'Oreos', 'Dear White People', Stereotypes, and much, much more

A friend posted this article about a film trying to get funding based on the concept of Black identity by tweets under the title 'Dear White People.' Again and again the author makes the designation that the film is under 'satire.' Because I don't want to comment on whether or not this 'satire' is truly up to snuff, I checked the world's most reliable source (Wikipedia) to refresh my definition of satire:

In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement.^[1] Although satire is usually meant to be funny, its greater purpose is often constructive social criticism, using wit as a weapon.

The trailer, found here, sums up the overall arch of the argument: Black culture in America is stereotyped and white people are the culprits and they deserve to be the victim of satire (see definition mentioning the intent to shame individuals) to prove a point.

Ok.

The article overall has some good key points, namely that mass culture responds to people based on 'personalities in a box' given to people because of race. I can only assume the author excluded gender, sexual orientation, religion, and citizen status because that would take much much longer to address. The problem of singular-minded representation in the media is not just a Black problem, it's gay, hispanic, those with mental illnesses, women, and other minorities as well. I hope the author does not assume that these other minorities and designations do not face as much abuse as the Black community does.

This quote from the article, in my opinion, does not mesh with the trailer:

The truth is, my film really isn't about "white racism" or racism at all. As I see it racism is systemic and is inherently reflected in any honest story about life as a minority in this country. What my film is about however is identity. It's about the difference between how the mass culture responds to a person because of their race and who they understand themselves to truly be.


The trailer, I'm going to admit, was hard to watch. Being lumped in the group targeted for this 'satire' was offensive to me. What I fear this film (and others like it) does to our society is polarize it further along the issues of race. As a white person, I view this trailer and see how it promotes white people as stupid, racist, inconsiderate, and forever wishing to stifle and put down the advancements and developments of Black culture. I am immediately offended and, if I weren't as sensitive and educated about the issues of race and consider myself NOT a racist, I could have a knee-jerk reaction that this is just reverse-racism. One only has to look at the comments on the YouTube page to see the reverse-racism comments (and oh, they abound). I am afraid that the majority of the white community might have that knee-jerk reaction. I can only assume (and forgive me for assuming), that someone in the Black community might watch this and say, "yeah, I hate it when white people do that." Fair enough. The truth is, in this satire (at least from what I could tell in the trailer), white people are made into a singular mindset. Is this not the very thing that the film wants to speak out against?

 The film's trailer has one quote that I feel responds with the above quote. It's in minute 2:00 when a character says that there isn't just one way to being black. This quote, however, comes a minute after (see 0:57) when a younger Black student is essentially told he knows nothing about Black culture. One can only assume that this means the student is regarded as acting 'white.' I've seen this kind of comment in the classroom this past year. When a student has correct grammar and does not seek to disrupt the classroom and asks questions, (and this has happened right before my eyes) he or she is called out for 'acting white.' More specifically the student is called an 'oreo' (black on the outside, white on the inside). One day in class I took nearly half of the time to address this, standing on my soapbox and asserting that one does not 'act' a race, one acts like themselves and the traits given by societal stereotypes only limit an individual. Furthermore, by assuming that good grammar, participation in class and good behavior is 'white,' sells short the abilities and expectations for success for Black students and other racial minorities.

I can only hope that the moment in 0:57 was intended to draw light to the 'oreo' commentary to make it false. I fear it is not.

To look into matters further, I subscribed to the @DearWhitePeople twitter account. Did I find comments that said things white people did to stereotype Black people? No. I found tweets that essentially made fun of white people via stereotypes lumping all white people together. And it seemed the comments should have been further specified as Dear Economically Privileged White People.

All this being said, if the intentions of the trailer (and later on, movie) were to make people think critically, this might be obtained in a small minority of viewers. If the intentions were to paint white society as unilateral simple, racist, insensitive, and oppressive people, it has succeeded. Whether or not this specific commentary will produce the results of promoting Black culture is to be determined, but it does a really good job of turning the tables to lump all white culture into one group to be hated.

Is that the price of promoting a wide range of culture? Putting down another?

Hopefully, when this film is made, I will be proven wrong.

Poetry

In my procrastination of cleaning/packing up my room in Pass Christian, I have, of course, been reading. I'm waist-deep in a biography of William Alexander Percy that my Dad gave me a couple of weeks ago. It's the kind of writing and the kind of book that I am committing my life too- an academic contextual biography. It's both about the ways Percy had to navigate the Southern world and the entire world as a lover of beauty, poetry, and other men when the South had no room for men to love any of those things. It's wonderful. I plan on re-reading Lanterns on the Levee as soon as possible now that I know some of the context for Percy's autobiography. I had no idea, however, about his sexuality and his relationships until this biography. Another thing I did not realize was that Percy was a pretty renowned poet. A lot of his poetry is quoted in the book and it is beautiful.

But that's not entirely the inspiration for this post.

Reading about Percy's poetry has roused my memory of how I used to write poetry. As far back as the 5th grade I can recall keeping a little notebook where I would write. I kept writing quite a bit on up until my senior year of high school. I was the editor of the literary magazine for my high school and the poetry there is pretty much all that survives of my creative writing thanks to Katrina wiping out documentation of my childhood. I suppose some red snapper has snacked on my journals out there in the gulf. Once I got to college, the only poetry I would write would be for my girlfriend and even at that point I had started slacking off. By the time that relationship and my degree were over, I hadn't written anything creative (besides that poetry class I took Senior year and I apologize profusely to the fellow classmates and the professor- I didn't take it seriously and wrote some pretty awful things).

I want to write again though. Poetry is something to me that is both beautiful and frustrating. With poetry I can read the same poem 100 times and feel 100 different things. Each and every word is so calculated and inspires. Reading silently can induce one feeling, but then you read it out loud to yourself (I find myself doing this and feeling silly about it, but it's very soothing) and it seems to be an entirely different poem. I've always heard that if you want to be a writer, you must first and always be a reader. Well, I read plenty, but I can count on one hand the books of poetry I own. I think I don't own more because reading a book of poetry has no closure. You might finish the poems in the book, but that doesn't mean you have absorbed even the slightest of what that book was set out to accomplish. There will never be closure with poetry. I admire that.

I think I might try writing poetry again. It's bound to be awful and it will be hard to get back into that way of thinking and feeling on a page, but I think it'll be good. Especially with grad school coming up, life can't always be about researching history and writing for conferences and classes. There has to be a creative outlet somewhere.

I promise you this though. I will not subject you to my poetry unless I have absolutely been convinced that it is good. Or at least decent. Or that it won't induce vomiting (some of the poems I vaguely remember reading would definitely do so).