Racism, Anti-Racism and its modes
This article is about fashions in Racism, and why they exist. As noted in our previous foundational article laying out our working definitions of Racism
The main difference between Racism and other isms around that attempt to describe reality, is that Racism was not actually conceived in a desire to describe reality, but instead to maintain an order of reality that put some people in charge and others subservient. As such Racism could be pragmatic in choosing beliefs about the various races, and constructing narratives that proved efficient and salable, much like astrology, a belief system that often attempts to don a pseudoscientific disguise and with such a disguise catch the easily misled and naive.
Because Racism does not actually have a real basis to it, it mutates and remakes itself — while still staying true to its central mission, in this way it is more like that other ever-mutating, self-reinventing field of human endeavor — Fashion.
And if Racism as a field of study could be best understood as a form of fashion, that is to say involved in trying to sell something and gain followers, then anti-Racism in trying to respond to shifting fashions of Racism must also seem very bound by its times.
In short just as trends in clothing can fall out of fashion, then trends in Racism and those that oppose it can suffer the same fate.
There’s a funny difference though, between how the things that are Racist fall out of fashion in Racism and the things that are Anti-Racist fall out of fashion in Anti-Racism.
The things that fall out of fashion in Racism do so because they are unbelievable, cons that nobody is stupid enough to fall for any more, and that if trotted out might call the whole project into question among those targeted for conversion.
The no longer fashionable bits of Racism while not for public consumption may still be quite tenderly viewed among the historically minded. Even skinheads would probably cringe and wince a bit at Bill “Bojangles” Robinson dancing with Shirley Temple but the nostalgic Racist might long for a time when that was the style.
The no longer fashionable bit of Racism is put in storage in case that cut may come back in style again.
It is however of note that the things that fall out of fashion in Anti-Racism do so because they have come to be thought of as Racist in turn.
Robinson started out working in black productions, for much of his career that’s what he did.
An interesting aspect of the black productions of the time, they used blackface. Blackface, according to Wikipedia, is “the practice of non-black performers using burnt cork or theatrical makeup to portray a caricature of black people on stage or in entertainment.”
This however is obviously that special form of incorrectness known as incomplete, because black theatrical productions of the late 19th and early 20th century used blackface as well.
James Dormon has said that they were “blacks playing whites playing blacks,” but really it was not quite that meta, and often they were just blacks playing blacks.
I would argue blackface in a black production served the same Racist agenda as blackface in a white production; think about it, how would a Racist feel to go to enjoy a nice show with light skinned black people in it, the one-drop rule essentially. meant you could see people that were black that you wouldn’t know were black unless you knew they were black — blackface provides that very important bit of knowledge.
But aside from that blackface as a costume of blackness makes everybody look the same, as Ernest Hogan’s popular all-black show “All Coons Look Alike To Me” promised
Nowadays if you had black people wearing blackface what would the Racists think? I suspect they would hate it and think it was a big put on, there would be no logical connection to any current expression of the mission of Racism.
Blackface on blacks — once a commonplace in a much more Racist time has fallen so far out of fashion that someone contemplating it must just go “WTF”, slap palm to forehead, and move on shaking their head — similar to what happens when examining fashionable Men’s codpieces from the 16th century
Bill Robinson started out working in black theatrical productions, for much of his career that’s what he did. But he never wore blackface. Generally from what we see in the black movies he did before the later white movies he was slick and cool, a hustler, a trickster.
I appreciate that.
Here is one of those movies — King For A Day
In which a tap dancer uses his prowess at playing craps to take over a threatrical production for one day, so he has something he can star in. That’s the story of my life, folks.
This movie includes some scenes in it of the production showing the actors wearing blackface, as they would have done in a real “coon show”.
These are the kinds of things Bill Robinson was doing before he started doing movies for and with white folks, in which movies he played someone subservient to white folks, an “Uncle Tom” figure (quotes because quoting what other people describe it as, being a misanthropic cynic I describe it as a man getting work in a Racist society). I don’t think at the time there was any movie where a black man could play someone non-subservient, probably some folks opted out of playing in movies with white people for that very reason.
From outsider on the top to insider on the bottom — back then that was pretty much the only game in town if you wanted to get anywhere.
Both of these types of roles were fraught with their own racial problems, he dressed nice, but he certainly didn’t abide by W.E.B Du Bois’ dictum that
A rising race must be aristocratic; the good cannot consort with the bad.
Here is an anti-racist statement that has all sorts of problems with it from a modern perspective.
