Michael Parenti on the Racist Propaganda

Michael Parenti on the Racist/Imperialist Propaganda of Entertainment Media

Tintin's Racist Past

Traveling in a hammock, Belgian Congo [Photograph taken or provided by Émile Gorlia (1887-1966)] Hammocks carried by African porters were an important means of transportation for Europeans during the colonial period. Some African leaders also used palanquins and other carrying devices as symbols of their status.

From Forbes Magazine, "Tintin's Racist Past," by Lionel Laurent, on 23 July 2007 --LONDON - When British lawyer David Enright opened the pages of a comic book entitled Tintin In The Congo while in a shop with his wife and two young boys, he was probably expecting a benign adventure story full of fun for all the family.

Instead what he found was a "highly offensive" collection of racist caricatures of Africans, from superstitious natives to incoherent simpletons, and in a letter of complaint he demanded that the Borders bookstore in his hometown of St. Albans stop selling the comic book.

Tintin is Belgium's most famous export, with over 200 million copies of his adventures sold worldwide. In May Variety even reported that co-founder of DreamWorks Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson were planning a Tintin trilogy, no doubt tempted by the $3 billion gross raked in by Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies. Could one angry British lawyer derail the reputation of a true comic book hero?

The incident has snowballed into a very British scandal, with the Commission for Racial Equality backing Enright and demanding that all Borders stores take Tintin's Congolese adventures off their shelves. Now even the police are involved, with the Hertfordshire police deciding to record Enright's complaint as a "racist incident."

Borders' response has been to move all copies of the comic to the "adult graphic" section of the store from the childrens' section, but the book seller refused to stop selling it outright.

It's not the first time accusations of racism have been leveled against Hergé, the late Belgian cartoonist who created the iconic orange-haired reporter known as Tintin. When the character first appeared in Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets at the end of the 1920s, he stood for conservative, Catholic values, showing up the godless credo of communism. It is no accident that in his second adventure in 1931, Tintin In The Congo, the intrepid reporter is saved from the snapping jaws of angry crocodiles by a bearded Catholic missionary dressed in white.

But Hergé himself regretted his early work, as well as his personal attachment to a Catholic abbot with fascist sympathies called Norbert Wallez. In an interview released in 1983, the artist said: "The fact is that while I was growing up, I was being fed the prejudices of the bourgeois society that surrounded me. It's true that Soviets and Congo were youthful sins. I'm not rejecting them. However, if I were to do it again, they would be different."

Democratic Republic of Congo (Belgian Congo) - Kuba King "Dr. William Henry Sheppard (1865-1927), an African American missionary for the American Presbyterian Congo Mission, who later became an outspoken critic of King Léopold's regime, was the first overseas visitor to reach the kingdom's capital in 1890. The Kuba, famous for their arts, subsequently attracted many visitors, ranging from anthropologists to photographers, who sought to depict the legendary kings, the visual splendor of the royal court and important chiefs, among them Chief Ndombe of Bieeng. Casimir Zagourski, who traveled through the royal capital in the 1930s, took a classic, often-published portrait of then ruler Kot Mabiinc (ruled 1919-1939), who was paralyzed. Eliot Elisofon (1911-1973), an American photographer who worked for Life magazine, followed in Zagourski's footsteps in 1947, creating evocative portraits of Kot Mabiinc's successor, Mbop Mabiinc maMbeky (ruled 1939-1969). Photographic encounters in the capital became commonplace and orchestrated--grand performances for the cameras of the Westerners. Kuba kings used the opportunity to further the reputation of the Kuba as the foremost artists in central Africa." (flicker)

Tintin In The Congo did not even make it to the U.K. until 2005, over 70 years after its first appearance in French, because of the controversy surrounding it. When the publisher Egmont finally released the English version, it billed it as an "essential volume for collectors," making sure to wrap a label around the comic that warned readers of its potentially "offensive" content.

And the huge divide between post-colonial Britain and Belgium in the 1930s, when the kingdom still owned the Congo, adds to the shock of today's reader discovering Tintin's adventure for the first time. The story is filled with witch doctors, lazy natives who need to be put to work and over-the-top violence against animals.

According to Mark Rodwell, representative of Moulinsart--the firm that manages Hergé's estate--this explains why children ignorant of the past don't have the same reaction.

