Ta-Nehisi discusses why race matters when people address Blacks as “nigger”:

I never thought that because Toby Keith made a record called White Trash With Money, that somehow gave me the right to address random white people in the fashion. I never thought the fact that there was a magazine called Heeb gave me the right to address my Jewish buddies as such. More to the point–I never wanted to. So this is what I don’t understand–What’s the big beef? Why is that in “Blackworld” the normal laws of human interaction somehow don’t apply? I don’t get white people who have a hard time with this–you call your mother “Mom,” I call her Ms. Phillips–same deal here. Nigger means one thing when used amongst a group of people with similar experiences, and something else when used by people outside of that experience.

In a follow-up, Ta-Nihisi quotes one of Megan’s comment-writers:

The only reason the word “nigger” is such a taboo — and yet is used freely among blacks — is because keeping it a whites-only taboo is a way for blacks to intimidate and dominate whites.

All this reminds me of this cartoon of mine, from years ago:

(Larger version of cartoon here.)

This is something I just wrote in a comment, but I thought maybe I should “promote” it to a post.

That someone might see this cover at a newsstand and think “hey, this magazine I know nothing about is literally saying that the Obamas will burn American Flags in the Oval Office fireplace” doesn’t concern me. All that says to me is that “there are some idiots out there, and some of them will glance at this cover,” which is something I can live with.

On the other hand, I am bothered by the idea of Black, Muslim, and Black Muslim readers seeing this cover on newsstands, and understanding the satiric intent, but nonetheless feeling “othered” by it. Since I the cover is pretty weak tea anyway, I wish The New Yorker hadn’t published it, because the negative result — contributing to the othering of Blacks and Muslims — seems to me to outweigh both the cover’s good points.

There’s been a fair amount of blog discussion of this extremely popular Mexican comic book — which started in the 1940s, but is kept going today through reprints — because Wal-Mart recently began stocking it, and then pulled it off their shelves almost immediately.

Why did Wal-Mart pull the comic? Well, take a look at a typical Memin illustration (the little boy is the title character):

Both now, and when there was a similar Memin-related controversy in 2005, Memin’s defenders claimed that the image only seemed offensive to Americans, but never to Mexicans. For example, Adalisa writes:

Most of the posts in México were about how hystericals americans were at some stuff, not delving in the fact that there’s a huge cultural difference between the States and México, and that most of the problem American’s have with Memin is due to those cultural differences.

First point in fact: There’s not that much racism in México against PoC. We have our own problems against the indigenous habitants, but not against PoC, and that makes us have troubles to relate to the situation north our border. What we have is a huge problem of class discrimination. Upper class looks down on Middle Class, who looks down on the poor. You could have green skin and purple hair but as long as you don’t stray away from your own economical class, no one would bat an eye at you. [...]

The Wikipedia entry on Memin touches it a bit, but it doesn’t quite goes in depth enough to explain why Memin is so popular here, or why no one in their right minds see him as a racist caricature.

Adan makes a similar argument:

So, while Memin Pinguin may seem racist to Americans steeped in racism (though not necessarily racist themselves), this simply is not the case in Mexico. It’s not viewed that way by any segment of the population.

But it’s simply not true that no Mexicans see Memin as racist. When the Mexican government released commemorative Memin stamps in 2005, hispanicnews.com (quoted on A Spirited Life) wrote:

The stamps have also drawn fire from Mexico’s tiny black community. The Asociacion Mexico Negro, which represents some 50,000 blacks living on the Pacific coast, said in a letter to [Mexican President Vicente] Fox that they were stereotypical and racist.

Another 2005 news account, found on Freedom Rider, quoted a black Mexican activist:

“One would hope the Mexican government would be a little more careful and avoid continually opening wounds,” said Sergio Penalosa, an activist in Mexico’s small black community on the southern Pacific coast.
“But we’ve learned to expect anything from this government, just anything,” Penalosa said.

So no, it’s not only a matter of knee-jerk Americans projecting racism onto a Mexican comic that no Mexican would ever find offensive.

* * *

Anti-Racist Themes In Memin Pinguin

That said, Memin isn’t one-notish, and it’s not simply a KKK tract. I haven’t read the comics — they’re not available in English, as far as I know — but I’ve read several summaries of Memin plotlines, and it’s clear that Memin and his mother are positive characters. Here’s how Adalisa describes one plotline:

The second one, and probably the most offensive to Americans was when, for some reason I can’t remember, the school football team wins some tournament and is selected to go to play against an American team in Texas. The whole gang is on the team, and so they go. This cover, that I found thanks to Supermexicanos, shows pretty much the summary of that particular storyline when Memin faces for the first time in his young life institutional racism. While he had met some nasty people like the aforementioned scout leader, he had never been denied service in any place, or treated like if he was somewhat inferior until he had gone to the States. In the story, he and Carlos go to have a milkshake, and when the man refuses to serve Memin….