You can’t really accuse Du Bois of Racism and it seems problematic to accuse him of even the lower-case racism here but it does seem strange that white people can move cross country with their belongings packed inside garbage bags and decree that black people have to shell out for fancy luggage and look elegant while doing it (obviously an example growing out of the expression as a memetic barnacle on the hull of a fucked up idea).
From within the race, as Du Bois is, one is allowed to make these statements as to in which way the ship of Race should be navigated and accoutred.
From without the race it would be a hell of thing to say, a requirement that black people had to cohere to a particular standard in order to not make themselves seem lesser to the other races. The black race is rising, the other races have already risen, the rising race must present a good front for the approval of the risen race which can do as it damn well pleases. It sure is a hell of a thing.
And abstracted, as a statement made without the context of the speaker’s ‘race’ it seems to fall more on the side of problematic than not. Because of course we understand that race does not actually exist as a scientifically definable classification, so it should be said that as a statement made without the context of the speaker’s ethnicity it is pretty problematic, but even with an ethnicity that would place them within the group that was being lectured to it still seems problematic, because it accepts the ideas of Race established by Racism.
This idea of the rising race essentially argues that to defeat Racism one must accept the claims Racism makes regarding what is worthwhile and what not, and then disprove those claims by showing the opposite. Now that’s dancing to a tune.
But enough about all that, I’m getting on a side-track. The fashionable changing of anti-racism to Racism we are concerned with is not Robinson shifting from the slick good looking hustler to something more pleasing to a white audience, or the changing meaning of Du Bois’ probably least quotable quote, no I’m talking about that great work of anti-racism at the beginning of this article, that no longer seems so pure and inarguably good
I guess everyone is familiar with the discussions around the book
In a Washington State School District it was decided to drop requiring To Kill a Mockingbird, essentially due to the feeling that the book dealt in a number of racist tropes, at the same time as allowing Racist behavior disguised as engaging in anti-Racist behavior.
Relevant Quotes -
One Black teen said the book misrepresented him and other African Americans..
and
Another complained the novel did not move her, because it wasn’t written about her — or for her.
and
A third spoke about how a White teen said the n-word aloud while reading from “Mockingbird,” disobeying the teacher’s instructions to skip the slur, the student recalled in an interview with The Post. She spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear of harassment.
“The kid looked at every Black person — there’s three Black people in that class — and smiled,”
The teachers then issued a book challenge to remove it from their curriculum
“To Kill A Mockingbird centers on whiteness,” the teachers wrote in their challenge, adding that “it presents a barrier to understanding and celebrating an authentic Black point of view in Civil Rights era literature and should be removed.”
In other words from the perspective of these people To Kill a Mockingbird was Racist (not even racist) but full blooded upper-case Racist, working on a Racist agenda and spreading its virus by encouraging Racism in its readers.
There are other responses in the article from people who find this view horrifying, and it sure must suck to have grown up reading a book, feeling it’s message affect you, feeling morally better for reading it and agreeing with it, loving the book and believing it to be one that would last forever because of its goodness and quality, and then decades later finding the tides of fashion have changed and what you are committed to understanding as being one thing is now considered the complete opposite by the upcoming generation.
Sure is worse than finding out your kids like Rebzyyx’ mix of hyperpop and emo. Your kids are learning a book you love is Racist! That means your kids are learning you are Racist! How much sharper than a serpent’s tooth are the changes in fashion of anti-Racism.
Boomers and older Gen X’ers might remember the fights over this book, exemplified from the following quote from Jet Magazine 1967– 20 Apr, page 24:
Protest School’s Use Of ‘Mockingbird’ Novel
A couple in Herwinton, Conn., protested to the school board there that their eighth grade daughter should not be required to read the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Mr. and Mrs. Harold Humphrey called the book too “filthy” for their daughter Nancy.
I wonder what Nancy thinks of the current situation, assuming she is still alive of course.
I obviously don’t know, but it seems to me clear from context that the family that are against the teaching of To Kill a Mockingbird are White — and that Jet seems to be on the side of the school board that resolved to keep teaching the book.
