From the height of the civil rights movement through the Cold War into a new era of globalization, the United States trumpeted the value of inclusion as central to its democracy. In response to European race riots or ethnic cleansing pogroms, we could invoke our exceptionalism. Yet the reality of race still belied the nation’s image of itself.
When Barack Obama’s candidacy began to gather steam in 2008, some wrote that it was a sign the rancor was finally dissipating. He was greeted as a “Black Joshua” or a “Healer-in-Chief” in the context of an America still divided on issues like affirmative action, immigration, policing, and criminal justice. In his race speech, the candidate said, “I have never been so naive as to believe we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy.” Yet in the afterglow of his historic victory, many declared that the United States had entered a “post-racial” era.
But if the image of 2008 had been Fairey’s HOPE poster, the image of 2009—the year, Pat Buchanan claimed, that had “radicalized much of white America,” the beginning of what some only half-jokingly called the “post-hope” era—was a picture of a Obama whitefaced into Batman’s arch-nemesis, the Joker.6 Someone had photoshopped the president’s visage onto Heath Ledger’s Joker, mottled his eyes black, smeared his lips and dimples bloodred into a gruesome grin. The entire picture was framed by a commie-red border and finished with the accusatory word “SOCIALISM.”
The image had actually been assembled before Obama’s inauguration, but it went viral during the following summer, when organized conservative opposition to his healthcare reform legislation disrupted town-hall meetings across the country. Far-right Tea Party members carried picket signs depicting Obama as an African witch doctor. Redesigned food stamps featuring watermelon and fried chicken buzzed through e-mail and social networks.
The designer of the Obama Joker was a bored Palestinian American college student named Firas Alkhateeb, who during a lull on his Christmas break was sitting in front of his computer with a Time magazine cover of Obama, his Web browser pointed at a Photoshop how-to page. Alkhateeb’s politics were left of Obama. He was a Dennis Kucinich supporter and had not voted in November. He later said he wasn’t trying to make a political statement when he spent several hours that evening designing the image.
He simply posted the image to his Flickr account, and found seven months later that someone had stripped the Time logo and cover lines, added the “Socialism” tag, and wheatpasted posters of it all over Los Angeles, the same streets that had been ground zero for Obama HOPE. Reached by the Los Angeles Times, Alkhateeb fessed up but quickly added, “To accuse him of being a socialist is really … immature. First of all, who said being a socialist is evil?”7
Yet by then the Joker image had gone epidemic. It pressed all of the Obama opposition’s hot buttons. To call Obama the Joker was to uncover all of his pathologies and elevate them into something archetypal. He was psychotically single-minded (his obsession with health-care reform), dismissive of tradition (his callousness toward “guns or religion” Americans), and downright murderous (his alleged support for so-called death panels).
“See, I’m not a monster, I’m just ahead of the curve,” says the Joker to Harvey Dent and Batman in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. “You have all these rules and you think they’ll save you.… The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules.”
“Introduce a little anarchy,” he says. “Upset the established order and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos.”
Tea Partiers understood themselves in that quintessential, paradoxical American way. They saw themselves as rebels, outsiders, nonconformists. But they cast themselves in the role of Batman, a vengeful Old Testament kind of hero endowed with modern wealth, skill, and technology. Through their call to austerity, disinvestment, and civic white flight, they would restore the rightful order. Obama was a screen for their projections, a worthy opponent.
“What would I do without you?” the Joker tells Batman. “You complete me.”
In the 1830s white minstrels had put on blackface, creating space for the white working class to challenge the elite while keeping Blacks locked into their racial place. Obama now appeared as a dual symbol of oppression. Because of his Blackness, he was even more of an outsider—and in that sense, even more American—than them. But he was also the president. His Blackness did not just confer moral and existential claims, it was backed by the power of the state.
And so the summer of 2009 stretched into more absurdity. When, in a press conference, Obama said that the white Cambridge police who had harassed the famous African American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. had “acted stupidly,” he caused a national uproar. Glenn Beck called Obama a “racist” who held a “deep seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”8
Not long after, the Obama administration fired African American official Shirley Sherrod after conservative white blogger Andrew Breitbart accused her of being anti-white in a speech to the NAACP. Sherrod—whose father had been murdered by white racists—was in fact speaking candidly of how she had overcome her own prejudices against whites, and the administration hastily tried to rehire her.
It was then that Obama, who had wanted to be a symbol of reconciliation, seemed to have been restored—by those fearful of a new America—to a symbol of all things Other: he was not just Black, not just the product of miscegenation, he was also a socialist, a Muslim, an illegal alien. Behind the colorized face of hope was the whiteface demon of disorder. The Obama Joker was a lord of misrule, the triumph of the minstrel, in a show played no longer for laughs but for nothing less than the end of their America. Change the joke and revert the yoke.
The Obama Joker image enclosed the sum of all their fears while presenting the picture of confrontation. The image said: skip your empathy, screw your reconciliation, we embrace our victimhood—because a nation is not an unfinished draft in search of its missing words, it’s a game, and only one can win.
