times,' prompting a standing ovation from the crowd."
When do we, the people, get to see Biden and hear him discuss and defend his policies and his fitness for office? I don't find it cute at all that he "steps out in Tinsel Town." He's collecting money from the elite and protecting himself from any criticism (other than what wafts into the "spacious backyard" from the "nearby park."
Steps out in Tinsel Town... that really irritates me.
"... and argues that a fat woman 'will not be a social success unless she burnt-cork herself, don beads, and then go to that burning clime where women, like pigs, are valued at so much a pound.' People have been pushing back against fat stigma since at least the nineteen-sixties, when activists staged a 'fat-in' at the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. But the desire to achieve thinness by any means necessary—amphetamines, grapefruit diets, SlimFast—remains an almost foundational tenet of female socialization. When I was a preteen, in the heroin-chic nineties, pro-anorexia Web sites proliferated on the Internet; in the early two-thousands, teen girls puked or did obsessive sit-ups or took Hydroxycut in pursuit of abs like Britney Spears’s. In the twenty-tens, even as the Kardashians ostentatiously displayed their curves, they sold Flat Tummy Co. teas—laxatives—and waist trainers...."
"It seems that Caryn Johnson saw value in appearing to be Jewish.... So, is it racist to pretend to be Jewish if one isn’t? Is it ‘cultural appropriation’?... Perhaps Whoopi does have some distant shred of Jewish heritage buried far back in her family tree....
Minorities are often granted licence to joke about their own... If Whoopi had been better connected to her putative Judaism, she might have thought twice about her festive jumper design aimed at Jews, depicting a ‘Jewish’ octopus wearing a kippah. Most Goldbergs I’ve met know that Jewish Octopuses are usually associated with Nazi era antisemitism. Not Whoopi.
When it comes to racism, it’s not only Jews Whoopi has angered. When she was dating the comedian Ted Danson in 1993, he nearly ended his career by appearing in blackface in a sketch at the Friars Club comedy event, which was reported to have included jokes about how he got her to clean his parents’ house, contained numerous full occurrences of the “N word” and ended with him eating from a tray of watermelon. The gags didn’t go down well with the 3,000 strong audience.... She’s said to have come out on stage to challenge the audience, saying: 'N*****, n*****, n*****, whitey, whitey, whitey! It takes a lot of courage to come out in blackface in front of 3000 [people]. I don’t care if you don’t like it. I do!'"
Here, at the Holocaust Encyclopedia, you can see the well-known Nazi era cartoon depicting Jews as an octopus that is destroying the entire world.
***
Goldberg said "I don’t care if you don’t like it. I do!" in 1993, but in recent years she's been entrenched in a long-running group project on network daytime TV that supports and mildly challenges nice American ladies who want to think well of themselves. I'd love to see her quit the show and get back to the woman-alone-on-stage shows that first made her famous.
Maybe she's too comfortable with "The View," but "The View" wasn't sufficiently comfortable with her. Comfort is overrated, and it deserves a particularly low rating in comedy. It's the enemy of comedy. Goldberg could build a one-woman show around this incident, and that's what I'd like to see. Take the time to look at the problem from multiple angles and bring us somewhere surprising. That's what Dave Chappelle does with his very independent shows.
"Even before class ended 90 minutes later, group chat messages were flying, along with at least one email of complaint to the department reporting that many students were 'incredibly offended both by this video and by the lack of explanation as to why this was selected for our class.'
Within hours, Professor Sheng had sent a terse email issuing the first of what would be two apologies. Then, after weeks of emails, open letters and canceled classes, it was announced on Oct. 1 that Professor Sheng — a two-time Pulitzer finalist and winner of a MacArthur 'genius' grant— was voluntarily stepping back from the class entirely, in order to allow for a 'positive learning environment.'... 'Of course, facing criticism for my misjudgment as a professor here is nothing like the experience that many Chinese professors faced during the Cultural Revolution,' he wrote. 'But it feels uncomfortable that we live in an era where people can attempt to destroy the career and reputation of others with public denunciation. I am not too old to learn, and this mistake has taught me much.'... The Olivier film was controversial even when it was new. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Bosley Crowther expressed shock that Olivier 'plays Othello in blackface,' noting his 'wig of kinky black hair,' his lips 'smeared and thickened with a startling raspberry red' and his exaggerated accent, which he described as reminiscent of 'Amos ‘n’ Andy.' (To 'the sensitive American viewer,' Crowther wrote, Olivier looked like someone in a 'minstrel show.')"
