Thursday, November 25, 2010

The Politics of Thanks

Earlier this fall, I started watching the new NBC television program Outsourced, particularly because I wanted to see if episodes or segments of it would be useful for some of the classes I teach, especially International Communication. After the first episode or two, I didn't like it, feeling that it was relying on all-too-easy stereotypes of people from both India and the United States. I kept watching, though, and the show has grown on me. In fact, the opening of the most recent episode, "Temporary Monsanity," impressed me a bit with a discussion of Thanksgiving that occurs among the main characters, challenging some of the historically dominant ideas about the meaning of Thanksgiving and articulating questions about the consequences of the history of interaction between Europeans and Native Americans. The show raised nothing particularly new that hasn't been said before by various individuals and groups who have critiqued Thanksgiving, but it did articulate them in a very public, mainstream way, which I think illustrates something significant. I'm not sure that I would have seen this kind of discussion on a primetime NBC show twenty years ago.

I ended up talking a little bit about the clip not only in my International Communication class, but also in my Political Communication class on Monday. I brought it up in the Political Communication class largely because it shows that holidays are political. The meanings of holidays, the traditions that surround holidays, the practices in which people engage on holidays, and even what is designated a holiday and what is not all involve the processes of inclusion, exclusion, and marginalization that I argue are fundamental to politics.

Recently, I've seen many examples in which, given the insensitivity of the idea of Thanksgiving as a time to remember Europeans and Native Americans celebrating together, various individuals, groups, and institutions have chosen to divorce the holiday from the historical narrative and to focus the meaning of the holiday on a more general sentiment that it is good to have a day to be thankful for what one has, which often blends well with the idea of getting together with family, since family is often considered something to be thankful for.

I find this move to change the meanings of Thanksgiving reasonable enough. There would seem to be some merit to the idea of a day to be thankful, and it does mean at least some level of recognition of the insensitivity of the historical narrative toward Native Americans. Yet, that said, this practice is not without significant limitations. Notably, while recognizing the insensitivity of the historically dominant narrative, this view chooses to brush that narrative aside rather than engage it. In the process, issues involving exclusion and marginalization of Native Americans remain unarticulated and, to a significant extent, further removed from rather than addressed in public discourse. Additionally, articulation of the holiday as a day of giving thanks, even when not explicitly invoking the historical narrative of European-Native American interaction, more subtly reinforces that narrative by generalizing out from one perspective on that history of interaction--that of the Europeans who could be thankful for the privileges they have gained as they interaction has proceeded. In other words, by making the holiday a general one about thanks, the process of decontextualizing the holiday reinforces the perspective of the group whose experiences are being generalized for everyone, to the exclusion and marginalization of those groups whose experiences are not being articulated. Even though this kind of generalizing of the holiday's meaning might seek to be sensitive, it ends up reinforcing and extending the exclusion and marginalization of non-dominant voices and perspectives.

Given this, I think it is useful to articulate alternatives to the dominant meaning of this holiday as a day of "thanks." With that in mind, I choose to articulate this holiday as a day of "mourning." This holiday marks the 40th anniversary of the first National Day of Mourning, which was held near Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, to remember the grief and loss that Native Americans have experienced in connection with European interaction. Just like the historically dominant narrative of the Thanksgiving meal between Puritans and Indians, this narrative can be articulated as a way to think about U.S. history. (Indeed, I would argue that this narrative is a more valid and valuable one than the Thanksgiving meal one.) And just like that historically dominant narrative, the sentiments associated with this narrative can be generalized. So, I choose to consider the consequences of European expansion for Native American civilizations, and I choose to generalize the meaning of today as "mourning" instead of "thanks," recognizing that with mourning comes an element of thankfulness for the time one has had with whom and what one mourns--a thankfulness that, at least to me, feels more properly contextualized when articulated as one aspect of mourning.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

The Daily Narrative

I've added a new website to the Links of Interest on this website. It's to H. L. "Bud" Goodall's blog, "The Daily Narrative." His analysis of cultural and political narratives on the blog is outstanding and well worth the read.

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

This Is the Liberal Media?

If you haven't seen Bill Maher's critique this past week of Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity/Stephen Colbert's Rally to Keep Fear Alive, here's a link to it, but it looks like HBO is being very diligent in getting all copies of it removed from the Internet. So, that link may not work for much longer after I post this. Try, though, to find it if you can. It's about a six minute clip, and it is very good at indicating the problem with suggesting that U.S. politics features an extremist left and an extremist right that are equally empowered and problematic.

