Comments | oyceter: Race and Pirates

oyceter

Race and Pirates

Jul 08, 2006 11:54

I ended up buying Beverly Tatum's "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?", despite already having borrowed it from the library because a) I wanted something to read in line while I waited to get a seat for Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and b) I want to financially support books like these and authors who tackle the subject of ( Read more... )

movies, race/ethnicity/culture

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mneiai July 10 2006, 01:18:52 UTC

When looking at a movie like this, where all of the "people of color" look stereotypical, I look at the other side: Are all the white people stereotypes, as well? And, especially in this sort of movie, there really wasn't a single case where I could go "no, that person isn't just a blatant stereotype."

Plus, there's the added fact that back in the seven/eighteenth centuries that most people would have accents. And among pirates it would make sense that most of the people of color were recent immigrants to the Americas or from a lower class setting originally ( ... )

oyceter July 10 2006, 05:19:45 UTC

I'm not arguing that the other people weren't stereotypes or takes on stereotypes as well. But since racism still does affect people, stereotypes of blacks and other people of color are much, much more harmful than stereotypes of British naval officers or pirates, and stereotypes of people of color play into a long history in which arguments about a race being intrinsically more savage than another were used to support slavery and bigotry ( ... )

mneiai July 10 2006, 06:09:01 UTC

I'm a bit of a minority, myself, not a racial one (unless you count being nine different European ethnicities a minority), but a minority none the less. And I have always felt that I'd rather have minorities be minor characters than just token characters. If there was a black "main" character just so there would be a black character, how would that make it any better ( ... )

rachelmanija July 10 2006, 06:49:39 UTC

I am not commenting on the movie in question, because I haven't seen it, but regarding the larger point you make:

I think putting every movie in terms of racist-or-not hurts more than it helps. Most people would never notice it was racist and that's A GOOD THING. Because it means they're not THINKING in terms of "huh, they're all white" or "oh, look, all the minor characters are brown" or whatever.

I am a little confused by what you're saying here. It sounds like you're saying that the less racist people are, the less likely they will be to notice actual racism. And also that it is a good thing to not notice racial divisions that actually exist.

That would mean that, for example, that the people who noticed or discussed the fact that all the black people were sitting at the back of the bus were actually more racist than the people who did not notice or discuss this.

Is that actually what you're saying, or did you mean something else?

mneiai July 10 2006, 07:10:51 UTC

I am a little confused...

Please refer to my South Park reference.

Why should people notice skin color? Why should we train our children to see different skin colors as meaning different things? I went to a school where everyone, white, black, Indian, Puetro Rican, were basically the same. Because we weren't judging them on skin color, we were judging them on how they acted and what they did.

If you're African and you wear African native dress, same if you're Tibetan, or Magyar, or whatever, then that should be noticeable. But if you're just a certain skin tone because you're ancestors happened to live in an environment where that skin tone was a better adaptation, why should children be made to think you're different? Kids never think boys and girls are different until people start pointing that fact out to them. Then the opposite gender has "cooties". Racism can be a lot like everyone having "cooties" because someone mentioned that they were different in some way, so people started thinking they were different in other, ( ... )

oyceter July 10 2006, 07:15:57 UTC

I think not noticing race would result in a colorblind, non-racist society only if there weren't institutional racism in the first place. Unfortunately, that isn't the case.

Beverly Tatum argues that even if parents never mention race at home, children as young as three will still pick up on racial stereotypes, simply from popular culture. I don't think this is a good thing or a fair thing, but because it happens, I think it has to be confronted and dealt with.

As such, I think pointing out racism is a necessary step to get to a non-racist society; the only way to get past stereotypes is to confront them and to actively attempt to diffuse them and provide counter-examples. Otherwise, people are just ignoring an existing problem and as such, exacerbating it.

mneiai July 10 2006, 07:30:16 UTC

I think that the cry that everything is "institutional racism" just enacts MORE racism. Because then you get into reverse racism, and then that springs into other things, and eventually what you have is everyone hating everyone else. Sure, you can claim that, say, the government is racist against minorities, but you can also claim that a politician in my state likes to compare gay people to child molesters. If it truly exists at all (and I haven't studied this topic enough to say whether it does or not) it's not institutional racism. It's institutional prejudice against all people who are different in some way. Saying racism, in my mind, is deluding people into thinking there's just one category of prejudice--the skin color kind ( ... )

coffeeandink July 10 2006, 14:01:53 UTC

I think pointing out stereotypes is, in fact, what perpetuates them. Your, er, quote there said it itself--children pick up stereotypes from culture. Culture keeps putting out stereotypes because people think in stereotypes, therefore more people start thinking in stereotypes.