"... he was dressed in blackface and dancing, when he heard the loud echo of a white man’s laughter reverberate across the set. To Chappelle, this was evidence that his satire wasn’t working: regardless of his intention, some people felt he was giving them the green light to laugh at an oppressed minority. Over 15 years later, The Closer confirms that Chappelle is no closer to remedying his original problem. After all, he is still drawing out mean-spirited laughs from a crowd – the difference is that the laughs are now at the expense of another marginalised group."
ADDED: As we were talking about yesterday, here, Chappelle uses the idea of blackface in his new show, in the context of imagining "TERFs" questioning what transgender women are doing: "They look at transgender women the way we blacks look at blackface. They go 'Oh, this bitch is doing an impression of me!'" That was criticized by a transgender woman who said “He compared my existence to someone doing blackface.”
Now, in that old Chappelle show incident, Chappelle himself was in blackface, that is, Chappelle was doing a "impression" of his own "existence" and envisioning it in a negative way. That would be comparable to a transgender woman wearing makeup, clothing, and a hairstyle of a type that she herself didn't respect but thought was demeaning! That's more like what a drag performer might do.
When should women who are not transgender say "Oh, this bitch is doing an impression of me!"? The real answer, I think is, when the getup is an expression of hatred toward women. That's when the blackface comparison is apt.
ALSO: I said "That's more like what a drag performer might do." Note the "might." A drag performer might admire and respect women and might outright loathe women. There's a whole range in between that's involves satirizing women and clowning in the guise of a woman. But these performances are themselves subject to critique. You can do it, but we get to talk about your doing it.
The memo followed condemnation from Jaclyn Moore, a transgender writer who worked on the Netflix original “Dear White People”....
Last week, Moore... wrote on Twitter that Chappelle used to be one of her “heroes.”
“But he said he’s a TERF,” Moore wrote. “He compared my existence to someone doing blackface.” Moore said she was “done” with Netflix.
I recommend more speech. Why is what transgender women are doing different from blackface? Moore's answer is implied and worth discussing: Because it's "my existence."
"... the university used the term as it is often used by historians — comedic performances of ‘blackness’ by whites in exaggerated costumes and makeup. Regardless of how one views this particular definition, it does not change the nature of the underlying conduct."
You need to be careful when you're putting highly defamatory labels on your students. You should worry about lawsuits, and you should also worry about the welfare of the young human beings who are in your charge. It is sloppy and reckless to use a term that has a specific meaning where the specific meaning does not apply and to argue — when you are called on it — that there is also broader meaning.
Kimball used the term "blackface" against students who had done nothing to darken their skin and had put on blonde curly wigs — what they're calling "Napoleon Dynamite" wigs.
To say "blackface" against your students, when there was no blackening of the face is like calling them "whores" when there is no prostitution — because some people use the word "whores" just to refer to women who are sexually active.
ADDED: The students did a performance of the "Fresh Prince" theme song. Are young white people getting the message that they should never sing songs associated with black people? Never do dances that originated with black dancers? Never dance to music performed by black musicians? Or is it just don't demonstrate your enjoyment enthusiastically? Be sure to maintain whiteness as you sing and dance? Who can understand these rules? But how nefarious of oldsters to impose these rules on the young! These mysterious rules. And isn't it awful to have confusing, mysterious rules that you can only be sure you'll avoid breaking by restricting and restraining your speech and behavior? It doesn't take a real disease to send us into lockdown.
In 1998, The Hill tells us: "The great Billy Crystal served as host of the show," but this year
There was no movie anyone was buzzing about. No household-name stars were nominated unless Anthony Hopkins – who won his last Oscar 30 years ago – counts. There wasn't even a host for the show, because the Academy thought it was a great idea to eliminate the position for reasons unclear when a raw, unfiltered talent such as Ricky Gervais would have been just the person to lift our spirits.