"The criticism is that it's not suitable for children," he told Forbes.com. "But it's the adults that have the problem with it. It's a book of its time." (source: Forbes)

Revisiting The Human Zoo Phenomena in Paris

From the BBC News Paris, " Human zoos: When real people were exhibits," on 27 December 2011, by Hugh Schofield--An exhibition in Paris looks at the history of so-called human zoos, that put inhabitants from foreign lands, mostly African countries, on display as article of curiosity.

Over four centuries from the first voyages of discovery, European societies developed an appetite for exhibiting exotic human "specimens" shipped back to Paris, London or Berlin for the interest and delectation of the crowd.

What started as wide-eyed curiosity on the part of observers turned into ghoulish pseudo-science in the mid-1800s, as researchers sought out physical evidence for their theory of races.

Finally, in high colonial times, hundreds of thousands of people visited "human zoos" created as part of the great international trade fairs.

Here they could watch whole villages of Kanaks or Senegalese, with real-life inhabitants paid to act out war dances or religious rituals before their colonial masters.

The story is told at the Quai Branly museum in Paris until June 2012, mainly through the display of paintings, old photographs, archive film, posters and postcards.

The aim of the exhibition is explicit - to teach how Western societies created a sense of "the other" in regard to foreign peoples, thus legitimizing their eventual domination.

The information allows people to understand why there are still fault-lines in society based on the colour of our skins."”

Ex-footballer Liliane Thuram

"What we tried to do is conduct a kind of archaeology of the stereotype," says curator Nanette Snoep.

The display, entitled "Inventing the Savage", was the inspiration of the Caribbean-born former international footballer Liliane Thuram, who today heads his own anti-racism foundation.

"I have long been interested in slavery because of the way my own family was affected by it," says Thuram.

"It became clear to me that racism was above all an intellectual construction. And as such, it was also susceptible to de-construction.

"That's what we are trying to do with the exhibition: putting on display the information that allows people to understand why there are still faultlines in society based on the colour of our skins."

At the start, all was relatively innocent. One of the first paintings is of four Greenlanders brought to the Danish court in 1664 by a Dutch sailor. They stare out with a look as bewildered as those that must have been on the faces of their captors.

"What is fascinating is that on top of the painting are written their names. In other words, at this early stage they are seen as individuals. Exotic yes, but people," says Snoep. "It is later when the names disappear that the relationship deteriorates."

Another early portrait is of the Tahitian man called Omai, who was brought to the court of King George III in London by the explorer Joseph Banks.

In his book The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes describes Omai as "quick-witted, charming and astute. His exotic good looks… were much admired in society, especially among the more racy of the aristocratic ladies."

But describing this same portrait, Holmes adds: "It is not clear if [Omai] is Banks's companion or his trophy."

Guest or specimen? If there was room for ambiguity in the early days - when explorers and explored often found each other mutually intriguing - this disappeared with the new certainties of the colonial epoch.

The saddest emblem of the coming era was the South African Saartjie Baartman, later to be known as the Hottentot Venus. Born around 1780, she was brought to London in 1810 and put on display.

She had the genetic characteristic known as steatopygia - extremely protuberant buttocks and elongated labia - which evidently delighted the cabaret-goers of the British capital.

Can it teach us anything about modern attitudes to race?

Later she came to Paris, and was analysed by the budding racial anthropologists. According to the exhibition catalogue, one scientist described her as having the "buttocks of a mandrill".

When she died in poverty, her skeleton was put on display. It remained on show in the Museum of Mankind in Paris until 1974. In 2002, her remains were repatriated and buried in South Africa.

"Baartman marks the start of the period of description, measurement and classification, which soon leads us to hierarchisation - the idea that there are lesser and greater races," says Snoep.

The climax of the story comes with the imperialist high noon of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

A European public fed on notions of Christian evangelism and cultural superiority was titillated by re-enactments of life in the colonies which became a regular part of international trade fairs.

Entrepreneurs put on travelling stage shows featuring Hindu rope-dancers, Arabian camel-herders, Zulu warriors or hunters from New Caledonia. Whole African villages were recreated to allow Europeans a glimpse of "primitive" living.

The most famous impresario was "Buffalo Bill" Cody whose Wild West shows - according to the exhibition organisers - were another example of racial stereotyping.

Some 35,000 people are reckoned to have taken part in the displays. Most were paid.

"They were shows. Public entertainment. The villagers from Africa or India were acting out a role. Significantly there were barriers between the public and the performers, to reinforce the notion of separateness," says Snoep.

