Tag: racism

Taking a break with random vaguely unpleasant TV commentary

I’m thinking about Rachel Zane (Meghan Markle) from Suits, Zoe (Jennifer Beals) from Lie to Me, and Lillian (Maya Rudolph) from the movie Bridesmaids. What do they have in common (besides that I watched them recently so I remember them?)

  • The characters are all canonically mixed-race (we meet Rachel’s and Lillian’s parents on screen, and Zoe discusses people being racist against her parents because of their relationship)
  • I thought they were all white until it became a plot point that they weren’t.

Now, that degree of obliviousness might be just me.

But I think it says something that you have to be that mixed to be thought of as mixed. In the US we have a history (thanks to slavery) of considering anyone with any African ancestry as completely African. I feel like this situation is a mix of that, plus a general desire to cast only very conventionally attractive actresses and the racism involved in what’s considered conventionally attractive.

I want to tell you all about something I realized last year.

I’m not sure I’ll do a very good job of explaining it, and I don’t have the book I’m talking about anymore so I can’t refresh my memory, but here goes.

For one of my college classes (an overview of modern United States history), I had to read The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader,   It has a prologue written by Vincent Harding, which unfortunately is not part of Amazon’s preview.  Harding does something I’d never really heard before: he talks about events before the 1950s in the context of racism and civil rights.  He describes people waiting and searching for opportunities to take the fight against racism to a larger scale, and how various important events looked from that point of view.

And I had to put my book down and take a long walk to calm down, because: it is seriously fucked up that I had never heard anything like this before.  This is what people mean when they say that history (as it’s taught in the average high school classroom, anyway) is written from a white point of view and erases the viewpoint and agency of people of color.  This is what they mean: not only had I not been told about things like this, it never even occurred to me to wonder what it was like to be African-American during World War I, for example.  I’m pretty sure my high school US History class mentioned racism in relation to exactly three topics: the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, and World War II (in relation to anti-Japanese propaganda, and the internment of Japanese Americans.)  Except for those times when racism became a big, public issue, the usual history curriculum goes along as if everyone were white.

And I should have known better, I really should have!  I spent my teenage years reading blog posts and articles speculating about same-sex marriage, when it would become legal across the country, where it would be best to campaign for it next, etc.  So I knew, if I’d thought about it, that before something becomes a big political issue, there are years of people hoping and thinking and planning behind the scenes to get it there.  I should have known that the Civil Rights movement was the same way.  I should have known that people in the ’30s and ’40s must have sometimes sat up late wondering how the political events of the moment would change things for racial equality in the US.  But nobody ever showed me that point of view.  Nobody really showed me things from the point of view of the 1960s Civil Rights activists, either, but I think that’ll have to wait for another post.