Tim Wise on Race and the Healthcare Protests

*tip of the fitted to Racialicious

Re-appropriation and "Arab Money"

So I'm not trying to beat a dead horse, but the tangled web of "Arab Money" keeps getting crazier and more complicated.

First up, I was having dinner at a friends house and he was telling me that while teaching his undergrad class they started talking about "Arab Money" and whether it was offensive and if so how. The responses were mixed but one story stuck in my head. One of the young women told the class that she went out to a hip hop club and that while she was on line a Hummer pulled up blasting "Arab Money" and a "bunch of young Arabs" rolled out "really feeling themselves. That was their song."

There is something interesting about that story in terms of the way that certain forms of self/re-appropriation are playing out as a desire for visibility and recognition in mainstream hip hop culture. That brings us to our second serving of food for thought...

Bless' comedy remix/redo "Hebrew Money." Bless plays on a number of tropes about Jews, money, and spend thrift.

I haven't worked it out yet but there is an interesting triangulation between Arabs, Blacks, and Jews around issues of race, class, and relationships with money and hip hop culture that "Arab Money" and all its various permutations brings to the fore. Its especially interesting to have a song explicitly talking about glamorous images of "Arab life" at a time when Palestinians are experiencing such danger and terror.

Tim Wise's "This is Your Nation on White Privilege"

Critical whiteness scholar Tim Wise recently wrote the brilliant "This is Your Nation on White Privilege" which is currently making its way around the internet. Wise does a great job exploring the blatant racism that is permeating every aspect of the 2008 Presidential Elections. As a person of color in Higher Ed, I really appreciated this point...

White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.

Read "This is Your Nation on White Privilege" here

Los Republicanos: part duex

Okay, so I've had some time to think about this whole Daddy Yankee endorsing John McCain fiasco and my take is McCain might have just shot himself in the foot and here is why...

McCain is obviously trying to appeal to the Latino/a vote by appearing with El Cangri and accepting his endorsement, but chances are DY's endorsement will actually turn off some Latino/a voters, particularly the kind of Latino/a voter McCain wants to reach

Reggaeton is an extremely contested genre within the Latino/a community. More than any other musical genre, reggaeton truly highlights the the complexities of nationality, race, class, gender and generational division within the Latino/a community. Reggaeton is very often seen as something that is either strictly Puerto Rican, or more broadly Caribbean. Already there has been push back to having DY be the supposed voice of the Latino/a community because he is seen as representing Puerto Rican interests. Many people have also pointed out that DY can't even vote for McCain so his endorsement is irrelevant (which is true but it's bogus that people aren't talking about the fact that that's because Puerto Rico is a colony).

The reason why DY's endorsement might really hurt McCain is because of people's perceptions of El Cangri and reggaeton. Although claims over reggaeton's ownership are now fought over, during the 1990's reggaeton sparked a culture war in Puerto Rico over issues of race, sex, taste, and class. Reggaeton was seen as cafre, a term which is highly racialized and classed and denotes low culture. Reggaeton was seen as too Black and too American because of its close association to hip-hop, and therefore inauthentically Latino/a. It was seen as music that was devoid of culture and little more than a copycat of hip-hop when it first came out. It was also highly sexualized and suggestive with its visible trademarks being aggressive lyrics and perreo dancing. Not to mention, reggaeton was born out of the caserios (projects) and was initially funded by the drug game, which only added to the moral outcry against the genre. Reggaeton culture was immediately and vehemently denounced by the conservative and Christian segments of Puerto Rican society as crass and indecent. Although, it is extremely popular and much more sanitized today, reggaeton still maintains its association (real and imagined) to money, drugs, violence, and sex in the minds of many Latinos/as and Americans alike. It is that association that many Latinos/as, particularly those who tend to vote republican, are trying to distance themselves from. That is where McCain's plan backfires.

Daddy Yankee does not represent a performance of Latinidad, that many conservative Latinos/as feel comfortable with. I think the unease around Daddy Yankee's endorsement has to do with the fact that he actively and aggressively markets himself as de la calle and as a gangsta. Reggaeton and Daddy Yankee represent a version of Latinidad which is raced and classed that some Latinos/as want to distance themselves from. Rather than addressing the social realties that reggaeton speaks to and represents, it remains easier for certain segments of the Latino/a community to dismiss reggaeton and the culture around it as an abberation of Latinidad. It's crazy because in a way this whole Daddy Yankee - McCain thing made me think about the way's in which Latinos/as are climbing over each other for a piece of that Americano Dream. At whose cost are Latinos/as representing themselves as idealized American citizens?