These ethnographic displays died out after World War II. Oddly it was Hitler who first banned them. The last was in Belgium in 1958.

The organizers of Inventing the Savage claim that these "human zoos" were seen by 1.4 billion people overall - and that they therefore played an important, and so far unacknowledged, part in the development of modern racism.

"What is left of this incredible story today?" intones the voice-over on a film which is part of the exhibition.

"A view of Africa and its people that is still contemptuous. A certain way in the West of believing oneself superior. Above all the story helps explain how millions of westerners were manipulated into a belief in the inequality of races."

Inventing the Savage provides plenty of food for thought, and there is no-one alive today who would for a minute defend the practice of human ethnographic exhibitions.

The show has been well-received but has come into some criticism for what some see as its heavy-handed didacticisim - as well as a kind of historical cherry-picking that leaves out what does not fit the message.

There is no mention for example of what the human "exhibits" themselves thought when brought to Europe. They are presented as victims, nothing more. Nor are the reactions of the audience explored. Maybe these were more complex than mere colonial self-satisfaction.

Writing in the left-wing newspaper Libération, columnist Marcela Iacub detects in the show "the frankly conservative role… of militant anti-racists and the consensus that they seek to create."

The spirit of the exhibition, she says, is a kind of "censorship, accompanied by the promotion of pedagogical, uplifting messages that will eradicate in us all those dangerous ideas that survive."

Iacub says it is ironic that it was just that kind of misguided moral superiority - the need to improve the unenlightened - that led to Europeans colonizing Africa in the first place.

"In the eyes of the militant anti-racist, we are all violent, easily manipulated, barbarous, bloodthirsty, and incapable of thinking without the aid of people to teach us. In fact just like the 'savage' of old!" (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16295827)

Mightier Than The Sword: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Battle for America

Mightier Than The Sword: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Battle for America

By David S. Reynolds; Illustrated. 351 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $27.95

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From the New York Times Book Review on June 24, 2011, "The Impact of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’" reviewed by Andrew Delbanco:

No less an authority than Leo Tolstoy included “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” on his short list of “examples of the highest art flowing from love of God and man.” Fifty years later, James Baldwin called the same book a “very bad novel” full of “excessive and spurious emotion.” What goes on here? The question belongs in the present tense because it is by no means settled.

There’s nothing unsettled, however, about “Mightier Than the Sword,” David S. Reynolds’s informative account of the writing, reception and modern reputation of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Reynolds unstintingly celebrates its author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, as a colossal writer who mobilized public opinion against slavery, and proved, against long odds, “a white woman’s capacity to enter into the subjectivity of black people.”

The novel began to germinate in Stowe’s mind while she was living in Cincinnati in the 1830s and ’40s, where she met fugitive slaves who had escaped through or from Kentucky, and where, as Reynolds puts it, “she loved spending time in the kitchen with servants like the African-American Zillah.” In the spring of 1850, having moved to Maine, where she followed the Congressional debates over a proposed new law that would deny fugitive slaves basic rights while imposing new penalties on anyone harboring them, she wrote to a magazine editor that “the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak.” The result was a series of fictional sketches of slaves under physical or psychological assault — among them, the beautiful Eliza, who escapes from bounty hunters by leaping from ice floe to ice floe across the Ohio River with her baby in her arms; the brooding Cassy, who belongs to the brutal Simon Legree; and Tom himself, whose gentleness and generosity grow apace as he is sold farther and farther south, eventually to Legree, who torments and tortures him before ordering his overseers to beat him to death.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

When the magazine pieces were gathered and published in 1852 as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Or, Life Among the Lowly,” the first print run was 5,000. Within a year, the book had sold 300,000 copies in America, and over a million in Britain. As Reynolds points out, a contemporary periodical noted that the number of people who encountered the story may have been 10 times the number who bought the book — since it came out in an era when reading aloud was a common practice among family and friends.

If ever there was a publishing event to prove the principle that timing is everything, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was it. On both sides of the sectional divide the timber was dry — and Stowe struck the igniting spark. In the North, Frederick Douglass rejoiced that she had “baptized with holy fire myriads who before cared nothing for the bleeding slave.” In the South, her indictment of slavery through the odious figure of Legree was likened to a “malignant” attack on the institution of marriage, as if she had chosen a wife-beater to represent “the normal condition of the relation” between loving spouses.