I’ve seen that storyline described by a few people who have read it, and all of them agree that the story itself is anti-racist. And that’s one of a few anti-racist Memin storylines. So why do I still think there’s a problem?

Well, here’s the cover image for that story, showing Memin with his apparently white friend Carlos:

I can’t read Spanish — but I can read cartooning. No matter how anti-racist the storyline is, the design of Memin, which is not intended ironically, screams a contrary message. It’s saying that Memin is stupider, animalistic, dependent, and less human than Carlos. It’s saying that black and white are two separate species, and the black species is inferior.

I think it’s good that this and other Memin storylines had anti-racist themes — but that doesn’t magically erase the racist themes carried by the artwork. And although only a small fraction of Memin stories had anti-racist themes, 100% of Memin stories had racist, anti-black artwork.

(I want to acknowlege that Adalisa does recognize the problems with how Memin is drawn, and is starting a fan project to redesign Memin’s appearance.)

* * *

Memin Pinguin: U.S. Racism, Exported

Quoting again from the article reprinted on A Spirited Life:

Lost in the storm of American outrage is the strong probability that Memin Pinguin was, in his own way, born in the U.S.A.

He is the visual twin of “Ebony White,” a black comic character who was the taxi-driving sidekick in cartoonist Will Eisner’s enormously successful “Spirit” strip, which ran from 1940 to 1952. It is very likely that Cabrera was familiar with Eisner’s “Ebony White” and modeled Memin Pinguin after him, visually. The two are almost identical, facially. [...]

With its immense global reach in the arts and entertainment industry in the 1930s and 1940s, America did more to spread racial stereotypes than any country on earth, though Britain ran a close second.

The resemblance of Memin to Ebony White (pictured to the right) is pretty impressive. Eisner eventually wrote Ebony out of The Spirit, thankfully. (Full disclosure: I took a class from Eisner at SVA.)¹

Whether or not Memin’s character design was directly influenced by Eisner, I’m fairly sure that this racist approach to drawing blacks originated in the United States (and did so decades before Eisner created Ebony). Modern cartoonists don’t draw Black characters that way anymore, of course, but you can still see the old style in prestige reprints of comics from the 1950s and earlier, such as reprints of Frank King’s Gasoline Alley strips.

More blogging about Memin Pinguin: Occasional Superheroine, Racialicious, Ann at “Beautiful, Also…”, and The Comics Reporter.

1. Ever notice how some people use “full disclosures” as a covert way of name-dropping? (back)

I disagree with virtually every person I respect in the political blogosphere. Which certainly makes me realize that I could be mistaken on this one.

Nonetheless, here’s my take:

1) I don’t think mockery of racist fear-mongering is the same as racist fear-mongering.

I realize, of course, that plenty of white people use racist images and try to cover it up by claiming to have been making fun of the racism. There is a universe of stupid lynching “satirical” images, blackface, and all the rest which are really just recycling racist images for the fun of it, and which should be condemned. (And have been, on this blog.)

But I don’t think that it follows that racist images should never be mocked. In this case, the fact that the cover’s images are so specific to particular news stories, and to this particular moment in history, makes a difference to me. It’s not a white jackass reveling in an excuse to finally photoshop blackface, with basically no connection between the image used and the image’s target; it’s a very specific take on the specific racist, xenophobic undercurrents in this year’s election.

2) I don’t think it matters that some idiotic right-wingers will fail to understand that this image mocks their beliefs. Or at least, I don’t think that’s reason enough to condemn this image. Jeff, do you really think that all liberals should base what we say on whether or not the stupidest people in the world could misunderstand?

3) Jake Tapper, in an op-ed that recycles right-wing cliches about liberals (we all live on the upper east side of Manhattan and consider our intellects superior), says that this cover is “a recruitment poster for the right-wing.”

Does Tapper think that if only the New Yorker hadn’t published this cover, the right wing would lack for recruits?

UPDATE: Jeff replies.

(There are some spoilers in this post.)

I was bewildered by the plot point about bone mass. The writers went out of their way to establish that generations of living in low gravity have reduced bone mass to the point that people can no longer stand upright — until the plot called for them to stand, at which point, they stood. It was especially hard to buy how easily all the humans were standing on Earth at the end; they should have been writhing in agony after reaching Earth. And they definitely should not have been able to walk.

It bewilders me, because they could have avoided the whole problem by not bringing it up in the first place. I’d be quite happy to accept a movie just ignoring the problem. But why explicitly bring up a problem in the script just so they can fail to solve it?

The best part of the movie — the first forty minutes or so, before the plot leaves the planet’s surface — presents a world in which humans are entirely absent (although the evidence we were once there is all over the place). And it was pretty damn cool, because humanity wasn’t the subject of the movie; it’s a movie about robots. Then, in the final act, suddenly the plot became human-centric. It’s as if the humans writing the film couldn’t stand letting the story be centered on non-humans.