V
With Obama’s election in 2008, everything changed. And nothing changed. We have entered a new era in U.S. history. But how do we describe this time?
The divides remain. We live in an era in which the primary social schism is not that between so-called red states and blue states, but between those stuck on monoculturalism and a singular “American way,” and those comfortable with demographic change and cultural difference; those fearful over the great America in danger of being lost forever, and those hopeful about the one being made anew; those stuck in black-and-white, and those living in color. Americans remain overly apocalyptic on the one hand and overly ardent on the other, identity-fatigued and post-racially euphoric.
Cultural desegregation has changed America. We can be seen as a happy rainbow country. Yet all of our social indexes show rising rates of resegregation and inequity. In other words, there is a growing gap between what we see and what we think we see. For these conditions hide in plain view. Even as our image world expands at a profound rate, making us believe that every thing worth seeing is available to us, what sits in our blind spots may be more important than ever.
There is also a growing gap between what we think and what we say. Blindness and denial—personal and systemic—often stop us from speaking at all about race. What Toni Morrison once said of American letters is true for all civil discourse: “[I]n matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled.”9
Almost two decades after Bill Clinton announced that he wanted to begin a national conversation on race, we largely seem to talk about race through shallow media spectacles. We make noisy ritual of rapidly shunting to the dim wings of the image-world celebrities who reveal themselves as bigots. At the same time, illusion, acrimony, exhaustion, indirection, and muteness describe the rest of our all-but-suspended conversation. We know what not to say to each other, but not what to say.
How did we get here? The story is not to be found in the faded glories of the sixties, b
ut in the tumultuous decades that followed, not in the civil rights movement that rendered legal segregation obsolete, but in the story of the grand triumphs and crushing failures of the American multiculturalism movement that grappled with the actual segregation that remained, and in the tumult and ruins and visions of this era after multiculturalism, a history we seem to have forgotten we have forgotten. It is to be found in the flash and the half-light, the din and the silences of the eternal culture wars.
And so, although Obama’s rise provoked this inquiry, Who We Be: The Colorization of America is not really about the man or the politician. It is about what has happened to the ways we see race in this country, how they have changed and how they have not. It is about the questions that have yet to be answered and the new ones that proliferate.
Who We Be spans the last half-century of American image- and idea-makers. It talks about some of their images and ideas, and the words spun around those American images and ideas. It is an admittedly unusual dub history—written to be complementary to, and sometimes intersect with, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop. It cannot be exhaustive, but it can be suggestive.
The book begins at the end of the civil rights movement when the Republicans’ Southern strategy locked into place a politics of racial distancing. It discusses the rise and fall of the multiculturalism movement. It revisits the claims for representation and recognition, the debates about the nature and future of American culture. It examines how multiculturalism’s animating ideas were acknowledged, adopted, and diverted by the market and the state.
The book then moves on to look at how demographic change has impacted American arts, cultural politics, and electoral politics. It asks: Why, after colorization, has racial and cultural inequality remained largely unseen and undiscussed? It asks us to consider the fate of this still emerging cultural majority, and the fate of the nation itself.
“Images transfix,” Susan Sontag once wrote. “Images anesthetize.”10 They focus our attention, and they dissolve it. They reveal things and they hide them. Each image demands a frame, and the act of framing is also the act of discarding. The writing of history can be, in a sense, the curation of images, revealing the struggle over what will be seen within the frame.
I think there is a particular reason we need history, even recent history. In the United States of America, we still tend to begin each conversation about race as if it were new, from a willed presumption of what might be called racial innocence, as if we have lived nothing and learned nothing. We presume race and identity to be fixed, not subject to any past or any future, beyond interpretation and beyond change. For these reasons they reappear time and again as unknowable irritants to a supposedly settled present.
Writing about race in America must always be a labor of recovery and faith and—yes—hope against the spectacle of fear and the twilight of forgetting.
The story of the colorization of America is a story worth telling because, even as it reminds us that only a painful process of illusion-burning can bring us to see things anew, it also suggests our faith in democracy is renewable. And, finally, it is a story that—at least right now—cannot help but have fewer answers than questions. Perhaps in times of massive change like this, the questions, not the answers, are the most important thing.
After the 1992 Los Angeles riots, while the bulbs flashed and the shutters clicked and the questions fired like bullets, Rodney King blinked into the lights, confused. People watched him stutter on television and made fun of him. But for a moment he held his ground like some kind of a savant or prophet.
“Can we all get along?” he asked.
We could not answer then and still cannot now. King’s question reminds us how inarticulate we can be when the subject is race. If race begins as a visual problem, how do we overcome our misrecognitions and blindnesses? How do we move toward recognition, honesty, empathy, and mutuality?
A book or a work of art—culture—cannot by itself change the world, but by asking the questions that matter, it might attempt to be an act of articulation against violence, both the brutal and the casual kinds. It might aspire to starting a conversation through which together we might find common meaning, and words that free.
