If Mort Divine ruled the world

[CiG]

I'm tone-gay. I suck the cock of the tone.

 

[The Ozzman]

Disney character Mary Poppins labeled 'racist'

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/us-academic-sparks-mary-poppins-blackface-row-a4056126.html

 

[Blurry_Dreams]

I read the title
And thought
Americans are dumbassess and the rest of the world is laughing at us

 

[Einherjar86]

Disney character Mary Poppins labeled 'racist'

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/us-academic-sparks-mary-poppins-blackface-row-a4056126.html

I don't really think it should be all that surprising that a lot of pre-1960s films are racist (as are a lot of post-1960s films), including the most ostensibly harmless ones.

 

[Blurry_Dreams]

https://www.bustle.com/p/these-13-j...-now-yes-that-includes-the-soup-nazi-10191949

 

[Einherjar86]

Obviously I'm just some pleb, but as someone who has read Baldwin and other black writers, I think censoring the text, censoring yourself while reading the text, or watering it down by replacing ni**er with "n-word" while reading the text is to pay disrespect to the man and his material. Whether or not enunciating the slur pays respect is one thing, I guess at a bare minimum it shows enough respect to actually read what the man wrote word for word, but for me the disrespect is obvious.

As a scholar of literature, I have this reaction too, especially when it comes to writers I love. But I also can't help but have subsequent reactions to this reaction:

--does respect for Baldwin's work outweigh respect for the experiences of students in the class?
--would Baldwin have wanted me to reiterate the word? (more of a personal than intellectual question)
--Baldwin almost always puts the word in either quotation marks or italics when he writes it, and speaks of it circumspectly: why?
--does repeating the word, even in a professional and educational setting, perpetuate the white desire for it? (this is a psychological/sociological question, i.e. can we cordon off unwanted, socialized desires/impulses?)

There are others I'm sure, but these come to mind immediately.

 

[Blurry_Dreams]

This discussion of the n-word is getting weird because there's no black people here

This is like an all-white city-council arguing about what to do about Lincoln freeing the slaves

 

[HamburgerBoy]

This discussion of the n-word is getting weird because there's no black people here

This is like an all-white city-council arguing about what to do about Lincoln freeing the slaves

There were a lot of black people heckling your foot-sucking at that bus stop.

 

[Blurry_Dreams]

There were a lot of black people heckling your foot-sucking at that bus stop.

Yes there were
They kept saying "crazy white people"

 

[Oblivious Maximus]

https://www.amazon.com/Trigger-Warn...swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1549324796&sr=1-3

JOHNSTONE COUNTRY. WHERE OTHERS FEAR TO TREAD.

From the bestselling authors of The Doomsday Bunker, Black Friday, and Stand Your Ground comes the explosive story of a college under siege—and freedom under fire . . .

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WON’T SAVE YOU

Former Army Ranger Jake Rivers is not your typical Kelton College student. He is not spoiled, coddled, or ultra-lib like his classmates who sneer at the “soldier boy.”

Rivers is not “triggered” by “microaggressions.” He is not outraged by “male privilege” and “cisgender bathrooms.” He does not need a “safe space.” Or coloring books. Jake needs an education. And when terror strikes, the school needs Jake . . .

Without warning, the sounds of gunfire plunge the campus into a battle zone. A violent gang of marauders invade the main hall, taking students as hostages for big ransom money. As a veteran and patriot, Jake won’t give in to their demands. But to fight back, he needs to enlist his fellow classmates to school these special snowflakes in the not-so-liberal art of war. This time, the aggression isn’t “micro.” It’s life or death. And only the strong survive . . .

Live Free. Read Hard.

Someone who does voiceovers for trailers needs to do a dramatic reading of this holy shit.

 

[CiG]

--does respect for Baldwin's work outweigh respect for the experiences of students in the class?

What of the respect for the intelligence and maturity of the students? If you break it down to the experiences of the students, doesn't that become so individualized to the point of impracticality? How can you possibly address each and every experience without grinding the lesson to a halt? What about black students who don't want Baldwin's words watered down by the teacher? Are their black experiences more or less valid than the ones who would rather the slur not be enunciated?

Can't really wrap my mind around the context of higher education and the position the students and teachers are in.

--would Baldwin have wanted me to reiterate the word? (more of a personal than intellectual question)

Did he expect only blacks to read his writing? Did he lack an understanding for words and how they relate in different contexts? I think there's some irony here that whites have done what they have done to blacks in America, and here they are now deciding whether Baldwin's words should be allowed to be read verbatim in a classroom, on top of that they're deciding this for black students out of fear of backlash. Teachers need to be braver than this is my gut feeling.

Surely it's the job of the teacher to make sure Baldwin isn't censored by the feelings of (black) students who are reacting out of a history of racism that caused Baldwin to write in the first place.

--Baldwin almost always puts the word in either quotation marks or italics when he writes it, and speaks of it circumspectly: why?

That's one for you to explain to me.

--does repeating the word, even in a professional and educational setting, perpetuate the white desire for it? (this is a psychological/sociological question, i.e. can we cordon off unwanted, socialized desires/impulses?)

It probably does to some degree, just as any word that is considered unutterable is treated with fetish by those who say it when they can. This gets way too much into thought-crime levels of speculation though.

 

[Einherjar86]

Those are all great rebuttals, and I don't have definitive answers to them; but I see them as complements to the series of questions I already ask myself when dealing with works of African American literature.