Maher's reation echoes much of my own reaction to Stewart's rally. While fundamentally this sounds like a cool idea that can both make a political point and provide comic relief at the same time (and there certainly appear to have been times that it did this), Stewart lost me most on two accounts. First, in the days leading up to the rally, he argued that this was not political. Simply put, that's pretty impossible at this point, and it is just as preposterous a statement as Glenn Beck's argument that his rally a couple months ago was not political. Based on their public personas, which are highly built in political discourse, neither Beck nor Stewart can construct public events that can be divorced from those political identities. Both, at least in their public life, have already been defined as political. So, the claim of being not political is disingenuous from either. Indeed, in both instances, this is a rhetorical ploy to try to persuade people that what they have to say transcends politics because if people believe you are not politically motivated, they might be more likely to be willing to listen to and consider your message. Additionally, as my political communication class can tell you, the statement that one is not political in and of itself is a political statement.

Typically, Stewart is, as Jeffrey P. Jones has written, more real than the "real" news because, among other things, he acknowledges his own constructedness in ways that other news programs don't. However, with this case, he's given up some of the credibility by not acknowledgeing his event as political.

Secondly, amid his summary of what the rally was all about, Stewart stated, "Not being able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers, or real bigots and Juan Williams or Rick Sanchez, is an insult, not only to those people, but to the racists themselves who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate." Now, I think I get his point. While talking about how the media overdramatize everything, he's using this among other examples of how discourse in the United States focuses on these extreme and sweeping characterizations and categorizations. As he says just before this, "If we amplify everything, we hear nothing." In other words, it would be nice to have more nuanced, articulate, and reasoned accounts of things than the screaming drama that we get in the news. When it comes, then, to the specific issue of racism, he appears to be suggesting that if we lump out-and-out bigoted people with people who say or do things that are racially insensitive, we are making an error in judgment and statement. I suppose this is not a bad sentiment, but it misses the boat where racism is concerned. There already is the more precise language for discussing racism for which Stewart appears to long. Namely, it's what are called overt racism and inferential racism. Overt racism is when something is out-and-out racist, like the Ku Klux Klan or over-the-top stereotypes of racial and ethnic groups. Inferential racism is when the things one does are not explicitly about marginalizing or excluding based on race, but these things ultimately reinforce a system that maintains those kinds marginalizations and exclusions. (For more on these concepts, see Michael Omi's essay "In Living Color: Race and American Culture." For the example that I usually use in class to show inferential racism, see the case of Thomas Benya, where the school board, in deep ethnocentric fashion, failed to recognize that the style of dress they were imposing on Benya is a cultural heritage that they are assuming to be superior to Benya's Native American heritage.) Stewart's statement fails to reflect a deep representation of what racism is. Racism is not simply prejudice against or even exclusion based on race. Rather, it's a system that exists in society whereby power relations based on race are developed, maintained, and reinforced. It's not enough simply to call out the out-and-out racists. Really fighting against racism also asks us to look at how the very structures of society, the very ways we do things, and the very ways that people think reinforce racial oppression, exclusion, and marginalization. The kinds of things Stewart says are not racist actually do perpetuate racism. When this is not acknowledged, racism is reinforced and more fully entrenched. To get what I think Stewart wants, one needs to recognize the different forms of racism, not dismiss many instances of racism as not involving racism.

On a related note, the other day I watched the first couple of episodes of the new NBC show Outlaw, which stars Jimmy Smits as conservative judge Cyrus Garza, who, after some political and personal soul searching, resigns from the Supreme Court to pursue a law practice that takes on controversial cases, often with a sense of expressing some kind of moderate perspective that balances the right-wing ideologies he has practiced with the left-wing ideologies for which his father fought. The show has already been cancelled, and probably rightfully so. While not without merit as a premise, the first episode seemed really contrived (i. e., that a case made it to the Supreme Court without anyone finding particular evidence that was not that hard to uncover), the attempts at building romantic relationships are very weakly developed, and the characters themselves are not as multidimensional and well developed as they need to be for the series to succeed.

