In the (White) Imaginary World, "We" Don't Exist

One of the cool things about talking on the phone (long-distance) to a friend who's had similar training in academia like myself but who's just as down to earth about not subscribing to the elitist culture of the college professor (i.e. you must drink wine whenever you dine out, you must tune into NPR, you must be high brow and not listen in to any popular culture - except to critique it, of course) is how we can talk shop for hours on mundane things. Last night, our conversation turned to the imaginary segregated spaces of Soap Opera Land.

See, in academia, we can talk about our guilty pleasures in watching bad horror movies or even porn, but soaps? "Where's your pride?," I could hear some of my colleagues saying as I type this. But, I've been watching soaps since I was a toddler - thanks to Mom's viewing habits, which I have since adapted myself. And so, my friend and I talked about soaps. We watch different ones, but inevitably, our idle chatter became an intellectual, philosophical endeavor, for we didn't just talk about soap operas but what we had keenly observed as the ever bleaching, whitewashing world of daytime drama that always has us asking, "Whatever happened to so-and-so?"

So-and-so is that black character who mysteriously disappeared from the show, with no explanation (no death, no moving to another city, no hiatus because he or she was left in a coma somewhere or shipped off to jail, nothing!) Just one minute, there's a fine, decent black doctor at the hospital (I'm thinking of the good Dr. Ben on As the World Turns or ghettofabulous Drucilla Winters' sensible sister doctor, Olivia, on Y&R) who all of a sudden is gone....just vanished into thin air! (My friend had similar observations on the soaps she watches).

The black characters that we mentioned aren't your typical, marginal add-ons who could be here today, gone tomorrow. No, these are pretty regular, staple characters who've been on their shows for quite some time. We couldn't imagine a white character, with the same status, just disappearing without the writers creating a plausible (and not even that sometimes!) storyline for why that character no longer exists. But, with black characters, who's noticing? (Umm, the black viewership is noticing, don't we count?)

This situation on soaps is not peculiar to the genre. I believe it is indicative of what is obviously a conception of the world - as viewed through white Americans who produce, write, direct, and star in TV shows, movies, or any other site for the cultural imagination. My friend and I came to the conclusion that in their imaginary worlds, "we" (and not just black folk but any person of color) don't exist. That in any new show or movie, a concept can be drawn, an imaginary city or suburban neighborhood can be visualized in the planning stages, and when it's time to populate these imaginary settings, they might as well hang a Jim Crow "Whites Only" sign at the entrance gate.

Oh, inevitably, they realize that they better have a few token "others," and so they include a variety of stereotypes, until they realize they must balance out this representation so that the "others" watching their shows won't complain about racist representations. So they overcompensate, as I suspect they did when they created the educated Olivia Winters, MD, to counterbalance the portrayal of her sister, Drucilla Winters, the ghettoized, illiterate, street girl (who could forget her debut with her three gigantic braids sticking up every which way like Buckwheat?) who has since risen up in the ranks as the wife of black bourgeois CEO Neil Winters but has since regressed to her ghettofabulous self. Of course, when it comes to entertainment value, Dru is far more interesting, so I'm not surprised she outlasted Olivia.

I'm not saying anything new, of course, but I do have to wonder about this forced segregation and this emphasis on whiteness as normative in the imaginary world, since in the real world, people of color abound ... in their neighborhoods, in the workplace, in schools. If a whites-only neighborhood, workplace, or school still exists in our increasingly multiracial and pluralist society, then the folks who've made these sites homogeneous have worked damn hard to keep them that way, just as they work pretty damn hard to keep their imaginary worlds that way.

Considering that other soaps and TV dramas in other predominantly white nations (England and Canada come to mind) have been pretty successful in portraying a variety of communities of color (the daytime drama East Enders come to mind, as does Degrassi High) - including people of African descent, Asian descent, mixed-race folk, etc. - Hollywood has no excuse since there are significant numbers of screen actors of color looking for work. That Hollywood producers routinely do their film productions in the backyard of many other nations (see the detailed book Global Hollywood) means they deliberately enforce segregationist practices, especially considering that many of their white celebrities hail from countries like Australia, Canada, or Europe. In other words, so committed to a White Supremacist representation in the cultural imaginary, that they'll cross borders to do it while marginalizing others or insisting that actors of color re-present themselves to fit a "white" image as closely as possible (or the flip side: be as stereotypically black, brown, or yellow as can be imagined).

