CSotD: Finding our way without signs, dogs or firehoses
Skip to comments
There are a lot of cartoons about climate-change deniers around at the moment, but I'm more pleased to see Keith Knight go after the race-problem deniers, and do it in a way that is pointed and unambiguous, but also funny.
Not everyone can pull that combination off.
There was a story on an NPR blog the other day about race and young people and some polling MTV did on the topic. It's very much worth a read, but don't expect a lot of surprises if you've kept up with popular culture at all. And certainly don't expect to read anything uplifting and cheerful.
Here's the critical quote:
"In some ways, the next chapter of this is much more complicated because there aren't dogs on our televisions being sicced on people," he said. "For our audience, this seems like it could be ancient history. There's not a true, clear sense of how recent that is."
There was, after all, something very clear-cut about Jim Crow: There were signs on the water fountains and rest rooms telling you that, yes, we're racist.
And, if that wasn't clear enough, they'd turn the firehoses on black protestors, or sic dogs on them. Or lynch them.
But now it's all just "history": There's the statue.
For today's 25 and 30 year olds, Birmingham and Selma are no more present to them than is the Jazz Age to someone my age. The Depression and World War II are more recent to me than the Civil Rights Movement is to them.
Do your own math: Subtract 25 from the year you were born. What's your impression of what was happening that year?
In part, this assumes that I'm addressing a white audience, but not entirely: One aspect covered in that discussion is that young people of color are also distant from the immediacy and clarity of that period in the struggle.
But the chief issue, across all age groups, is "Some of My Best Friends Syndrome," in which the fact that "we" don't use the N-word and that most of "us" have Negroes and Mexicans and Chinese-or-whatever-they-ares working in our companies and that we even have an African-American president, means it's over and there's no more racism and we can stop talking about that now.
To start with, it's a lot more over if you're one of "us" than if you're one of "them," and, while the solution is, in part, to get to a point where we don't have "us" and "them" anymore, that whole "melting pot" model is itself a sham.
The melting-pot theory was that we'd meld everyone together so that we had a country full of white people with different kinds of last names, though they might want to change some of those last names to something not quite so different.
The goal was never to truly blend but to transform: Lose-a da accent, keep-a da pizza.
We all like pizza and, oh yeah, thanks for discovering America, too. Now you need to become real Americans.
When you toss red and yellow and black pieces into the pot, however, it becomes harder to keep the result WASP-colored, particularly when the people you're tossing into that pot don't want to stop being red or yellow or black, even though, sure, they like pizza, too.
The goal of a color-blind society isn't practical, and pretending not to notice race or gender is not the same as actually accepting it.
Keef is right: It's not just insulting to pretend race is no longer an issue. It's ridiculous.
For one glorious moment, we had our whipping boy in the person of Donald Sterling, whose racist screed got everyone united in what Kareem Abdul Jabbar rightly called "The Finger-Wagging Olympics."
Unfortunately for national unity, Sterling has since continued to talk and to justify his estranged wife's analysis, which is that the guy has simply lost his marbles.
But the problem is nowhere near as simple as racists who are crazy and blatant anyway.
Part of the problem is conscious, purposeful racists who are sane and smart enough not to use the N-word or to openly wish we still had two water fountains or to say that they miss the days when those people knew their place, but who instead spread the notion that the president was born in Africa and is too stupid and inarticulate to speak without a TelePrompter and, to top it all off, has an ugly wife.
Which is not about race, oh, no. (See illustration above)
A more insidious problem, however, are those who honestly don't think it's about race.
Some are whiners, who feel that, if it weren't for affirmative action, their B-minus average would have gotten them into Harvard, but they also whine about why they didn't make the Little League team and why they have a crappy job and all sorts of other disappointments. "Racial preference" is just one more pathetic alibi in their collection of pathetic alibis.
There are many more innocently insensitive people who simply don't stop to think that walking down the street as a black person, or an Asian person, or a woman, isn't something you can choose to do on the days when you're in the mood to stand out.
And who don't realize that you can walk past 100 people who don't stare and 1,000 who don't say something stupid and hateful, but it's that 101st, that 1,001st, who sticks with you.
Which is like saying, hey, you walked two miles today, and, with all the steps you took, only one of them involved a three-inch nail going through your shoe and into your foot. That was only one unfortunate step. It wasn't typical.
And, dammit, stop limping! Get over it!
I don't have an answer for all this. "Smarten up, everybody!" has proven, over the years, to be a spectacularly ineffective piece of advice.
Though I suppose it's the drip that will eventually wear the rock away. We really have come a long way, after all.
But we've sure got a long way to go.
Leaving the City for greener pastures
Another cartoonist moves on: After 24 years, Derf Backderf is shutting down his strip, "The City," to concentrate on graphic novels.
It's a loss for fans of the strip, of course, but the collapse of the alternative market in general and of his print client in Cleveland in particular, plus the international success of "My Friend Dahmer," makes it pretty hard to feel that the move is a bad one.
He explains it here. More cartoonists should have the re-invention options that Derf has carved out for himself.
It's all a question of who's to be master and who belongs to which, isn't it?
(Okay, that's not Cleveland, either. And I'm not sure that's even Derf.)
Comments
Comments are closed.