Tuesday, 25 September 2012

Shorter Ann Althouse: Racists can't be racist because they love their racism.

So some of Scott Brown's staffers were caught tomahawk-chopping while war-whooping, which is absolutely not a traditional means of representing Native Americans as tomahawk-chopping, war-whooping, nothing-noble-about-them savages. There's no history of American cinema in which Native Americans were a violent bulwark against the tide of civilizing white men eager to manifest their destiny. There's no history of American literature in which Native Americans played the roles of "Captor #1" and "Captor #2" and let's just call them "Tribe of Captors" in popular captivity narratives that identified war-whooping with lady-taking and child-killing. None of that is real because Ann Althouse said so:

Someone doing the "tomahawk chop" is himself playing the role of Indian. This Indian character making a stereotypical gesture can't be read as expressing hostility toward Indians. The Indian is his hero.

See? "The Indian is his hero." Whose hero exactly? According to Althouse anyone doing the tomahawk chop. Which means that she believes that performing a racially offensive can't be considered racist because the performance itself is necessarily an act of loving emulation. For example, if one of Scott Brown's white staffers were to create a television show called

It couldn't be considered racist by definition because its use of the stereotypical Chinese immigrant is evidence of that this white staffer considers Chin-Kee to be "his hero." In all seriousness, Althouse's problem is that she's so ignorant that she doesn't realize that the stereotype of Native Americans that Brown's staffers invoke isn't historically accurate, which is why she can claim, straight-faced, that "these fake Indians, the staffers, are pretending to be real Indians," when in actuality they're pretending to be racist stereotypes of Native Americans.

One day I will wake up in a world in which "Ann Althouse" is revealed to be the work of an art collective trying to win a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for the Longest Sustained  Installation of  a Person Who Couldn't Possibly Exist. I pray that day comes soon.

In the meantime go read my other post. It'll cleanse this stupid clear off your palate.

Sep 25, 2012 6:09:58 PM | American Born Chinese, Comics, Gene Yang, Politics, Race, Visual Rhetoric

1 Comment

Ruth Ellis

I'm still praying for the following to go away or dissapear from the different media outlets: Sarah Palin and her entire brood, Michelle Bachman, Rick Santorum, All the Pastors that teach Prosperity theology, Rush Limbaugh ( I don't know who has been in my prayers the longest Rush or Pat Robinson). Do not fret will add this one to the list.

Posted by: Ruth Ellis | Tuesday, 25 September 2012 at 08:16 PM

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
Game of Thrones: "Winter Is Coming" for Catelyn and Jon Snow (This is another one of those visual rhetoric posts that's born of this upcoming course ... which now has its own website that's only a demo at the moment so don't judge.) To recap: in the first post, I demonstrated how Van Patten turned Will into a sympathetic character. In the second post, I established that the scenes in Winterfell that weren't in the novel were designed to establish a perspective on Will's coming execution that's focalized through Bran, but which also introduces the audience to the larger Stark family dynamics. (I also, as Julia Grey pointed out, inadvertantly indicated how Arya's character would develop over the course of the season. I'll let Julia's analysis carry the weight of that interpretative thread for now and return to it when it comes to fore later.) Before I can yoke those arguments together, though, it would behoove us to see what happens when Bran steps off-stage, as it were, beginning with the announcement of Will's capture: Those smiles are residual: for one of the only time in the series, Ned and Catelyn have watched Arya and Bran engaging in what we might call "play." She hits his target and he's encouraged by his brothers, bastard and true, as well as his parents, to take off after her: There's levity to this scene, from the shocked faces in the medium shot of the first frame to Arya's mocking curtsy in the long shot of the second, but Van Patten has other intentions here: Bran needs to look fast and agile, and Van Patten establishes this by how he reverses the camera. In the first frame, Bran stands motionless in a medium shot; in the second, Arya curtsies in a long shot that seems longer because the level of framing makes her look smaller by leaving the top-third of the frame open, in the sense that her head doesn't occupy it. The fact that it's not only occupied, but stuffed full of objects-which-are-not-Arya further diminishes her. In the third, the level of framing shifts slightly down—which you can measure by the line on the pig or the distance between the head of the man on the right and the top of the frame—as Bran begins giving chase to his sister. His head barely turns in that frame before Van Patten cuts quickly to the fourth frame of the happy couple observing their children frolic, but then the camera reverses and Bran's halfway up the stable fence. That's significant: in the third frame he'd barely turned, merely tousling his hair, and still occupied the same plane in the mise-en-scene as Jon and Robb; by the fifth frame, Bran's traversed the distance between Jon and Robb and Arya during a half-second cutaway to Ned and Catelyn. He's moved to and mounted the fence so quickly that his older brothers, though stationary and clear enough to be seen visibly laughing, have become victims of the shallow focus that Bran's speed has necessitated. Because Bran is fast and...
PREVIOUS POST
Inside baseball. (This is some seriously tedious material. I only wrote it so I wouldn't ever have to write anything about it again. More interesting material also published on 28 September 2012 can found here.) As some of you may remember, back in 2006 myself and others were subjected to a comment and email campaign of unhinged rage from someone who claimed to be a better philosopher than everybody else. Steps were taken, by many, to stop this person. The difference between the steps others took and the ones I did had to do with the fact that he'd threatened my wife's life, on multiple occasions, and lived around the corner from me.* It was not cool. In late 2009 or early 2010 I began to receive similarly unhinged emails from someone claiming to be "Jeff" from "proteinwisdom.com." I asked this person to stop sending me emails. He did not. After this persisted, instead of repeating the annoying trials of 2006, I simply had a friend, a former grad student with a law degree, send Jeff Goldstein a cease-and-desist letter. I sent it to the address he'd provided me when he wanted me to send him a free book. For the purpose of verification, that address looks like this: 5*** P****** C***** F******** C* 8****. I hope that establishes I sent the letter to the correct place without actually revealing the actual address, as I'm not the sort of person who posts private emails or home addresses or cell-phone numbers on the Internet. (All of which has been done to me, including quite recently by you-know-who.) The vile emails continued for another week or two, then stopped. I assumed that the cease-and-desist letter had taken awhile to arrive but had finally done its job, and given that I didn't want to have anything else to do with Goldstein, I considered the matter settled. I did, however, make a mistake in mentioning that I'd sent this letter to Patrick Frey without explicitly indicating that I'd rather it remain private. And I wanted it remain private with good reason: the harassment had stopped and I didn't want it to resume. For reasons unclear to me, Goldstein claims not have been the one harassing me or the person who stopped harassing me after I sent the letter. That's just a big coincidence. As I have no evidence to the contrary, I suppose I'll just have to take his word for it. There is evidence that someone sent emails to Jeff using my name at this time, and those of you who know me and can recognize my style can judge for yourself whether I wrote this email from an account I don't have. (Those of you with whom I've corresponded can search your emails and see if I've ever sent you anything from a non-Gmail or non-UCI account. You'll see that I haven't.) Here's the thing: now Jeff demands to see the emails that I never publicly claimed he sent. But I don't have them...

Scott Eric Kaufman

The Typepad Team

Search

Become a Fan

My Other Accounts

Recent Comments