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Dean's argument about race was that it should be seen through the eye's of white people. That racism was a problem that white people suffer. If you have seen Monster's Ball, Bagger Vance or that navy seal movie with Cuba Gooding and Robert DeNiro, you get an idea of what I'm talking about. Both of those movies are about how white people suffer from racism. They make white people feel good -- and celebrate themselves -- for not being racist without asking them to do anything more -- without asking them to make any short term sacrifices so that society can have a long term gain.
In Monster's Ball you have two characters, on white and one black. The white character gets the character arc. The black chacter starts at the bottom, and just keeps going down (in fact, in some ways, this movie takes a little sadistic pleasure in brutalizing this character without rewarding her for her suffering at all). She's a bad mother because she can't get her son to stop eating candy. Her son dies. And then her economic situation gets worse. Thornton's character fucks her (which plays off a couple stereotypes about black women being all about the id and being sexually available to white men). At the end of the movie, Thornton, who started off as a big time racist, makes a big change in his personality: he likes chocolate ice cream. That's the actual metaphor they use in the movie. He has a taste for brown. Wow. That's quite a realization. That's quite a personal revelation born of a huge test of character. Not.
The navy seeal movie is the same. Gooding is always good in that movie. He's Billy Bud. He has no character arc. DeNiro is an asshole, but going through the process of deciding that you don't hate black people irrationally is some huge thing that we're suppsed to pay $8.50 to see, and then feel like we've really gone on an emotional journey by the end.
Look, I'm willing to accept in the first five minutes of any movie that anyone who hates black people irrationally needs to get smacked down. I don't want to watch a whole a movie where realizing you're a racist is supposed to be the enitire plot of the movie and I'm supposed to like thet racist at the end. Racism is not just about how black people make white people feel about themselves. It's about the black experience of America and about things in society that actually operate to screw black people. I want to see movies where the black character goes through the arc and we either see how things need to change and we're happy that they do or we're pissed off that they don't.
In many Hollywood movies about race in the last four years, we give white people a pat on the back because they're willing to share the world with black people. But that's enough. We don't see in Hollywood movies about how we have to change policies to make a difference for Black America.
To me, a movie like Monster's Ball replaces economic slavery with emotional slavery. It says to black people, you may no longer exist to give me free labor which makes me wealthier. But you are here to give me emotions (no matter how inconsequential and self-induldgent) that make me feel better about myself without me actually having to do anything significant that makes your life better.
Now, I seriously think Dean's campaign was deliberately trying to use this mood about race in America to get white liberal votes (I'm sure many white liberals thought Monster's Ball was a thoughtful argument about race), and also to reassure whaite racists that he wasn't going to ask much of them (or not exactly people who would call themselves racists -- but people who identify with the Thornton and DeNiro characters in those movies -- white people who are willing to admit to themselves that they clutch their purses a little tighter when they're on the elevator alone with a black man and who don't, deep down, think it's right that their white son might bet bumped out of a place at Harvard by the daughter of a black woman).
I listened to Dean's speach about race on the stump and in one of his conference calls. It was always the same. He made his statement about being the only person who talked to white audiences about race, and then he told his story about the anti-white male gender discrimination in his office.
That anecdote and analogy were very subtle. Break it down: first, he sets up this idea that there are two kinds of Democratic audiences, the white and the black audience. So he's pushing Ameirca into two worlds. All the white liberals listening probably immediately think he's talking to them as a white audience when he's saying that. You look at your skin, see it's white, and feel, OK, this is the white audience. Then he goes into the analogy about the woman in his office only hiring women, and how that was bad and he told her to hire a man.
OK. that's has got to be very reassuring for all the white men out there in his audience. Dean has just told them all that he is looking out for them and has a record of doing so. He's saying, Hey, I'm on your side. If this PC stuff has gone too far, I'm going to make sure that we're looking after you.
Compare that to other candidates' anecdotes and analogies about race. Clark said that he worked in the most integrated meritocratic office in the world: the US Army. That's true. That's a good point. Clark was part of a system that promoted black men and women straigth to the top. He knows about fasciliting that movement. Long ago, he worked through any hesitations he might have had about black people and for him, and for the last forty years he has been part of the solution and not the problem. Fuck DeNiro's character. A movie about Clark and race would be 2 hours of him pinning medals on the chests of black men and women.
