| OH MY GOD. This Sandra Bullock thing is too weird. I know US exceptionalism is wrong, but this story literally could only happen here. This story manages to expose almost every element of white people's craziness. Okay, the one-run-on-sentence summary: Sandra Bullock, a non-Jewish white woman, who won an Oscar for being a movie where she is a white savior to a black child, while married to a sorta-white supremacist, adopted a black child from New Orleans, a city that's black population was and continues to be abandoned by the US government and together they gave him a bris (a Jewish religious ceremony). Wow, that's a lot of crazy. It's also a really good opportunity for white people who see that racism is a complicated interwoven system to talk about it with people. If you pick even one part of the sentence above and go deeper with it, you can take things out of the realm of celebrity drama into a public reflection on what it means to be white in the US.
Okay, I want to hash out what I mean after the jump.. |
Let's deconstruct my run-on sentence.
"Sandra Bullock, a non-Jewish white woman, who won an Oscar for being a movie where she is for being a white savior to a black child..." WHITE SAVIORS White saviors are common in popular white-created/led art, religion and activism. To quote an African American writer, "the White Savior is there to show us poor, misguided minorities that we can read and dream and reach for the stars because, darn it, poor minorities are people too! All we need is some nice white person who’s a rebel or an unorthodox thinker or a grumpy old man, such as Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino. Well, if cinema is any indication, the poor minorities would perish were it not for the White Savior." This racism is often unexamined and unconscious. ...while married to a sorta-white supremacist... OVERT RACISM
Overt racism is "intentional and/or obvious harmful attitudes or behaviors towards another minority individual or group because of the color of his/her skin." With a taste for Neo-nazi garb, being deeply ingrained in biker culture (with it's ties to skinhead gangs), and his father coming out to say that Jesse has had a fascination with Nazis since childhood, Jesse James represents the more dominant understanding of racism/white supremacy in the United States. It's also the type of racism that is really easy for white people to separate themselves form.
"...adopted a black child from New Orleans, a city that's black population was and continues to be abandoned by the US government" INSTITUTIONAL RACISM
"Institutional racism is the differential access to the goods, services, and opportunities of society." It's no secret that the US government failed to construct a sound levee system that would protect New Orleans. The US government was unprepared and shockingly slow to deal with the direct aftermaths of the storm. Years later, public schools are still in disarray, hospitals are unopened and black community institutions and black access to capital remain in a sad state. These are examples of our institutions that failed for a very particular group of people, meaning that "community advocates estimate almost 20,000 people, all Black and low-income, remain displaced and separated from their communities." There's only so long you can call all of those things coincidences. And as far as Sandra Bullock's adaption, while we should be happy at an adapted parent's joy for a new child, we need to acknowledge that the baby's biological parents faced huge institutional barriers to raising their child in New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina. "...together they gave him a BRIS. A BRIS WITH A MOHEL... "
CULTURAL APPROPRIATION Cultural appropriation is the adoption of some specific elements of one culture by a different cultural group- usually a dominate group picking and choosing from a minority group's culture and devaluing it when its out of context. Okay, circumcision is one thing, but a bris is one of the most sacred traditions in Judaism. Taking it from its Jewish space feels yucky. I wouldn't get baptized because I thought it looked interesting and I like swimming. I didn't even add in the part where Sandra said she had no idea that her husband had a Nazi fetish, mostly because it wouldn't fit in the sentence. The point is, you're obsessed with gossiping about celebrities, just like everyone else. Let's hold up a mirror to ourselves and our communities, by supplementing our mindless chatter with some good analysis on whiteness, institutional racism and cultural appropriation. |