A decade after the book appeared, Abraham Lincoln is said to have received Stowe at the White House with the greeting, “Is this the little woman who made this great war?” No one knows if Lincoln really said that, and as the historian David Potter once put it, “history cannot evaluate with precision the influence of a novel upon public opinion.” But Reynolds is sure that the influence of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was immense.

Not only, he says, had Stowe “paved the way” for Lincoln’s election, but after her death she may have helped Lenin, who admired her novel, evade the czar’s agents by escaping from Finland over “the breaking ice of the moderately frozen Orfjarden Sound.” Through stage versions of the novel, she helped Henry James develop a sense of “human feelings as performative and theatrical.” Through Chinese and Portuguese translations, she inspired anticolonialism in China and emancipation in Brazil, and she taught the advertising firm J. Walter Thompson how “great masses of people can be influenced through their emotions.”

Reynolds is a rewarding researcher. He illuminates the innumerable “Tom shows” that became a staple of American popular entertainment, as well as the use of Uncle Tom’s image to sell jigsaw puzzles, dolls, card games, stockings and — grotesquely enough — licorice. He identifies stage and screen stars who accepted (Betty Grable, Judy Garland) or refused (Lena Horne, Paul Robeson) roles based on Stowe’s characters. One film performance is surely still worth watching: Little Eva — the angelic white girl who dies after befriending Tom — as played by Lou Costello.

Reynolds has insightful things to say about Stowe’s efforts “to present Southerners as favorably as possible” even as she excoriated their peculiar institution. And in surveying Uncle Tom’s postpublication career, he makes a number of striking points. He suggests, for example, that it may have been Frederick Douglass who first used the term “Uncle Tom” as a pejorative epithet denoting the shuffling docility of a submissive black man, and he traces the ups and downs of the novel’s reputation — high in the Civil War years, low during much of the 20th century, when the romanticized account in Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” (1936) largely supplanted Stowe’s version of the antebellum South. Today, Reynolds says, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is again “one of the must-reads of American literature.”

s such, it is a challenging book with which to come to terms. In my experience, students can be embarrassed by it. They recognize it as a valuable document for understanding the history of what we now call the “conversation” about race in America. In response to the prevailing view of black people as inferior beings (a view long held in the North as well as the South), it lifted its black characters to the status of impossibly virtuous victims — just the elevation that James Baldwin felt was a kind of contempt. When Baldwin called Stowe less a novelist than an “impassioned pamphleteer,” he meant, in part, that her characters don’t seem capable of selfishness as well as self-sacrifice, or of pettiness and jealousy along with piety and wisdom. In short, they don’t seem human. Reynolds calls Baldwin’s a “blinkered critique,” though he concedes that Stowe trafficked in the clichés of “romantic racialism” while reminding us, fairly enough, that what now seems “like racial stereotyping” was “progressive” in her day.

Still, we are left at the end of this book with the unsettling question of how to think about “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” as part of our cultural inheritance. The case for it as a literary work of depth and nuance is dubious. Yet it belongs to the very short list of American books (including, say, “The Other America” by Michael Harrington and “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson) that helped create or consolidate a reform movement — in Stowe’s case, the most consequential reform movement in our history. Perhaps the fact that readers today have trouble taking seriously its heroes and villains is a tribute to its achievement — since, in some immeasurable way, it helped bring on the war that rendered unimaginable the world that Stowe attempted to imagine.

City Talk: David Reynolds, author "Mightier than the Sword"

Marlon Riggs: Ethnic Notions

Ethnic Notions is Marlon Riggs' Emmy-winning documentary that takes viewers on a disturbing voyage through American history, tracing for the first time the deep-rooted stereotypes which have fueled anti-black prejudice. Through these images we can begin to understand the evolution of racial consciousness in America.

Marlon Riggs

Loyal Toms, carefree Sambos, faithful Mammies, grinning Coons, savage Brutes, and wide-eyed Pickaninnies roll across the screen in cartoons, feature films, popular songs, minstrel shows, advertisements, folklore, household artifacts, even children's rhymes. These dehumanizing caricatures permeated popular culture from the 1820s to the Civil Rights period and implanted themselves deep in the American psyche.

Narration by Esther Rolle and commentary by respected scholars shed light on the origins and devastating consequences of this 150 yearlong parade of bigotry. Ethnic Notions situates each stereotype historically in white society's shifting needs to justify racist oppression from slavery to the present day. The insidious images exacted a devastating toll on black Americans and continue to undermine race relations.