Oh, come on. If they'd picked anybody to host, that person would have been skewered for one thing or another. Billy Crystal is still alive, but I'll bet he wouldn't even want to be invited back. It's better for him to be remembered as the great Oscars host of his time than to be set up as a target. Not only would people say why him and not a person of color, he's vulnerable to cancellation for having boldly and repeatedly performed in blackface:
That wasn't at the Oscars, of course. Remember when Whoopi Goldberg hosted the Oscars in whiteface?
Those were simpler times. More racist times?
ADDED: I'm just kidding about "simpler times." I think those were more complex times. We're simpler now. And it's not a compliment.
But while, say, the New York Times decided that Hilaria's cosplaying as a Latina stereotype was off-limits — even as they wrote growing profiles of her as well, including uncritically her "slight Spanish accent" — the paper of record has celebrated children having their college admissions revoked for a video of them singing the N-word along to a song when they were 15 as a "reckoning."
I found that because it has Rachel Dolezal in the headline ("Alec Baldwin's wife became Hollywood's Rachel Dolezal because of our sniveling, bootlicking press").
But come on — "they wrote growing profiles." Presumably, that should be "glowing profiles," Hilaria Baldwin has posted many selfies where she's standing sideways to display her pregnant belly. But no, that's not something the NYT can write. Here's the glowing profile in the Times, from back in 2014: "Hilaria Baldwin Holds Her Center" ("Her voice betrays a slight Spanish accent, remains of a childhood split between Boston and Spain").
I wonder how many people are faking accents... and why (and when) we feel a person acquires a pleasing air about them because of that. Oh! Just by chance, last night I watched an episode of "Friends" where the Friends were extremely irritated by a woman who'd acquired a fake English accent:
Well, clearly, blackface is a very specific problem that has been isolated, and everyone has been warned about it, so violations are harshly judged. The same is true of the "n-word," though the presence of lots of recorded music with the word creates confusion for young people who might not understand that this is the ONE thing you don't sing along with.
But accents... accents are different. You can do fake accents... can't you? I've seen people pick up a New York accent or a Southern accent... to try to fit in or to be thought well of. Many actors do accents and get special acclaim. Meryl Streep, etc. etc.
So must Hilaria Baldwin be denounced because she's doing what she's doing while being a highly privileged person? Or are accents different from skin darkening?
Gone are the days when a nongay actor won praise for playing a gay person. I guess this is like the way they don't stage "Othello" with a white actor in dark makeup and that old-time performance would be called "blackface." A nongay actor playing gay is doing "gayface."
But what's the gay equivalent of dark makeup? Arguably, it's worse than a white actor putting on dark makeup to play a black person, which is mimicking an objective, outward trait. It's an affectation of stereotypical gestures and speech patterns and so forth.
What do you need to do to read as gay? Has the answer become just don't do it?
Corden, who is straight, is so bad in The Prom—somehow both appalling and terminally bland—that it had me thinking maybe the hardliners were right along. Forget the whole case-by-case thing: No more straight actors playing gay men until the sins of The Prom are properly atoned for. [The director, Ryan] Murphy, a gay man, has led some straight actors into fertile gay territory before.... But Corden, flitting and lisping around in the most uninspired of caricatures, misses all potential for nuance, and thus never finds even a hint of truth in the role. And this is in a movie that’s supposed to be about empowering queer people!
It's hard to believe that the era of straight actors playing gay people is over. Look at all the actors who have in very recent years won awards for doing just that. Maybe the problem is the stereotypical gay character. It's one thing for Rami Malek, a straight man, to play Freddie Mercury, a gay man — a grand narrative about a specific person — but quite something else to have a generic gay guy clowning for cheap laughs.
The lyrics to “The Eyes of Texas” were inspired in part by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, who after the Civil War was a teacher at what would become Washington and Lee University, where he made an impression on future UT president William Prather by repeatedly telling students that “the eyes of the South are upon you.”...
Edmund T. Gordon, a professor of African and African diaspora studies and anthropology at Texas, said (via Texas Monthly) that Prather reminded his own students that “the eyes of Texas are upon you,” inspiring a pair of UT students in 1903. Their song debuted it at an annual campus minstrel show, according to Gordon, who said the students probably were wearing blackface when they performed it.