Edwards said that the small town he grew up in is now all Latino, but they all move to that town today for the same exact reason his father moved there 40 years ago: for a better chance for their familes. And Edwards wanted to give them the same chances his father had and he had coming out of that town. That's smart. He's saying, look at me, I have white skin so it's harder for me to say that I have walked in your shoes. But I have definitely walked the same path, and I want to give you the chance I had to reach the same destination I reached. Edwards had another analogy about race. He said that his law school friend would not have gotten into law school but for affirmative action, and that that man graduated first in his class. Edwards said that affirmative action isn't about lowering standards so that we can homogenize socieety to the point of mediocrity. It's about taking down barriers so that people who want to work and succeed have an equal chance to do so and can apply their incredibly talents in a way that lifts up all of society. (Now there's a great movie!)
Kerry's argument about race was that he was on a boat in the war where the enemy's bullet didn't care about the color of your skin and they all worked as a team to look after each other and keep each other safe. Because we worked together and protected each other he could stand on a stage today with 12 of his fellow crew members -- of all different races. Because race was not a barrier from the time they first stepped on that boat, they are all allive today. (That's another great movie. Had DeNiro's character been on that boat, mayber a couple black men wouldn't have made it out.)
Clark, Edwards and Kerry were not appealing to the people who identify with Thornton and DeNiro's charcters at all. The were, in fact, saying they have no time for thinking like that. They were saying that when America thinks like that, it's a waste of time and talent, it can get you killed, and it is totally incompatible with the America dream. They wanted to get the part of the movie over before the credit sequence finishes rolling where we struggle with our racism. In fact, they don't even care to look at America through those eyes.
OK, Edwards, Clark and Kerry's movie about race in America isn't likely to get promoted by Warner Bros or 20th Century Fox, and it's not going to get a ton of publicity from ET and compete for Oscars. But that's the story about race in America that doesn't totally offend me to hear. And I'd much rather have my candidates playing to best intincts about race rather than to (white) people's worst instincts (and white people's worst intincts are that racism in America is all about them personally -- that we need to see racism through the eyes of white men who don't like black people, and that's it's about celebrating them for simly tolerating black people).
And how else did Dean make this argument -- that racism is trial for white people and that we need to look at it mostly through the eyes of white people? He did it with the flag comment after he changed it to saying that he wanted to be the candidate "FOR" those people.
Before he would just say, essentially, I have looked at these people and it makes no sense for these people to vote Republicans because voting Republicans mainitains their economic deprivation. Then he said, "I want to be the candidate for these people." With the new formulation, he was saying not that these people need to drop racism. He was saying that these racists need a voice. That is very different, and it was very sublte. It's like saying, I want to write and direct a movie telling the world what characters played by Thornton and DeNiro suffer for being racists. Like I said, I don't want to see that movie. I want to see the movie where Gooding has the character arc. I think that's going to be more important story for America to hear.
And finally -- the icing on the cake -- he said that hearing Edwards (and not Sharpton) explain the problem opened his eyes. So not only did he subtley say throughout the campaign that he felt that race was something for white people to deal with (but then pretty much said it was enough just to think about it -- he never really explained what he wanted white people to do beyond think about it), even after he screwed up, he STILL emphasized that it was still only going to look at race through the eye's of another white man that.
Now here's the thing about Dean: maybe he was the smart one. Maybe he looked around America and thought, OK, American culture is selling these movies about race which are actually subtely very damaging to black people. But, hell, this is clearly how America is being programmed to think about race, so I'll ride it.
So the question is, do you agree with that strategy? Frankly, I thought Edwards's strategy for talking about race was the most brilliant. To me, that IS the argument about why racism holds us back. Since that it so close to the truth, I wanted to hear that argument get made to America. It's always the truth which the key to unlocking the complicated emotions and that has the greatest power. What Dean was saying might have tapped into a mass sentiment among white people about what race is about in America. But, to me, it's a whitewash meant to cover up the truth about racism, and therefore would have been less powerful and might have actually been damaging to progress on these issues -- which is what I think Sharpton and Edwards were telling him at the debate.
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