Ethnic Notions has quickly become a mainstay of university, high school, and public library collections. It is a basic audio visual text for American History, Sociology, Black Studies, Anthropology, Social Psychology, Media Studies, and any training program concerned with stereotyping and cross-cultural understanding.

Approaching a complex and delicate subject with great sensitivity, Ethnic Notions equips viewers to view media and other cultural representations with a more critical eye. It's a direct challenge to those who say, "It was just a joke."

Ethnic Notions

Ethnic Notions Transcript

VOICE-OVER: A is for Aunty, de odes 'er all, she rocks all us chil'ren t' sleep in her shawl.
D is for Daniel, who tends to de do', he took care of massa, way back 'fo de woh.
F is for Felix, who won't do no wuk, he's lazy and shif'less and ready to shirk.
Z is for Zonia, chunky and small, but 'ere comes de Missus so I guess dis am all.

VIDEO/SYNC: (Cartoon) SCRUB ME MAMA WITH THE BOOGIE WOOGIE BEAT

"Listen, Mammy, that ain't no way to wash clothes. What you all need is rhythm!"

"Wh- wh- what do you all mean, rhythm?"

"Ha ha ha ha. I'll show you what I mean!" (music)

NARRATOR: The mammy … the pickaninny … the coon … the sambo … the uncle: Well into the middle of the twentieth century , these were some of the most popular depictions of black Americans

By 1941, when this cartoon was made, images like these permeated American culture.

These were the images that decorated our homes, that served and amused and made us laugh.

Taken for granted, they worked their way into the mainstream of American life. Of ethnic caricatures in America, these have been the most enduring.

Today there's little doubt that they shaped the most gut-level feelings about race.

LEVINE: When you see hundreds of them, uh in all parts of the country persisting over a very long period of time, they have to have meaning. They obviously appeal to people. They appeal to the creator, but the appeal also to the consumers, those who read the car - look at the cartoons, or read the novels, or buy the artifacts.

CHRISTIAN: It is not just that it's in the figurines, and the uhn coffee pots and so on, it is that we are seen that way, perceived that way, even in terms of public policy. And that our lives are lived under that shadow, and sometimes we then, even become to believe it ourselves.

LEVINE: Blacks don't really look like that. So why is it so appealing to people to think they look like that, and pretend they look like that, and to like to look at icons that look like that. You look at them often enough and black people begin to look like that, even though they don't. Um, so that they've had a great impact in our society.

They therefore tell us both about the inner desires of the people who create and consume them, and also they tell us about some of the forces that shape reality, for large portions of our population.

VIDEO/SYNC: UNCLE TOM'S CABANA

Well now chil'ren, ol' Uncle Tom's gon' tell you the real true story about Uncle Tom's Cabin

NARRATOR: Contained in these cultural images is the history of our national conscience striving to reconcile the paradox of racism in a nation founded on human equality - a conscience coping with this profound contradiction … through caricature.

The Miami Hate

From the sports pages of the Miami Herald, posted on May 29, 2011, "Le Batard: We may as well just call it the Miami Hate," by Dan Le Batard:
Dan Le Batard writes, I was jarred by how the conversation felt with my radio audience last week.

[ Dan Le Batard] Me: Try to be classy, Miami Heat fans.

[Miami Radio]Audience: No.

[Dan Le Batard] Me: Isn’t there a high road to be taken here?

Audience: No.

[Dan Le Batard] Me: You can’t be throwing things at Charles Barkley.

Audience: Shut up.

It is ugly, and it is beautiful, and it is sports — tapping into emotions on the extremes. There isn’t very much, in other parts of life, that makes you scream curses at the TV while the baby sleeps in the other room. And I’m as guilty of being obnoxious about the Heat as anyone this season. This team, a symbol of civic pride in the only city I’ve ever loved, has made me unusually loud, defensive and emotional as America and its sports media roots against it. So I’m not wagging a parental finger from my soapbox at you, Heat fans. I’m just interested in exploring what it is about this team and city that mixes like gas and fire to produce this unprecedented Heat — and a rabid connection unlike any I’ve ever felt between our community and a sports team.

Joy is usually enough. Gratitude, too. But that’s not all you’ll find here. “Thank you!” is glued to “Bleep you!” The joy is mixed with anger, defiance and hostility. Grace, humility and civility are noble but not quite fun. And sometimes sports make us irrational, emotion trampling logic on the way to the party. Burning cars in a championship riot? That seems like a way to protest something, not celebrate it. It also speaks to a larger unhappiness in the homes and lives away from that arena.