The film would have been better if it were indifferent to the fate of the humans. I would have loved it if all the humans had died in the course of the film, but the ending was nonetheless happy because Wall-E and Eve lived happily ever after. (Why should they care what happens to the meat?)

* * *

FAT

A lot of bloggers have been commenting on the politics of Wall-E. On the up side, conservative bloggers hate this film, so gotta love that.

On the down side, it’s been getting a lot of criticism from pro-fat blogs, and rightly so. The Chicago Tribune review (via Big Fat Blog) summed up the film’s take on fat:

Awaiting the word that Earth is once again habitable, the ship spends year after year in space, sustaining the last remaining humans–blobby, pampered creatures who never get out of their whiz-bang flying loungers long enough to look at what they’ve become.

My take on this is that although there was annoying fat bigotry built into the film’s concept, I’ve seen much worse. I was able to enjoy the film despite the fat bigotry.

But it’s going to depend on one’s individual taste. Wall-E’s fat characters aren’t contemptible, repulsive slobs, like Fat Bastard, nor — despite the constant sipping of drinks — are they food-obsessed like Homer Simpson. Instead, they’re presented as huge infants: round, helpless, cheerful and friendly. So unlike Jessica, I didn’t find it all that wince-able, and enjoyed the film.

Fatshonista points out that Pixar apparently changed the film to make it less anti-fat, compared to its initial conception.

My Pixar friend said that essentially, the idea is that humanity was supposed to spend just 5 years on the luxury spaceship, but got trapped for 700 years, and because of the super-artificial situation (it was meant to be a total vacation to recruit people into going), got dependent in an artificial way. Originally they were apparently designed to be rather more gross and creepy, and had no intelligible lines; both of those were changed by the team working on the movie because of concerns about what it would suggest about fat people.

Now, the equation of sloth + fast food = fatties is still at the heart of this, and is undeniably problematic.

I liked this comment from Rethink:

Pixar tries to suggest in one throw-away moment that the people are fat because they have been in space so long and lost some bone density, but the much clearer message is that they are chunky because they are lazy and eat too much (and several times the characters’ large size is used for visual jokes). A clear sign that Pixar recognized the nastiness of their message is that they chose not insult their target audience: kids. There are no children, let alone overweight children, at all on the ship — we see only babies and chubby adults. [And good luck finding images of any of the chubby characters in Disney's advertising for the film or the film's official website.]

More ironic still is that the film’s criticism seems to be levelled at the very folks who are viewing the movie — you and me, sitting there, doing nothing, watching a screen while consuming buttered popcorn and Junior Mints. The movie wants us to know that mass consumerism will doom this planet and its people. And you can show your support for that message by going out and buying all the Disney tie-in products and toys that will be filling your store shelves, and eventually your landfills, in the next 6-12 months.

I also think this post from Red No. 3, responding to defenders of the film, is good:

….irregardless of what sci-fi talk about bone density was snuck into the film, audiences took the characters to be fat and ultimately the audience interpration matters more culturally than the filmmakers intent. Intent is nice, but if that intent was not effectively communicated to the audience, it doesn’t matter. Just look through what the reviews say. From professionals to amateurs, people talking about the film have consistantly identified the future humans as “obese”. And of course they do, because that is the visual language the film is using, complete with cues about the characters’ gluttony and inactivity.

More fat-and-Wall-E blogging: Professor What If and Feministe.

* * *

GENDER

I haven’t seen much discussion of the genderization of the robots in Wall-E. Essentially, Wall-E is presented as male, while Eve is presented as female. Visually, this is done by constructing Wall-E of machinery that resembles construction site equipment — rusty, dirty, treader tracks and forklifts — while Eve is rendered to resemble a Macintosh computer — smooth, curved lines of white plastic. (As methods of making a robot femme goes, it could be much worse. Actually, it’s extraordinary they resisted the impulse to either color Eve pink, or to give her a bow or eyelashes.)

I wish the gendering hadn’t been done; it would have been wonderful if Pixar had shown a romance that wasn’t gendered at all. But still, as Professor What If says, props to Pixar for making Eve tough and strong (she rescues Wall-E several times during the film), for making Wall-E nurturing, and for not making Eve’s toughness a threat to Wall-E.

(And in case you’re wondering, no, this movie doesn’t pass The Bechdel Test.)

* * *

RACE

Oh, and although I’m sure folks will rationalize it (”in the racist Earth society, the people rescued and sent into space were disproportionately white!”), it bothered me that humanity, as presented in Wall-E, is overwhelmingly white. (I think some background characters were people of color; every single human who had a speaking role was white).

In a science fiction movie — and one that didn’t face any real-world casting limitations — there’s no excuse for not presenting humanity as it is. To reflect the actual make-up of humanity, most of the humans in Wall-E should have been Asian, with substantial minorities of Europeans, Africans, and Latin@s.