Racial identity in the media

For this last post of the chapter, we are asked to see how racial identity and identities are dealt with in visual media, using Dyer as a model.

I chose week from 21-28 September 2014.

Yusra Hussien

One story that caught my eye was the disappearance of Yusra Hussien. Yusra lives in Bristol, and attends a school where I work, so the story is close to home.

Yusra disappeared on 24 September, and is evidently headed for Syria, presumably to meet up with Islamic fighters, assumed to be Islamic State, the brutal force that has captured much of Iraq and is active also on Syria and Turkey. 

The plight of Yusra's family is dealt sympathetically in the media; the coverage is nonjudgmental and as sympathetic as if the family were of any other ethnic background. 

Tom and Jerry 

A story emerged that Amazon Prime Movie videos featuring cartoons of the famous cat and mouse now include the following warning:

"Tom and Jerry shorts may depict some ethnic and racial prejudices that were once commonplace in American society. Such depictions were wrong then and are wrong today."

The reference is to the depiction of the black maid in the cartoons, probably to the fact that she is the maid not the owner of the house, and speaks in a stylized way.

There is a problem with the 'warning', that we are judging a cartoon written fifty years ago by the standards of today. It is arrogant to say such depictions were wrong then, as per the quote in the article:

"We're reading history backwards, judging people in the past by our values," said Prof Furedi from the University of Kent.

Representations on behalf of minority and disadvantaged groups can become too self righteous, too politically correct. Dyer points out that looking at minority groups with too much single mindedness can be counter productive as it highlights the 'departures from the norm'.  This is one example where less said the better.

 Nicholas Hlobo at Tate Modern

I visited Tate Modern on 28 September and saw an exhibition of Hlobo's work, including Belindile:

Hlobo uses Xhosa words as titles for his works, which often typify the handicrafts of South African women, such as weaving and stitching. The materials in Belindile are from garages in Johannesburg. He fashions them into phallic shapes, and the use of inner tubes is an allusion to condoms. Hlobo thus promotes his people, his language and culture, and alludes to both genders in his work. Society today takes this for granted; fifty years ago there would be very few black artist, let alone one whose work is shown in a premier gallery. By promoting his racial identity, Hlobo turns Fanon's Fact of Blackness on itself. In the same way, Hlobo belies Dyer's views, as his is not a view of race dependency or awareness of self by differences with others. It is simpler than that, Hlobo is saying: this is what we do, this is how we are.

Dorset Echo

While walking in Dorset on 26 September, I noticed this poster:

Dorset is not renowned for being a hotbed of racial hatred, and perhaps that is the message from this poster: that racial incidents are sufficiently uncommon to warrant a headline in the local paper. I visited the paper's website later, searched for 'race hate brothers' and got......precisely nothing. Perhaps that too tells a tale..

Scottish Nationalism

At the beginning of the week, there was discussion over the failure of the YES campaign to secure the majority vote for Scottish independence in a vote a few days earlier, failing eventually by a margin of 55:45. This has nothing to do with race identity in the sense of skin colour, but it does in the sense of a minority group that has a sense of its own identity distinct from that of the majority. Dyer's allusion to Sartre's thesis of self awareness by contrast is relevant here. The Nationalists' man complaint was a feeling of being governed by 'Westminster', that the government elected here was not theirs (i.e. a Conservative led coalition running a country that returned just one Conservative MP in 2010) and that Labour, the largest party in Scotland in terms of seats, was too 'English'. 


Media coverage was generally objective, though there was criticism of the BBC from the YES campaign that the corporation was taking a line that was too aligned with the NO campaign. Nationalists, too, considered that big business was out to threaten the YES campaigners with job losses and firms moving south of the border. In the end, it was probably the case that too many people had too much to lose from independence to risk voting YES; less of a sense of identity, more of a vote about economic well-being.

Family Jules: NNN (No Naked Niggahs)

Barkley Hendricks 1974 Available from http://www.ozartsetc.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/ozartsetc_barkley-hendricks_painting_00-e1361658168252.jpg

This is a second work of art seen at the Tate Modern on 28 September. This is one of four paintings Hendricks made featuring George Jules Taylor, an former art student at a class run by Hendricks.

This is a provocative piece of art. Black nudes are not a common subject; Hendricks is making a tatement simply painting one. It is an antidote to the traditional white female nude on both geneder and racial grounds. To add to the effect, there is an implied 'reverse scopophilia' as a woman's face disguised in the dress on the left is staring at Taylor.

Hendricks takes a tilt at the reluctance of artists to engage in nude painting, the cause of which Powell (2002) contends was the result of artists fearing being accused of racism and/or pornography (another example of political correctness working in counter productive ways).

As regards Dyer, this is surely an example of where the politically correct taboos enforced by a white dominated society have been challenged in an open fashion.

Reference:

Powell, Richard (2002)  Black Art: A Cultural History, London 2002. Quoted in http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hendricks-family-jules-nnn-no-naked-niggahs-l02979/text-summary