If LeBron James ends the season holding up the trophy, our city runs the risk of becoming so unhinged that it will put off even more people from sea to shining sea. When we throw things at Barkley, a beloved icon, and shower him in curses during the Chicago series, we are just giving the media and America the snapshots and ammunition to smear all of us as barbaric, bandwagon baboons.

There is so much criticism in the coverage of this team that the Heat players get ripped for overcelebrating against Boston, changing the narrative almost immediately after the triumph. What is going to happen if a defensive, angry city overcelebrates with a radiator’s hissing relief after an entire season of abuse?

What is a hater?

This is all America’s fault. That’s what you are saying, right? Miami didn’t feel angry and defensive like this when the Heat won in 2006. How good and pure, and only good and pure, did Livan Hernandez's “I love you, Miami” feel in 1997? But America has been overly critical of this Heat team for months, rooting against it in a way so polluted that you can hear it even in the voices of an allegedly objective media. That’s a pretty negative way for America to experience sports, rooting for the other guy to lose instead of for your guy to win, but it is only part of the explanation.

The term “haters” is a plague. It is so dismissive. Lazy. It is either a conversation ender or an argument starter. It closes open minds. And the great soothing in it is that it never requires a mirror. It puts 100 percent of the blame elsewhere, on others, and wraps it in envy.

There is plenty of that at work here. Surely, anyone who cares about sports would want this team on its side. But we participate in exacerbating the envy the moment one frustrated fan throws something at Barkley to combat it, and we perpetuate it when the angry mob concurs that, yes, that is the proper rebuttal for haters. It is why the announcer kept pleading at the end of Game4 against Chicago, as debris filled the air, that anyone who threw things would be subject to arrest. The line between passion and stupidity gets crossed when you go from “In your face!” to “at your head.”

This team is a fascinating civic symbol. It is loud, flashy, cool, famous, passionate, envied, hated. Vanquished Chicago Bull Joakim Noah called the Heat “Hollywood as hell,” but “Miami as hell” would have been more accurate. Led by sugar daddy Pat Riley, the only way this team could be more Miami is if LeBron dunked while wearing Gucci sunglasses, Dwyane Wade smoked a Cohiba on his way to the rim and Chris Bosh played the post while sipping a cortadito (Erick Dampier, for the record, already holds up his end by playing as if wearing chancletas).

Best behavior

So even though these players have behaved honorably in representing the city all season, showing uncommon grace under uncommon pressure, it is easy to see why outsiders might think this team of ours wears too much cologne. Miami knows how to party, and these guys introduced themselves with a swaying, loud fiesta you don’t normally see before a ball has bounced. James, Wade and Bosh have said they don’t regret a moment of that introduction — that it was for Miami, not for anybody else. But too much of our city was built with drug money and is now plagued by foreclosures, so America views the assembly of this team as just another flashy Miami shortcut. And that stinks and stings if you have to witness it thrown in your face while shoveling snow from your driveway and trying to cheer Jamario Moon.

It is worth noting that Heat players, the ones who have actually carried the weight of criticism, have not reacted with defiance, though it would be understandable. In fact, after beating Boston, James not only knelt but took that moment of triumph, of validation, to finally apologize to Cleveland. It was a rather remarkable contrition, given what he has endured this season, choosing the moment you were right to concede where you were wrong. Many of us, after having our image run over by a convoy of 18-wheelers for a single Decision, might have spent the entire postgame constructing a parade float out of middle fingers.

But here’s the disconnect between James and the city that celebrates him so zealously now: He has a voice, a platform, a scoreboard and inordinate fast-twitch muscle fiber with which to defend himself. The Heat fan? Not as much. It’ll make you insane, not really having your desperate voice heard, and that is true whether you are at the bottom of a well or at the top of sports. New media like Facebook and Twitter has exploded in part because people just want to be heard — to have the platform old media has.

So poison and T-shirts and expletives get hurled at Barkley, ESPN personalities and all the media members who appear to be rooting against this team. Why? Because those people are a face and voice and symbol and punching bag. They represent every faceless “hater” in America who has rooted against this team. Barkley, meanwhile, can spew all over every newspaper, radio and TV platform without rebuttal — and be very popular everywhere outside of Miami while doing it.