All I'll say is that I regularly teach Flannery O'Connor's "The Artificial N--er," excerpts from Ellison's Invisible Man, and George Schuyler's Black No More, and I don't think speaking the n-word aloud in class allows students to better understand the historical dynamics of the word. I think they get that already from reading the assigned works.

When I think of respecting these authors and their work, I have difficulty reducing that to simply reiterating what's on the page without second thought. Yes, Baldwin wanted white people to read his work; but I think his point of cordoning off the n-word with quotation marks and italics is that he's calling out the non-necessity with which the word is used. Baldwin always said that the word didn't illuminate or identify a specific situation or problem in the world, but a sociological pathology of white people. The word is a construction of the white worldview, and the point is to move beyond it. I think that comes through powerfully in the writing, and I'm not sure that repeating the word in class pays respect to the work; in fact, I think you could argue that not saying it pays respect to the author and his work.

This isn't to define my position on the issue, just to highlight what I see as the unstable social dynamics of using the word in an educational setting.

 

[CiG]

I don't envy the people who have to make these choices and consider these angles. I do see what you're saying about the way Baldwin always frames the slur in his writings as if it should be questioned by the reader rather than simply enunciated. It's also clear to me that Baldwin preferred to use "negro."

 

[Dak]

sociological pathology of white people

And yet he was never so affected so as to remove himself from the company of white people. If anything, he sought the opposite.
He was a rather eloquent speaker, but he never gleaned a frame of reference outside of his own (actually relatively fortunate one) of which to speak, excluding appropriating that which he imagined to be the experiences of other Caucasian Americans and African Americans, both past and (then) present.

I watched his debate vs Buckley in '65. There's some irony when he references a comment by another that there may be a black president in 40 years, which he noted was a suggestion met with laughter and anger in "Harlem". The commenter was only 3 years off.

 

[Einherjar86]

And yet he was never so affected so as to remove himself from the company of white people. If anything, he sought the opposite.
He was a rather eloquent speaker, but he never gleaned a frame of reference outside of his own (actually relatively fortunate one) of which to speak, excluding appropriating that which he imagined to be the experiences of other Caucasian Americans and African Americans, both past and (then) present.

If I may--what makes you say this? What biographical evidence are you basing this on? Just because he consented to interviews with white people? That doesn't mean he only ingratiated himself to whites, though. Or am I misunderstanding you?

I mean, do you know anything about his upbringing, education, interaction with other blacks, etc.?

I watched his debate vs Buckley in '65. There's some irony when he references a comment by another that there may be a black president in 40 years, which he noted was a suggestion met with laughter and anger in "Harlem". The commenter was only 3 years off.

I'm not understanding your point.

 

[Dak]

If I may--what makes you say this? What biographical evidence are you basing this on? Just because he consented to interviews with white people? That doesn't mean he only ingratiated himself to whites, though. Or am I misunderstanding you?

I mean, do you know anything about his upbringing, education, interaction with other blacks, etc.?

When not living in the US he preferred to reside in an even more white and therefore sociopathic place: Europe. Why not move to less sociopathic places?

As far as his appropriation, his taking on of the "trials" of those who lived before his birth and in very different environment paints a questioning light on the rest.

I'm not understanding your point.

The suggestion which was met with such derision turned out to be pretty damn accurate. A young, minimally accomplished black man beat an established white male of the Senate, and a war veteran no less. I'm sure if those particular additional details had been provided in the suggestion, the original commenter might have been involuntarily committed.

 

[Einherjar86]

When not living in the US he preferred to reside in an even more white and therefore sociopathic place: Europe. Why not move to less sociopathic places?

The "negro problem" (this is Baldwin quoting white writers, politicians, academics, etc.) is specifically an American problem. By the mid-twentieth century, Europe (specifically France) was a much better place for black people to live than America. I take your point, but I don't think it's the case that he made an ill-informed or contradictory decision.

As far as his appropriation, his taking on of the "trials" of those who lived before his birth and in very different environment paints a questioning light on the rest.

I'm still a bit unclear. He was raised in precisely the kind of environment he wrote about. You think he didn't experience "trials," or know people who did?

The suggestion which was met with such derision turned out to be pretty damn accurate.

So? I'm sorry, I'm still not sure what this says about Baldwin. After all, he simply reiterated what a lot of people in Harlem were expressing.

 

[rms]

The "negro problem" (this is Baldwin quoting white writers, politicians, academics, etc.) is specifically an American problem. By the mid-twentieth century, Europe (specifically France) was a much better place for black people to live than America. I take your point, but I don't think it's the case that he made an ill-informed or contradictory decision.

doesnt he admit that France, while a different racial experience, was akin to that in America?

 

[CiG]

By the mid-twentieth century, Europe (specifically France) was a much better place for black people to live than America. I take your point, but I don't think it's the case that he made an ill-informed or contradictory decision.

Reminds me of the film Paris Blues, with Sidney Poitier playing a black musician who moves to France because of what was going on in America, meets a woman (a black American tourist) who convinces him to stop running from America and to come home and help fix it. Great film.

 

[Einherjar86]

doesnt he admit that France, while a different racial experience, was akin to that in America?

France definitely isn't post-racial or anything like that, but I think he found Paris far more accepting of both his race and sexual orientation. While France was a colonial power, it didn't have the same history of slavery to the extent America did. I think that plays a role in a country's racial consciousness.

Reminds me of the film Paris Blues, with Sidney Poitier playing a black musician who moves to France because of what was going on in America, meets a woman (a black American tourist) who convinces him to stop running from America and to come home and help fix it. Great film.

Baldwin was friends with Poitier, if I recall correctly. Haven't seen the film, have to look for it.