The melody is based on “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” which has its own origins in minstrelsy and other stereotypical depictions of Black people.
Football players have called for replacing the school song. I feel an instinctive resistance to breaking traditions, but let's think about that history. And look at the lyrics! The state has eyes and is always watching you: "The Eyes of Texas are upon you/All the livelong day/The Eyes of Texas are upon you/You cannot get away/Do not think you can escape them/At night or early in the morn/The Eyes of Texas are upon you/'Til Gabriel blows his horn."
There really is something wrong with this song. It's oppressive even if you don't know the background story. It speaks of surveillance and endless oppressive work.
Maybe a lot of college kids think the song is just funny and surreal. Eyes that you cannot escape.
I ran across that this morning because the Jessica Krug story (see previous post) got me thinking about the old movie "Soul Man," which I've never seen, but remember very well, because it was about affirmative action in law school, in which a white guy misidentifies himself as black so he can qualify for a black-only scholarship at Harvard Law School. The movie is named after the old Sam and Dave song, and Sam participated in that remake with Lou Reed — known for, among other things, the song "I Wanna Be Black"* — of the already-old song.
The use of blackface in the movie was criticized at the time, most notably by Spike Lee. The actress Rae Dawn Chong, who played the main character's love interest, said: "It was only controversial because Spike Lee made a thing of it. He'd never seen the movie and he just jumped all over it... If you watch the movie, it's really making white people look stupid… I always tried to be an actor who was doing a part that was a character versus what I call 'blackting,' or playing my race, because I knew that I would fail because I was mixed. I was the black actor for sure, but I didn't lead with my epidermis, and that offended people like Spike Lee, I think."
Anyway, it has always been a terrible idea for a white person to adopt a black identity to get ahead within higher education. That was a subject of a Hollywood movie in 1986. It's amazing that real people so recently have attempted this sort of fraud. Jessica Krug has outed herself (perhaps because she would have been outed by others), but it makes you wonder how many other people are out there who've furthered their careers by pretending to be black.
I'm writing this post mostly because I was struck by the racial healing acted out in that music video — as if getting white people to sing "I'm a soul man" could bring us all together. To quote another Lou Reed song: You know, those were different times.
__________________
* Listen to the song "I Wanna Be Black" here. Read the lyrics, here. They're quite shockingly racist, but the key line, for comprehension purposes is, "Oh, I don't wanna be a fucked up/Middle class college student no more." The annotation at the lyrics link says:
"This song [is] described by Ann Powers as 'a proto-rap unspooling of racist stereotypes that makes fun of white hipsters by forcing a deep wallow in ignorance.' Though racist, this song attempts to be a satire of bored young white men in America and their attitudes and beliefs around black men. Whether it passes Poe’s Law or not, is up for debate."
"Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture stating that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied."
I guess you "pass" Poe's Law when you're clear enough that you are not the thing you are parodying. So, Lou Reed was singing all these racist things but then he let us know that he's really making fun of the "fucked-up, middle class [white] college student" who fantasizes about acquiring a black identity.
Snopes explains. The video you're seeing — with captions like "Joe Biden participated in 'Black Face' skit in a unfunny way" — is Biden introducing a black singer.
“Now, the next man I would like you to meet,” Biden said. “Now, y’all got to sit down for this. We’re going to have some important people coming out in a minute. But there is one more band member that I want you to meet: Ladies and gentlemen, our vocalist tonight, Michael Jackson. Michael, would you please stand?” Biden said, pointing his hand toward the singer, who smiled and took a bow. Biden added: “Soon to become Prince, as was just pointed out to me."
But it's not about blackface.
In fact, the singer was a D.C.-based performer named Jerome Powell. Looking back at Biden's joke this week, Powell, now 75, told the Washington Examiner it was "just a big mistake" because Powell was influenced by artists such as Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and Tony Bennett and was nothing like Jackson. "People know the difference. I mean, Michael Jackson and I were in two entirely different categories."...