When it escalates

The result? Hostility. Defensiveness. Frustration. Helplessness. (Until LeBron James dunks on your behalf.) And that leads you down an emotional path that is just a few exit ramps from taking pleasure in the pain of others. Just like those old Hurricane football anarchies, it isn’t just about your own team; it becomes about inflicting pain on someone else’s. I’m not certain if mixing the love and hate makes for a better sports experience, but it certainly makes for what feels like a bigger one.

I have a friend who travels the United States. He isn’t invested in this. He is impartial. He isn’t attached to this team, city or basketball. Everywhere he goes, when the NBA comes up, he hears, “I hate the Heat. I hope they lose.” When he asks them to articulate what they hate, exactly, they tend to sound dumb. Still, something about this team bothers people in a visceral way, and there are too many people that feel it, really feel it, to simply dismiss the legitimacy of it while filing it under hater.

But here’s how hostility escalates: Even Gandhi is going to get worn out if he hears “I hate you” over and over from every angle of America. People on the receiving end of “I hate you,” understandably, aren’t going to hear anything above that, no matter how rational, nuanced or muted the criticism becomes. And at some point, the basic human response simply morphs into this:

You know what?

I hate you, too. -- Dan Le Batard

(source: The Miami Herald)

1st and 10 discuss Scottie Pippens "LeBron can be better than MJ"

The Hawaiian Illusion

The Hawaiian illusion

Mexico's Sambo: Memin

Mexico’s Race Problem

And the real story behind Fox’s faux pasClaudio Lomnitz

In a speech to a binational agribusiness audience this past May, Mexican President Vicente Fox complained about growing American barriers to Mexican immigration. Faced with an anti-immigrant vigilante movement, a forbidding wall raised on the Arizona border, and a Real ID program that denies Mexican illegals a driver’s license, a bank account, and legal identification, Fox confidently told his audience that “una solución win-win” was possible. After all, he said, Mexican immigrants are doing the jobs that “not even blacks are willing to do.”

Fox’s statement caused a political storm in the United States. Jesse Jackson traveled to Mexico and met with Fox. So did Al Sharpton. Both demanded explanations and apologies. The U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Tony Garza, expressed concern to his Mexican counterpart, and the White House issued a formal complaint. Mexican-American and African-American organizations decried the statement; African-American businessmen considered boycotting tourism to Mexico. The story was picked up by all the major American media—The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, CNN—and it caused an even bigger storm in Mexico: when the United States catches a cold, Mexico gets pneumonia.

Memín was described by his creator, Yolanda Vargas Dulché, as un chiquitín negrito de ojos enormes y muy chistoso – “a very funny little negrito with enormous eyes.” Although she drew the comic between 1945 and 1952, the series has been perpetually reprinted, and beloved, to this day. In 2005, when the Mexican Postal Service printed stamps in honor of Memín Pinguín, they sold out within a matter of hours. Various U.S. politicians, including Jesse Jackson, complained, ensuring the historical place of the stamps as collectors’ items. (Source: David Lido, Mostly Mexico City)

The ruckus completely overshadowed the original subject of debate; Mexican racism replaced immigration as the issue of the day. Then, just when the scandal had finally subsided, a new conflict broke out around a set of five Mexican postage stamps issued as part of a commemorative celebration of Mexico’s comic books. The stamps, which featured a cartoon character named Memín Pinguín, raised the accusation of Mexican racism once again.

Memín was created in the 1940s by Yolanda Vargas Dulché, an exuberant sentimentalist and blockbuster photo-novella writer. In a country in which newspaper runs rarely exceed 100,000, reprints of Memín still sell 125,000 copies a week. Memín has black skin, thick lips, a flat nose, and eyes like saucers. He lives alone with his mother, doña Eufrosina, an Aunt Jemima–like washerwoman who speaks Spanish with a Cuban accent. Memín, who was named after Vargas Dulché’s boyfriend, and later husband, Guillermo (“Memo”) de la Parra, loves his “Ma’ Linda,” who spoils him adoringly, though she does not spare the rod (her famous palo con clavo—board with a nail). Doña Eufrosina is, in any case, honest and clean, a dignified representative of the “working poor.”

Memín is the only black kid in a gang of four boys, all of whom attend the Benito Juárez public school in Mexico City. They are a multi-class group from the unmarked (i.e.,mestizo, or mixed-blood) portion of Mexico’s racial and class spectrum, with the exception of Ricardito, who is blond and rich, but (predictably) has unhappy family circumstances. Memín often provides comic relief in ways that are reminiscent of blackface minstrel theater (a well-developed genre in Cuba, where Yolanda Vargas Dulché first conceived of the Memín character, but with precedents in Mexico’s popular puppet theater of the 19th century).