Should we be surprised, with this segregationist set-up, that Chitlin-Circuit-like black movies (I'm looking at you, Tyler Perry!) are getting so much play?

When I saw the movie Children of Men this year, a London-based film directed by a Mexican director, the cast was remarkably diverse, and what I kept thinking was: there's no way this film could be made in Hollywood. Can you imagine how that would come off? First, the black actress portraying the pregnant girl would have been recast with somebody white or maybe Latina (b/c, the marketing dept. would say, this movie wouldn't "sell" with a black woman in a pivotal role), then all the Arab characters would've looked like raving lunatics about to carry out a terrorist attack, and the white hero (Clive Owen) would never be sacrificed.

In other words, for all their back-patting and self-celebratory ways about how "liberal" they are, Hollywood's industry is seriously behind the curve. The most multicultural films are almost always made somewhere else besides Hollywood. And we need to really think about that: after all, L.A. is the most multi-culti city you're going to find in this country, yet Hollywood manages to employ mostly white people for their movies (and I am not just talking about stars: look at the extras! Next time you watch a movie, count the number of people of color floating around in the background). The only reason they loved Crash last year is because it actually showed people of color, thus making them feel so "progressive": "Wow, there are black people, Asian people, Chicana people, Middle Eastern people, all in one city!" To think that the city is the same place where they make films (most times)! That's some serious denial and deliberate WHITES ONLY practice when the Hollywood movie industry consistently puts out all-white or nearly-white movies (esp. when they'll cast white actors from as far away as Australia to do it).

Of course, my friend, who's a historian, reminded me that - unlike our former colonial ruler England, or Canada, which posited a postcolonial, multiracial construct of its national identity, America is - at its heart - a Creole nation (the original meaning: a European descendant not born in Europe), and the goal of every original Creole is to assert its whiteness. In the past, white Americans were quite blatant about this (and not just the Klan!); today, the goal is still there, but they're more subtle about it (or are they, seeing that I'm writing about it?).

Very glad that Jennifer Hudson and Forest Whitaker won their Oscars this year, but I'm so not ready to give Hollywood a free pass on racial progress; until they can imagine us in their make-believe worlds (and not just on Soap Opera Land!), then we will always be a problem in the real world.

The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy: Black Feminism, Surrogate Motherhood, or Colonialist Fantasy?

I admit to being conflicted about Oprah Winfrey's new project: the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy. I watched her program "Building a Dream" when it aired on ABC last week - both last Monday night (Feb. 26) and Saturday evening (Mar. 3) to see if I could determine my feelings about this truly inspiring story of Oprah Winfrey keeping her promise to Nelson Mandela to build a school in South Africa for disadvantaged young girls with leadership potential. I wept at the girls' stories, I felt their glee and joyous expectations when they left their impoverished one-room shacks and moved into their luxurious dorm rooms at Oprah's $40 million academy. Surely, this could only be a positive story however you spin it, right?

So, why was I bothered, not only at what was shown, but also what Oprah revealed later when she appeared on Ellen's talk show to tell us behind-the-scenes stories, like what had transpired after the lavish Christmas party that she hosted for the first 154 pupils at her exclusive new girls academy? Apparently, the students, who were unused to eating so much food, had eaten until they vomited. Worse, many more stuffed their pockets and their bras with the leftover food so they could bring it back to their families who were still deprived of such luxuries, subsequently spoiling their school uniforms so early in the game.

Sigh. Oprah, Oprah, I love ya, but I have to ask: should we really be encouraging South African youth to indulge in the worst forms of American material culture: including binge eating and self-absorption, for why were these young girls not even given containers for leftovers? Did you really think that young girls, who are raised in an African culture that often puts communities first over self, would just eat to their heart's content without also thinking about how they could provide their families with the same food they're eating? After all, these are girls with "leadership potential," and from what your program showed, they were also responsible daughters and granddaughters who have already assumed the role of caregiver and provider. Of course they were going to stuff their bras and pockets with food to take back home: they were not simply going to eat just to fill their stomachs and their stomachs alone! They couldn't think of themselves, they had to think of their family as well. But, that's just one minor incident that I could tear apart ad nausea (no pun intended).