Powell said that while Biden's comment was "a mistake on his side" because he shared no musical similarities with Jackson, he was not offended and did not feel Biden was racially insensitive. “I’m a very sensitive person, so my sensitivity would have kicked in when a statement like that was made. It didn’t. I would have commented or responded to it."
I wanted to find some video of Jerome Powell singing, but it's hard to look up this Jerome Powell, because Jerome Powell is also the name of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
"... about the resulting 3,000-word article, 'Blackface Incident at Post Cartoonist’s 2018 Halloween Party Resurfaces Amid Protests': Why is this newsworthy? Readers within the Post newsroom were asking the question, too. 'No one I’ve spoken with at the Post can figure out why we published this story,' said one prominent reporter at the paper. 'We blew up this woman’s life for no reason.' In 2018, Schafer attended a Halloween party at the home of Tom Toles, the Post’s Pulitzer Prize–winning editorial cartoonist. The basis for Schafer’s costume was topical. NBC had recently fired Megyn Kelly after she said, on the air, that she didn’t understand why it was necessarily considered racist for people to wear blackface as part of a Halloween costume. Schafer, who is white, decided to lampoon the anchor by dressing as Megyn Kelly–in–blackface.... The Post said Schafer’s transgression was news because it happened in front of Toles and somewhere possibly in the vicinity of columnist Dana Milbank.... The story first arrived at the Post via management consultant Lexie Gruber, who, along with her friend Lyric Prince, an artist, had confronted Schafer that night in 2018.... Nineteen months later, on June 9, Gruber contacted Toles, whom she didn’t know, to ask for help identifying the woman... Toles claimed, falsely, not to recognize her.... Schafer told New York that when she asked [the author of the WaPo article] why the story was news, he replied, 'We have to do it or they will go to another outlet.'... Gruber expressed surprise that the reporters directed so much attention to Schafer — and to herself and Prince — instead of the more notable people at the party. 'I can understand people being curious: Why did they write a piece so focused on a private citizen?' she said. 'But Tom [Toles] is a public citizen. To me, it’s about a larger problem, where people go to marches and then drink and dance with people in blackface.'... How can Toles’s failure to promptly order Schafer out of his house be simultaneously so important that it merits feature-length coverage in the paper and not important enough to merit workplace discipline?"
What a clusterfuck! I think it's rather obvious that the ball got rolling when everybody hated Megyn Kelly and imagined they were enjoying her downfall. I wonder if Megyn Kelly is getting some weird muffled last laugh out of all this.
The link on "Long, Hot Summer" goes to "In Miami-Dade, dueling rallies in support of Black Lives Matter and President Trump" (Miami Herald). I don't really know what's in that article that justifies the photograph of what I'm calling a blackface fist or that headline using a phrase that back in the 1960s meant there would be "race riots" in the city all summer....
It's got to be to chime with that blackface fist that Drudge chooses 2-fisted Biden to illustrate "POLL: Trump losing female vote by historic margin..." That picture is one of several pictures at the link, which goes to "LADY TROUBLES/Trump ‘losing female vote to Biden by a historic margin not seen in more than 50 years’ – but men still on his side'" (The Sun). In that poll, Biden has a 20-point advantage with women, and Trump has a 2-point advantage with men. Polls — who believes them?! But why 2 fists when the issue is his appeal to women? Don't we imagine that the female preference for Biden over Trump is that he seems to be a kinder, gentler fellow?
Perhaps Drudge means to suggest that women are going to need a strong protector, and there's Biden, balling up his fists — does he look adequate to fight for you, as this "long, hot summer" comes on? In that light, consider the third item in my screen shot: "Winston Churchill's picture mysteriously vanishes from Google amid rising tensions" (knewz):
Searches for ‘British prime minister’ and ‘World War 2 generals’ called up photos of everyone else but the legendary British prime minister — just after his statue in London was defiled. The images were eventually restored. The picture of Winston Churchill suspiciously vanished from Google search results on Saturday just as the legendary British prime minister was under siege from racial justice protesters in the United Kingdom. The images reappeared about 12 hours later on Sunday, with Google saying it was an unintentional “updating issue.”
The old-school belligerent male protector is disappearing from the scene, and all we've got left is old man Biden, because the women seem to think he'll have to do.
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