From Grotesque Caricatures to Twisted Racism

After watching the documentary last week, I realized that racism in the media has progressed, not extinguished. In Ethnic Notions, we see television displaying blatant racism without any worry because it was the norm. There were many examples of belittling, emasculation, minstrelsy (and on and on) that the modern audience is horrified by. This is because white Americans, as depicted in White Boy Shuffle, have gone through a phase of exaggerated color blindness. This made for a situation where people were pointedly displaying how they ostensibly did not care. On the outside, this may seem to be a positive development to avoid racist behavior, but it created a new dynamic of racism that is well depicted by Beatty. This translated to the media where everyone went out of their way to avoid the mention of race. However, this has progressed further as the colorblind behavior was found to not be the best solution to the problem as is evident from the description by Gunnar. Many people have identified the problems with a colorblind approach and have become increasingly paranoid about how to correctly approach the topic of race. This makes for many awkward conversations as people try not to ignore the issue but to find a politically correct way to say it. The documentary also points out how the portrayal of racism in the popular media can have an impressive impact on how the audience views the world and acts. Therefore, this obsession over not being offensive has spread to be a very pervasive issue, even when we do not think about it. In class, we often mention stand up comedy to illustrate our point so I wanted to throw in a very explicit example of this dynamic although it does not involve exclusively black racism. This is from popular 2014 tv series Silicon Valley. I thought of this scene when we watched the documentary and decided to investigate how what was depicted in the documentary related to modern television.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0q9PjM4FCU

This is a very broad topic that I have only scraped the surface on. Any thoughts on our modern racism in the media?

What Does It Mean To Be Blind?

When we were reading Invisible Man, we realized that every use of words related to sight and invisibility and color were always very significant sources of symbolism, no matter their context. Therefore, the descriptions of colorblindness in White Boy Shuffle immediately caught my eye. Looking back on Native son, blindness is something that Bigger grapples with throughout the book. There is a huge difference in what these descriptions represent, but they are very racially charged and make up part of the identity of the character involved.

Invisible Man explores "invisibility" throughout the novel and the characters’ traits’ relation to sight is never fully defined. However, we have concluded that it involves flying under the radar and generally being ignored by society. Invisible men are those who are not fully engaged in society as a way to avoid the social burden of their race. As far as we are aware, the invisibility is not acknowledged by any white characters.

Native Son utilizes the word "blind" as a descriptor commonly used by Bigger when looking on various other characters in the novel. He uses it to label people as being ignorant to what was going on in the world around him. Bigger labels his family, Bessie, Jan, and even himself as blind during his adventures. He often utilized it when frustrated, but it always carried a connotation of not understanding the way the world worked.

White Boy Shuffle, as of chapter two, displays a white construct of "colorblindness". Gunner grows up with the white school system pointedly preaching that everyone has to look past race. This is an interesting contrast to the other instances because it represents being so aware of race that they need to try redefine it.

This difference could demonstrate a shift in the problems facing blacks in America between the two time periods. I have barely stepped into this topic and have not come close to doing it justice; how do you incorporate this motif of obsessing over symbolic vision?