Jeff Chang
Berkeley, CA; Stanford, CA; and Provincetown, MA
2006–2014
Let the nation and the world know the meaning of our numbers.
—A. Philip Randolph, The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
PART ONE
A NEW CULTURE
1963–1979
Morrie Turner at his South Berkeley studios 2009. Photo by B+ for mochilla.com.
CHAPTER 1
RAINBOW POWER
MORRIE TURNER AND THE KIDS
For all life seen from the hole of invisibility is absurd.
—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
The night of Barack Obama’s presidential victory in 2008, the eighty-six-year-old cartoonist Bil Keane called his old friend Morrie Turner, a sprightly eighty-four years old himself. Turner was working on his strip Wee Pals in the office of his tiny bungalow in South Berkeley, leaning over his woodgrain, worn Leitz drafting desk, tracing and embellishing the pencil outlines in India ink on Bristol board. A Law & Order rerun played on his tiny black-and-white television, unwatched. For Turner these were familiar rhythms, warm comfort. At that moment the last thing he wanted to see or hear was the news.
Keane’s strip, Family Circus, had launched in 1960, the year before Obama was born. Daily he drew the antics of his suburban children in a single round panel, each installment like a portrait-miniature of white boomer wonder years. Five years later, days before Malcolm X was assassinated, months before the Voting Rights Act was signed and Watts burned, his friend’s strip Wee Pals debuted. Its launch made Morrie Turner the first nationally syndicated African American cartoonist. Turner’s strip presented an urban, multiracial group of kids figuring out how to get along. Nothing like it had ever been seen on the funny pages.
Keane and Turner had formed their close bond as pacifist World War II vets on a USO trip to Vietnam in 1967. Keane would introduce a Black boy named Morrie into Family Circus at about the same time Charles Schulz added Franklin to Peanuts.1 Both were tributes to Turner and, in the context of the comics, small acts of desegregation. Then Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Cities were on fire. Blackness was suddenly in demand. Wee Pals went from six newspapers to more than a hundred. For Turner, success was bittersweet. Privately, he would say that it was guilt that got him into the papers.
The hopeful children of Wee Pals belonged to a gentler universe. They were a vision of a post-segregated American future that still seemed so far away. So even in the worst of times Turner would labor on, certain that it was the country that needed to come around to his kids’ world, not the other way around. Was Obama’s candidacy a sign that that day was finally coming to pass? People had begun using a strange word—“post-racial.” Did it mean racism was over? Or just images of racism? Was the word just another form of denial?
Turner had told friends he was happy that Barack Obama was running, but he was terrified Obama would be killed while trying. And now on election night he was sure a Black man, even this one, had zero chance of becoming president. His friends had invited him to election-watching parties. Morrie declined them all. Work was a shield against despair. The night would end. The campaign would be over. The kids would go on.
But at 8:00 p.m., when the polls at the seniors’ center around the corner closed and the festive whoops on the block began, Turner’s phone rang. It would ring all night. Old friends wanted to share the breathlessness of the moment. Into the bright streets people were swarming, delirious with music and the suddenly cantering rhythms of history. There still were not the words for all the new images.
Bil Keane had called his old friend with congratulations. Through Wee Pals, Keane told Turner, he had helped set America on a path to this historic moment. Turner tried to find the words to re
ply. Finally, he said to Keane that it was only the second time in his life he had ever felt like an American. Keane was about to ask Turner what he meant, but he stopped.
He heard Turner sobbing.
THE ANIMALS AND THE KIDS
Like many other forms of American pop culture, comics arose partly from a potent brew of racial fascination, temptation, and debasement. In 1895, two decades before D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, Richard Outcault’s Yellow Kid became the first broadly popular cartoon character. The invention of the Kid probably owed something to Charles Saalburg’s Ting-Ling Kids, who had debuted in color a few months before the Yellow Kid’s first appearance. The Ting-Lings were “Chinese” only in the way blackface minstrelsy was “Negro.”
As the cartoon scholar Christopher P. Lehman put it, the funnies relied on caricature and ridicule.2 For Blacks in the late nineteenth century and most of the twentieth, that meant the antic humiliation of slaves, mammies, and Sambos; for Chinese, the exploitation of alienness. Cartoon Blacks and Chinese were not representations of blackness and yellowness. They were representations of whiteness—the laughs were found in what whites were not. Once real Chinese were legally estranged by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, cartoonists could tame the strangeness left behind, transform the “yellow peril” into a Yellow Kid.
Outcault drew his boy with huge ears, buck teeth, and a big yellow nightie. The result seemed a refined Ting-Ling, a simplified Chinaman. Unlike the silk suits, the Yellow Kid’s taut garment—which, because the boy also wore a pretty, vacant smile, doubled as a thought balloon—needed little detail. The shaved head3 eliminated the mandarin hat and the Manchu queue. Slant eyes were replaced by round blues.
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