But, there's something else going on here. What does it mean for Oprah to present herself as a benevolent matriarch, even "fairy godmother," for the program was designed so that we would appreciate Oprah's gifts of luxuries bestowed on her new "daughters" (more on this later). We were expected, as American viewers, to look at these young girls' lives, who were eking out a living in impoverished townships, with no electricity or running water, and violent gangs of scary black men who might rape and infect these innocent young girls with HIV. I had a chuckle looking at Oprah so far removed from her own Mississippi roots when she couldn't even lift up a bucket of water to balance on her head, like the young girl she was with (here's a clue, Oprah: it's called a bandanna, you wrap it around like a turban, place it on your head, and if positioned correctly, the bucket should balance itself on this apparatus - I'm sure your rural, impoverished grandmother knew something about this, if you had listened to her various instructions instead of daydreaming that you would never do what she was doing; you might have spared yourself the embarrassment of not being able to do what most women of African descent in this world know how to do - but I digress). Even as I watched that scene, I thought: hmmm, no running water, I wonder what Oprah could do in terms of philanthropy or international policy to address this kind of poverty, for wouldn't it be useful to raise money to provide such developments in Africa, so that young girls weren't forced to leave their homes for the better life that their newfound "mother" in Oprah can offer them?

From the beginning of this program, we were presented with the camera panning the landscape. I could not help but think of the early European explorers who surveyed the African land before claiming it. Oprah just claimed a piece of it and built a school decorated to all of her Oprahlicious tastes. Great, I don't begrudge her fulfilling her own dreams like this, and I would love to send my daughter to such a comfortable, padded school replete with beauty salon and yoga loft. I wished she had spent more time describing the curriculum, the library (I'm an educator, so I'm very curious about how these girls are being educated), and state-of-the-art computer labs and classrooms (if there were any - I hope so).

Why did the program focus on all the nice clothes, shower stalls, and lovely dorm rooms and living room areas and art decor when I want to know how and what the girls will be learning?Who are their teachers? What credentials do they have? I'm sure they're all qualified, but why would the program not focus on the "education" these young girls so value but instead focused on the material comforts that they'll be experience in direct contrast to their impoverished upbringing?). How ironic, considering that Oprah answered her critics - who wanted to know why she didn't build a similar school, say in the south side of Chicago, her present city of residence - by saying that American kids only want material possessions, whereas South Africans prefer to get an education. Gee, I wonder where our kids picked up that attitude, Oprah, especially when you love to give away cars and treat some of your audiences to makeovers and the like.

I cannot help but think that, with this program, Oprah seems to be filling a far too familiar role of benevolent colonialist, colonizing Africa, reclaiming the "motherland" (as many affluent African Americans are wont to do), and at the same time perhaps fulfilling a wish to have children - incidentally quite a number of the students featured in the program are without mothers, just as Oprah herself is without "daughters," until now.

I commend Oprah for paying attention to the plight of young girls and encouraging Americans (especially African Americans) to consider the youth of the continent, but is this really an expression of black feminism or an attempt to colonize Africa (and, no, just because we have African blood, African Americans are not exempt from recreating similar power dynamics) for the sole purpose of living out our own dreams of motherhood and philanthropy? Wouldn't you know that Oprah is building a home right next to her school so that she can monitor her daughters' growth? Not to mention she has committed to funding their 4-year education to any college or university they attend in the world.

So, despite her efforts to create future leaders of South Africa, she's almost ensuring that 1) the girls will leave their country, after all, when they're ready to date and marry, can they really go back to the men of their community and "lift" them up to their level? That ain't gonna happen!, 2) the girls will be completely unfitted for their communities, and 3) the girls will subscribe to an elitist identity, as one girl already expressed this, when settling into her dorm room: "I was meant to live this life!"

They're very charming, these young girls, but I only hope, 15-20 years down the line, that they don't do what most spoiled daughters do when their mothers fail to equip them for the big bad world from which they have been sheltered (as this academy will become a shelter for them as well): blame their mothers for everything when their lives don't unfold according to plan. Girls can't arise as "leaders" when their very community fails to see them as such. They and everyone else will need re-education if they were to ever find seats in parliament or on the boards of multinational corporations. In the meantime, I hope the mass puking that occurred on their inauguration Christmas dinner is not an ominous foreshadowing of things to come.