I do not know if the hateful reactions by the White Right and the Conservative online media to Quentin Tarantino and Jamie Foxx's slavery revenge fantasy film is because they were suckered in by the latter's baiting them, but I am most definitely going to be seeing Django on Christmas Eve as an act of "protest."
Call me a sucker, any film that enrages conservative bigots who are overly identified with the Southern Slaveocracy, as well as tales of White Oppression and Victimology, has my ten bucks.
Newsbuster's first post on Django, and Jamie Foxx's call for a "race war" against white people, received more than 3,000 comments from White Nationalists and their Republican brethren. Newsbuster's follow up post received about 350 or so comments. Among them was an exhalation of white victimhood which is quoted at the end of this post.
I try to work through people's observations about social reality in a fair way. I sincerely want to understand the priors which drive individuals to their conclusions, as well as the cognitive map and related cues which they use to understand empirical reality.
I am at a loss in regards to Dominoe4's understanding of modern history. Help me understand. What are his priors? What texts are he, and those similarly inclined, using as foundations for their understanding of reality? What are the decision rules driving Dominoe4's understanding of white suffering?
I must admit, I do find a reference to the Barbary Pirates as an example of "white oppression" very compelling and darkly comic.
A question. Is the collective conscious which Dominoe4 is channeling via his relationship to the White Right inordinately preoccupied with the Yellow Peril, opium dens, and white slavery circa the 19th century?
I am intrigued, and simultaneously worried about how the moral panics of the 19th and early 20th centuries still loom in the imaginations of the White Right and "polite" conservatives. This cannot end well. Historically, the "race" concept, racism, and rumor, have never played well together. Moreover, the Right-wing echo chamber with its epistemic closure is one hell of a drug. The reactions to Django by the Drudge Report and others is proof of this fact.
Tie these examples together if you would. Is there any way to make any reasonable sense of Dominoe4's understanding of history? What is the metanarrative at work here?
.
.
.
Dominoe4
Some funny sh*t that's happened to white people;
- The Irish famine.
- The bombing of Pearl Harbor.
- 9/11
- The muslim invasion of Europe.
- The black plague (can I say that...is it racist?)
- Communism
- The Holocaust
- The Mongol hordes enter southern Europe.
- South African farmers massacred
- The LA Riots.
- Illegal immigration
- The Barbary Pirates
- WW I
- WW II
- Millions of individual hate crimes committed by black perps on white Americans.
- The Depression.
- The election of a marxist, fraud with minimal intelligence or desire to work, but big on divisiveness and unlimited authority.
7 comments:
tl;dr White people are not responsible for doing anything that would end up hurting them or causing others to retaliate against them.
Alternatively, maybe he's smarter than I give him credit for. Maybe, by pointing out things that are obviously not caused by racism, he's trying to make the point that people of color who claim that their history and lives are shaped by racism are exaggerating and being irrational. It's possible, but I doubt it.
Django could be a crappy film. It could be a great film. I won't know until I see it. I do know that white conservatives/racists, and to a lesser whites in general tend to avoid films which show blacks as heroes, let alone blacks standing up to or killing white people.
Along with the extermination of the First Peoples, slavery is the Original Sin of the US. So it's never been truly dealt with.
The extreme right-winger open racist is at least honest that they think slavery was a-ok. The slightly less openly racist right-winger can't quite say that but has to find ways to signal those feelings.
Thus all the revisionist history about the Civil War or the constant refrain of "other people did it too" about slavery.
The idea that sometimes the black guy can be the good guy, get the cool lines, save the girl, kill the baddies and ride out of town is something that is EXTREMELY rare in American films. I don't know that all that happens in Django. But we shall see.
It's interesting to see the checklist of white victimhood described by the commenter. With the exception of the massacre of South African farmers, in which race played a role, the entire list is 'things that happened to everybody including white people'. Oh, and the Potato Famine, because back then the Irish weren't white.
I think the thesis here is white folk are the default victims of any situation in which at least several white persons are made to suffer, regardless of additional suffering by other races.
Obviously the commenter is unaware that Cuba Gooding was there for Pearl Harbor.
@Senor. Is there a one white person suffered rule means that all white people are oppressed rubric at work here?
@Cavoyo. I think you are being too generous. But who knows?
Chauncey,
I had no idea about Django until I read your post! Thank you. I'm a TVless brotha, so sometimes I'm out the loop. But when I become a famous blogger I'm gone ask my readers to get me a flatscreen plasma TV with a tropical fist tank connected to it and some sort of space and time continuum sliding glass window so I can get Harold's chicken free and on demand! Just kidding, I understand the work you put in, so I'm aint hate n, no more. But on the real I think you should call on Black people every where to go see Django on Christmas Eve! People will think the Mayan Calendar was off by three days! White folks will be in a nation wide panic. Not even Al Sharpton hair jell will be able to calm things down smoooooth things over. The sad thing is that President Obama will denounce you as an "outside agitator" stirring up trouble and will have to give the banks a 10 trillion dollar stimulus to calm the markets down and make sure credit doesn't "dry up"
@Senor Tripp. Apologies for not figuring out the name at first. Send a brother an email if you want to chat for the podcast series. Rise Again is great stuff. As a ghetto nerd I remain on top of the zombie game as best I can.
Post a Comment