The second episode of the series involves SB 1070, the controversial immigration law passed in Arizona this year. In this case, Smits' character's firm agrees to defend a police officer who shot and severely wounded a man whom the officer believed may be an illegal immigrant. The episode offers what could be a very engaging and useful legal, ethical, and philosophical dialogue in that it asks the question of whether the police officer himself should be held responsible in a court of law for injuring this man when the officer was following what the law mandates for him to do by inquiring about the man's citizenship status. At one point, the case hinges on questions of racism (particularly racial profiling), and in the end Smits' character argues that the white police officer believing that the Latino victim walking around late at night may be an illegal immigrant was not racism, but "common sense." This occurs after Smits has, against his co-counsel and to the delight of the prosecution, stacked the jury with a group of people who come from demographics that would be seen as sympathetic to the injured man, not the police officer (e.g., Latino/a individuals, individuals of other ethnic and racial minorities, not middle and upper-class white folks). In the end, the jury decides, based on Smits' argument, that the police officer is not guilty. The idea here is that a "common sense" argument like that offered by Smits can persuade even the most potentially unsympathic jury.

The problem with this episode, though, is that it fails to acknowledge the link between racism and common sense. What is "common sense" is made of what has been accepted within a culture as basic knowledge about and understandings of the world that can be taken for granted as unquestionable. Yet, what is common sense in one culture is not common sense in another, and what has developed as common sense in a culture is highly influenced by the power relations in that culture. More specifically in terms of race, ideas about common sense in the United States--like the style of dress imposed by the school board on Thomas Benya--have been heavily based in white European cultural understandings and traditions, including beliefs about who constitutes a U.S. American person and who does not. As the show relies on this culturally constructed, nebulous idea of "common sense," it fails to recognize the inferential racism that that common sense already involves and, in the process, perpetuates the very racism it suggests we need to be cautious about identifying.

In the end, both Stewart's statement on racism and Outlaw's depiction of what constitutes racism reflect and reinforce rather conservative agendas. They both accept a status quo idea of what constitutes "common sense" and "sanity" that fails to acknowledge or even effectively engage with recognition of the power relations that influence what gets defined as "common sense" and "sanity." As Maher indicates, among other things, in his response to Stewart, "the big mistake of modern media has been this notion of balance for balance's sake--that the left is just as violent and cruel as the right, that unions are just as powerful as corporations, that 'reverse racism' is just as damaging as racism." In the end, you can't equate the effects and meanings of things when there are clear power differences between them. Stewart and Outlaw have both done just that, yet Stewart is generally acknowledged as ideologically tied to the political left; NBC, with its co-network MSNBC, is generally viewed as the most politically left-leaning major network; and as the account at this link and some of the response to it on its discussion board illustrate, Outlaw is apparently considered a show that is over the top in promoting left-wing propaganda.

Unfortunately, if Stewart and Outlaw count as "liberal media," then the real political left has little, if any, media representation. (Perhaps Maher is among the best hopes ...) On the other hand, Stewart and Outlaw help demonstrate just how baseless (and base) the "liberal media bias" idea is. As I've said before, I believe there is a "liberal" media bias, but it's already within a conservative frame, which makes it a moderately conservative bias. As Maher notes, when the right keeps staking a claim further to the right and then demanding to be met "in the middle," the middle is no longer the middle; it's the right. And, in the process, the "liberal" side of the media keeps reinforcing power relations rather than really making progress toward a fuller, more equitable and more functioning democracy.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

A Race to the Top Twenty Years Ago

As a chart aficionado in my high school and early college years, I was following closely, complete with subscription to Billboard, as Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby" became the first rap single to top the Hot 100 singles chart--a feat it accomplished 20 years ago today. That distinction could easily have gone to MC Hammer for "U Can't Touch This" a few months earlier but for a marketing decision made by Capitol Records. Since this occurred, I have always wondered about the role race played in the situation, particularly as the events reenacted a history of white artists appropriating black popular music.

Reflecting on this, I wrote an entry on Tunesmate today that I encourage you to read for more of the story.

Monday, November 1, 2010

La Vida De Los Muertos

In the Catholic Church, today is All Saints' Day, meant to commemorate those individuals who have already died and gone to heaven. Tomorrow on the Catholic calendar will be All Souls' Day, which recognizes those individuals who have died but who remain in purgatory, awaiting entrance into heaven. In Mexico, today and tomorrow also comprise El Día de los Muertos (The Day of the Dead), on which people remember and pray for loved ones who have died.