How does pointing out stereotypes perpetuate them when unthinkingly accepting them does not? This is kind of like saying that falling down won't hurt you if you don't know Newton's laws.

and I haven't studied this topic enough to say whether it does or not)

And I would strongly suggest you study the topic before deciding your opinions on it.

But, what this all comes down to, is that your post is still arguing over the fact that a movie as historical accurate as I have ever seen a Disney movie be, is...being historically accurate. And you think that makes it racist. Despite the fact that people WERE racist back then, MORE racist.I haven't seen the movie, so I'm not going to discuss its historical accuracy in detail. But I have seen the first movie, so I'm ( ... )

popfantastic July 10 2006, 14:31:58 UTC

Yes, and next time it takes me half an hour to finish a comment, I'll check that someone hasn't already posted what I want to say much more eloquently.

coffeeandink July 10 2006, 14:52:43 UTC

Cross-posting!

Thank you, but I'm glad you posted. Your concrete discussion of institutionalized racism is much more helpful than my suggestion of reading more.

mneiai July 10 2006, 17:59:30 UTC

What appears to be racist in this film....

Which, yeah, is all you can talk about. Appearances. See the film, then talk about such things like that.

And as far as the Carib go? We'll never know. They're gone, long gone, and the people who wiped them out were notoriously bad at making factual records. But some things about them are accepted as true--they did have ritualistic cannibalism (like many other cultures throughout history) and they did most likely speak a language that was a bastardization of English in order to communicate with English-speakers (called Pidgin, which is a form of language that has been used throughout history by various people for various situations), like most other natives at that time period. Beyond that? The cannibals portrayed in this film are no more stereotypical than cannibals portrayed in any other children's film. Hell, this is DISNEY, for gods' sakes. Some people claim that the Anasazi weren't cannibals--most of them are from places where they could be their descendents, so they have a ( ... )

coffeeandink July 10 2006, 18:09:25 UTC

Which, yeah, is all you can talk about. Appearances. See the film, then talk about such things like that.

But I'm not just talking about the film. I'm talking about your statements and the logical construction of your arguments. So far you've argued that talking about racism *causes* racism, and have offered nothing to support this idea but a cartoon; you haven't even offered anecdotal evidence to the contrary, let alone cited psychiatric research.

he cannibals portrayed in this film are no more stereotypical than cannibals portrayed in any other children's film.

That is *exactly* the problem. How does saying racism is so endemic to our society that it's *omnipresent* prove that racism isn't a problem?

Maybe it was all politics and economics that had them marked as cannibals. But that's only one theory.Uh, no. It's also marked in European records which explicitly justify exploration based on cannibalism and in anthropological investigations which don't seem to have evidence to support those contentions ( ... )

mneiai July 10 2006, 19:50:15 UTC

I haven't seen ANY hard evidence either way. The closest that came is the person who wrote this post placing a comment in my post paraphrasing the book that really caused this post in the first place ( ... )

coffeeandink July 10 2006, 20:10:27 UTC

All I'm stating are well known theories on human thought process that anyone can get out of Psych 101, or even my high school Psych. That if you draw attention to something, humans will think about it. If you told a person before they went in and saw a film that all of the instances of the color white in the props has a meaning, they'll be watching for the color white and trying to figure out what it all has in common. If you tell a person that a film is prejudice, they'll be looking for instances where it's prejudice. It's a commonly used technique in English courses, where you're given certain topics to think on before reading the book and they affect how you interrupt what you read. Hell, it's even used in film--if you've ever watched Mulholland Dr. on DVD, there's a perfect example.

If you tell me to look for a pink elephant in The Merchant of Venice, I still won't find it. If you tell me to look for anti-Semitism in The Merchant of Venice, I will find examples of it. This is not because I am projecting my own attitudes onto ( ... )

lavendertook July 11 2006, 05:57:26 UTC

And as far as the Carib go? We'll never know. They're gone, long gone,

No, no they're not. Some of their descendants are alive and well and protesting this movie.

popfantastic July 10 2006, 14:22:24 UTC

I think that the cry that everything is "institutional racism" just enacts MORE racism. Because then you get into reverse racism, and then that springs into other things, and eventually what you have is everyone hating everyone else...Saying racism, in my mind, is deluding people into thinking there's just one category of prejudice--the skin color kind.

Saying "institutional prejudice," in my mind, is deluding people into thinking that there's nothing particularly virulent about racism, that we aren't individually responsible for mitigating racism because we're all "different" somehow and thus all equally victimized. And I simply don't see how questioning the apparent racism of anything is perpetuating racism.

But, what this all comes down to, is that your post is still arguing over the fact that a movie as historical accurate as I have ever seen a Disney movie be, is...being historically accurate.

I have only seen the first POTC movie, but I think points are:

-The depiction of cannibalism is not historically accurate- ( ... )

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