A lot of people are mainly aware of the film adaption -
Some important things to consider from that write up
It gained overwhelmingly positive reception from both the critics and the public; a box-office success, it earned more than six times its budget. The film won three Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Peck, and was nominated for eight, including Best Picture.
and
In 1995, the film was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. In 2003, the American Film Institute named Atticus Finch the greatest movie hero of the 20th century. In 2007, the film ranked twenty-fifth on the AFI’s 10th anniversary list of the greatest American movies of all time. In 2020, the British Film Institute included it in their list of the 50 films you should see by the age of 15.[3] The film was restored and released on Blu-ray and DVD in 2012, as part of the 100th anniversary of Universal Pictures.[4]
In 1963 Jet magazine considered it a Movie of The Week
Jet also looked back in January of 1970 on the history of anti-racism in Hollywood in the 1960s:
Veteran Hollywood writer Bob Thomas:…the matter of race, which “had received only occa- sional treatment in American films until the 1960s,” was a dominant issue in the decade, he added. A Raisin In The Sun (1960), depicting an urban black family; To Kill A Mockingbird, dealing with racial intolerance in the South, were cited as examples.
It just makes me laugh the earnestness with which people worked on this film, thinking they were doing a good thing, and were rewarded with moral accolades for decades afterwards, just to end up having it all called into question at the tip of anti-Racism’s fashion.
All this certainly makes my personal decision to be an immoral reprobate all my life seem like the smart way to fly.
Now, I sort of think the praise from Jet is somewhat restrained. And I haven’t really been able to find anything from Black intellectuals during the 60s and 70s (although I’m sure it must exist, just that Google sucks for finding information). Like, maybe, black people at the time thought the book had been written not for them, and did not have them in it in any meaningful way — but that the book (and movie) worked to make white people more moral.
But if that were the case I’m not sure they would have put it in as a movie of the week, which presumably that was aimed at their readership. Surely Jet also had readers that were white, but probably the white readership did not need moral instruction to the same level as the general culture. So, this movie of the week review, makes me think that at the time the general black population thought the book and movie were anti-Racist and worthy of praise.
Also, it should be noted, the publisher of To Kill A Mockingbird — who obviously have some interest in making sales — thought that the Black market would be interested in buying their book, and it showed up in a list of books in ads placed in such publications as Ebony and Negro Digest in the 1960s
So — I sort of think based on these things that the school board in Washington State is incorrect when they say
“it presents a barrier to understanding and celebrating an authentic Black point of view in Civil Rights era literature and should be removed.”
It seems really like it might be something that is needed to understand the Black point of view in that era.
At the very least what that Black point of view was in relation to white media and their white liberal allies.
Since we talked a lot about Bill Robinson earlier a man who probably never was thought of as producing anything of an elevated moral nature — although from the viewpoint of Illuminati Ganga as an organization great artists such as Mr. Robinson by producing their work are performing a moral act — I’d like to put another little thing I found in Jet from 1962
Estelle Evans, who couldn’t get enough work as an actress (or maybe enough work she felt comfortable doing) signed up to work as the maid in To Kill A Mockingbird. Her previous work as an actress was evidently 14 years prior. In 1969 she won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actress in a Motion Picture The Learning Tree, which I mean — would she have been able to do that work without To Kill A Mockingbird? It doesn’t look like it to me, 14 years is a long time.
I bet she thought she was doing something good, but the fashions have changed and she was deluded. Down the memory hole!
I probably sound like I’m on the side of To Kill A Mockingbird here, I’m not particularly — but I do feel bad for people who maybe thought they were good and now have to hear no you were bad. Luckily a thing that I, having always been bad, have never had to endure.
What I am on the side of is people maybe being able to understand that Racism isn’t like other isms — as was discussed in the earlier article.
Yes, Racism isn’t like other isms, there is no hard center to it, it moves around and adapts to achieve its purpose. If the economy somehow changed to be dependent on how much social media attention one had, Capitalism would not change to be about social media, it would just fade away as an operative model of economic reality, because Capitalism has the hard center to it, but if it were shown tomorrow that there was an accurate measure of intelligence and that Black people were significantly smarter than White people (taking into consideration the two types of people that are often considered central in Racist thought) then Racism would switch around immediately to declaring intelligence a demonstration of the moral weakness of the inferior Race.
Racism has goals, it does not have ideas in the same way that most other isms do.
And that’s what I want people to understand, because until they do, we will always have the fashion changing on us, and be left looking rather ridiculous wearing previous decades’ moral designs, and pointing at the poor old folks who don’t know what the new style is.
This article was written by IG Agents 84 and 6, with input from IG Agent 19 regarding art of Bill Robinson.
NOTE: for the purpose of this article Racism is, as should be apparent by now as we are at the end, only focused on White Racism directed against Blacks, we will write in other articles about other forms of Racism and how these relate to the idea of Systemic Racism.