Today also marks two weeks since one of my dogs, Nellie Fox, a beagle-dachshund mix whom my wife and I rescued from the pound in 2002, passed away. Nellie took suddenly sick on the weekend of October 16-17. What seemed like a possible stomach ache or potentially passing illness on Sunday, October 17, escalated in the early morning of October 18. My wife and I rushed Nellie to a local emergency vet at 2:30 in the morning. This would turn into a trip for specialized care in Michigan about an hour and a quarter away. What was a furious and panicked drive north, when it seemed like Nellie could die at any moment, became hopeful, when she made it, the doctors stabilized her, and then they planned for surgery. When my wife and I left to head back home around 1:00 p.m., we knew the surgery might provide bad news in the form of cancer, but we also had hope. Nellie was awake, lucid, and stable when we left her. A little over an hour later, she was gone. During preparation for surgery, Nellie's heart gave out and the doctors were unable to resuscitate her.

I have felt pretty devastated by the loss of Nellie Fox, particularly since my wife and I had been getting her regular blood tests and checkups. Nellie's death has also extended a series of deaths that have hit my wife and I over the last few years. In May 2007, our chihuahua-terrier mix, Turbo, passed away after kidney failure. A year to the day later, my wife's mom died of a brain aneurysm. Then, this past May, my mom died of pancreatic cancer. Indeed, the very weekend that Nellie Fox became outwardly sick, I had gone to Indianapolis to commemorate my mom. A family friend, "Uncle" Dick McGowan, and his son, Cassidy, made an altar for my mom as part of the El Día de los Muertos display at the Indianapolis Art Center.

As I have been reflecting on these deaths over the last two weeks, I have found some comfort in the idea of El Día de los Muertos. The idea of celebrating, remembering, and engaging with the dead seems too overlooked in the culture that dominates United States society. Too often, people die, and the world seems to move on without pause, without consideration, without reflection, and sometimes even without sympathy. My wife commented on this when her mom died, I've felt it with the deaths of Turbo and my mom, and I'm feeling it as strongly as ever with the death of Nellie Fox. More time spent engaging with the dead, holding the things that they loved, focusing on vividly remembering the times we shared with them, and doing things that recall or honor them seems like a very spiritually useful and rewarding thing to do, not just for those of us still alive, but also for those who have died. Indeed, "un día" seems too little. "Una semana," "un mes," and even "un año" seem too little as well. So, I am proposing to spend and dedicate much more of my life for the dead--"mi vida para los muertos." I've already begun by making sure that I eat a banana--one of Nellie Fox's favorite foods--every day, thinking of Nellie when I do it.

On a related note, in a week and a half I will join millions of other people in going to the movie theater to watch the new Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, which depicts the first part of the seventh and final novel in the series. The morning of the day it opens, my "Reading Harry Potter" class, which I am teaching for the third time now this fall, will undoubtedly discuss it (though restrain ourselves somewhat for those who haven't seen it yet). I begin that course with an essay by C.S. Lewis called "Meditation in a Toolshed." In that essay, Lewis discusses the importance of both "looking at" and "looking along." He says we must both "look at" things, by examining them from outside of their perspectives, and "look along" things, by seeing the world from inside their perspectives. He argues that both are valuable for understanding the world. While we do a considerable amount of "looking at" in the Harry Potter course, I also consciously try to make sure that we "look along" Harry Potter, discussing what a perspective from inside the Potterverse offers the world. Among such things, the Harry Potter series, including to a large degree that seventh and final tale, offers us some ways to comprehend and come to terms with death--deaths of loved ones, deaths of people we do not know well, and deaths of ourselves. In the book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Albus Dumbledore tells Harry that "the true master [of death] does not seek to run away from Death. He accepts that he must die, and understands that there are far, far worse things in the living world than dying" (720). This comes six years after Dumbledore, in the first book in the series (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone) tells Harry that "to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure" (297). It seems to me that looking along these ideas asks us to take stock of death more fully in life, not necessarily charging into death, but accepting death and seeking to find greater communion with our own mortality.

So much of the struggle with death comes from fears--fear of the unknown, fear of loss of one's self, fear of pain, and so on--and I have held these fears of death strongly throughout most of my life. But with my mom, my dogs, my mother-in-law, others I have known who have died, and the ideas presented by J. K. Rowling in mind, I seek a change in how I live life, embracing the dead more fully as part of my life, living with death instead of attempting to forget or deny its existence. I've only begun this new adventure, and I do not know where it will take me as I live it, but I also realize that I do not need or want to know, for that would not be in the spirit of living and walking with death. And realizing that does seem to organize my mind and my life quite a bit.