The gang’s core characteristic is its absolute internal loyalty. When the gang travels to Texas to play soccer, for example, Memín’s friends defend him with indignation when he is subjected to Jim Crow laws and personal insults. The boys go on to win their game and triumphantly return to Mexico.

American reactions to Memín in June after the stamps had been released were not informed by the comic book’s plotline, which is of course virtually unknown in this country, but rested entirely on Memín’s image, which is deeply familiar to Americans. Inspired by the cartoon character Ebony White, from Will Eisner’s 1940s comic strip The Spirit, the Memín drawing is a variation of the Little Black Sambo theme.

The White House spokesman, Scott McLellan, condemned the Memín stamps, stating imperiously that such images “have no place in today’s world.” Jesse Jackson, who had just accepted a tortured and ambiguous apology from Fox for his May statement, saw the stamps as a deliberate insult. The African-American community agreed, and the question of Mexican racism against blacks again undermined the Mexican government’s ability to claim the moral high ground in immigration debates.

The Mexican public was caught by surprise in a storm that the Mexican press quickly dubbed “The Memíngate Affair.” Mexican racial attitudes had suddenly emerged as a factor in bilateral relations with the United States. How exactly had this happened? At what point did Mexicans start to be thought of as racist?

After all, Memín Pinguín is not the only comic book of the mid-20th century that was both wildly popular and racist, and that continues to be reissued and avidly consumed. Tintin, the character created by the Belgian Hergé, is a French journalist who, together with his lily-white dog Milú, goes around the globe straightening things out and protecting the feeble colonial races—Bedouins, Congolese, Chinese, Peruvian Indians—from their exploiters and from themselves.

Asterix and Obelix, a Gallic-nationalist duo, also have their racist moments and are nonetheless widely adored. They even have a theme park in France.

And the United States’s own Speedy Gonzalez has been massively popular. Speedy (“Arriba! Arriba! Andale! Andale!”) is a fast mouse in a town of drawling and anemiccompadres and beautiful mouse señoritas. Like Memín, Speedy fools and tricks arbitrary authority (in the form of a cat), while domesticating and reproducing prejudices about Mexicans.

With these images in mind, Mexican response to the Memín affair ranged from surprise to indignation: ethnic caricatures are a standard and relatively innocent form of entertainment, they claimed, and in any case, the United States should not cast stones from its glass house. At least in Memín the black kid is the hero; at least he has a lovable mother; at least he goes to the same public school as Ricardito.

But the roots of the dispute run deeper than American hypocrisy and Mexico’s refusal to inspect its own racism. The Memín affair reflects decades of profound and unacknowledged changes in the relations between the United States and Mexico.

Until the 1980s, Latin America, and especially its two great mestizo countries, Mexico and Brazil, claimed moral superiority to the United States on race relations. In the case of Mexico, their superiority was predicated, first, on Mexico’s early abolition of slavery in 1829, shortly after its independence. Because Mexico later went to war with the United States, and the United States has been a constant source of nationalist anxiety, Mexican superiority on race issues became an explicit theme of public discussion from the mid-19th century forward. Moreover, anxieties about annexation by the United States, which were a constant through the 19th and early 20th centuries, were fueled by American discrimination against Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in American territory. In short, the experience of discrimination in the United States has helped to sustain Mexican nationalism for a century and a half. (source: Boston Review, Nov./Dec. 2005, byClaudio Lomnitz. )

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Memin Pinguin: The Structural Violence of an Image, Afro Mexicans

Mexicans have 3% to 8% African blood when averaged out among all Mexicans, and 50% to 80% in places like Costa Chica in Mexico. At one point 33% of Mexico was inhabited by African slaves, over time most mixed in the the population. Most people consider themselves to be Mestizo (White and Native only) but genetically, most Mexicans are a combination of Amerindian, African, and European, in different degrees. Most Afro-Mexicans are only considered Negro when they have very dark skin, however the brown/lighter ones are considered to be Mestizo mainly because Mulatto/Negro has a negative stigma attached to it. Memin Pinguin is a great example if this stigma. In addition a significant amount of slaves were originated from Cuba, the Memin Pinguin character is also based on a Afro-Cuban character.