Crazy as it may sound McCain is right Daddy Yankee is "an American success story" (ugh), but he may not represent "an American success story" that conservative Latino/a voters are ready to embrace. Guess McCain should have studied Leslie Sanchez's cringe-inducing Los Republicanos: Why Hispanics and Republicans Need Each Other a little closer because now he has a "Reggaeton Problem".

Judd Apatow and the Art of White Masculinity

“That shit is SO fuckin’ homo”

So I finally saw Pineapple Express this weekend and throughout the whole movie the men around me were constantly expressing how “fucking gay” the movie was. I left there thinking about the two very different displays of masculinity I had just witnessed in the movie theater. The men in the audience, who were mostly young men of color in their late-teens/early-twenties, were attempting to (re)affirm their masculinity through homophobic and sexist comments in response to the perceived lack of masculinity they saw on the screen. On the screen however the cast of Pineapple Express (most of whom are white men with the exception of Craig Robinson) were celebrating their homosocial (but not homosexual) affection for each other and their outsider status as members of the informal economy. I thought about the ways that homosociality functions not only in Pineapple Express but in Judd Apatow movies generally as a comment on the state of contemporary white masculinity in American society.

For those of you who might not know who Judd Apatow is, he’s the writer and/or producer of many of the successful “Frat Pack” movies including: Pineapple Express, Step Brothers, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Superbad, Knocked Up, Talladega Nights, The 40 Year Old Virgin, and Anchorman. He’s was also the Executive Producer of the cult TV show Freaks and Geeks on NBC.


Yeah, he’s that guy.

Critics and audiences alike have wondered whether the characters in Apatow’s films, especially Superbad, might be gay. In Superbad, Seth is so obsessed with dicks that he used to compulsively draw them as a kid and talks about them non-stop throughout the entire film. Towards the end of the film Evan and Seth share a "tender moment" where they exchange “I love you’s” and Evan says he wants to go scream from the rooftops that he loves Seth. Those “tender moments” have become a staple in Apatow’s films and Pineapple Express is no exception. At one point in Pineapple Express Danny McBride’s character tells James Franco’s characters that he’s happy they’re best friends and continues by saying “I want to be inside you.”

I don’t think Apatow’s films say anything about sexuality that is specifically homosexual or homophobic, but I do think his films rely on homosociality to demonstrate the ways in which white masculinity has been “wounded” by the feminist, gay, and civil rights movements. In Apatow’s movies we see an entire generation of white men who rely on each other for a sense of validation and understanding, a generation of men who in many ways by refusing to grow-up are able to avoid facing the reality of changing power structures in American society.

In a New York Times article on Apatow Jon Kasdan, who also worked on Freaks and Geeks, said:

“The culture in the last 5, 10 years is one of shame and humiliation, and Judd gets that. Part of the experience of being a man in this postmodern life is humiliation, and wearing it as something to be proud of. This is a true frustration that Judd is expressing in his work, almost a romanticized version of being a schlub.”

What is interesting is that in Apatow movies arrested development is presented as the solution to dealing with the frustration of being a “schlub.” People of color, women and gays (particularly white gay men) have more visibility, if not power, in contemporary society – the question that Apatow’s character are trying to work out is “where does this leave me?” While Apatow’s films don’t directly say it, they certainly show us that white masculinity ain’t what it used to be for the groups of white male friends that the stories center on. Apatow’s characters exist in a universe that is almost completely male and almost completely white, their existence in this world of their own making is like an attempt to recreate the “old boys clubs” of their father’s and grandfather’s generations.

Think of AMC’s critically acclaimed TV show Mad Men, I think it is no coincidence that a show that literally portrays that “old boys club” has generated so much attention and ratings. In Mad Men and Pineapple Express you see the trajectory of white masculinity, Mad Men presents us with the cracks beginning to show in white masculinity’s façade, while Judd Apatow’s movies ask “How the fuck did we end up here … but since we’re here lets get high and play Guitar Hero.”