Pop-Culture Criticism/Reactive Anti-Racism
by Mauro Sifuentes
I’ve noticed a giant uptick in pop-culture criticism, especially within progressive, queer, and people of color communities. This criticism is usually aimed at news articles, current events, judicial maneuvers, police cruelty, movies, music videos, celebrities, etc. that exemplify a dominant racism. Critiques are usually leveled against forms of racism that most college Ethnic/Gender/Women’s/Queer Studies students can easily recognize after taking an Intro class and that many feel equipped to analyze based on rudimentary tools. Paring it down to the essential messaging, the arguments in these analyses follow this basic structure: point out something is racist, list how that thing is racist/appropriative, blame the white people responsible, then end the piece of writing feeling righteous and vindicated. Usually, people of color are portrayed as immune from blame and the category “white” is rendered flat and monolithic.
I am usually quick to notice and critique subtle dynamics formed through a racism that permeates every aspect of U.S. culture. Nothing here exists outside of racism. Let me repeat: nothing here exists outside the dynamics of racism. Having said this, I also feel it important to say that white people aren’t exactly the problem, though this may sound strange. It is the regulatory ideal of whiteness that strangles all people, except white people stand to benefit disproportionately for assimilating into these ideals. Having had many conversations with both white and mixed-raced people about experiences of race, I’m often baffled by how dismissive many progressive people of color can be when it comes to issues of race. White, as a category of analysis, is an ever-shifting category, with lines drawn and redrawn constantly. There are also huge differences in racial experience, mediated by class, nationality, gender, sexuality, ability, region, and religion. Our impoverished analysis of race has led us to passively absorb tropes of biological determinism that tell us that race is about genetics rather than socialization. Just as all people of color of various identities contain great depths of diversity, so do white people. We need to acknowledge the violent processes that go into teaching white people how to exploit imbalances of power. We need to make space for the rich histories of resistance to racism that have existed within white and European communities for centuries; to ignore these histories is also contributing to a disturbing trend of anti-Semitism that I’ve picked up on in communities of color. We refuse to acknowledge the different ways that Jewish communities live their whiteness – to say that all white/European people are always-only oppressor is to mask rich and complicated legacies of Jewish (and Irish and working class and…) resistance. As a mixed-raced person of Mexican and Irish/Scandinavian (white) descent, I often feel as though I have to leave a part of my family history at the door when I enter into communities of color, especially those who invest a lot of energy in imagining themselves as pure and devoid of the problematic dynamics of oppression. One of the most intense effects of a history of racism is the search for purity – an effect I see reproduced in many progressive communities of color. We cannot grant ourselves the privilege of reactivity if we ever hope for change. Our analyses of white people and culture must become more particular and robust. Reactivity can be a moment to pass through as we come into full consciousness about the devastating effects of racism, as our eyes are opening and we are seeing race for the first time through a critical perspective.
My straight, white, male father used to unknowingly absorb a lot of my frustration with regard to my immediate family’s history of assimilation. I used to blame him in my mind for a lot of the issues that came up in my family, with regard to classed and raced expectations of me, until I realized that my own analysis was so flat that I wasn’t able to acknowledge the ways that living with a family of color as the only white member shifted him in so many crucial ways – I found that I was, in fact, reproducing a denial of agency to myself and my other family members. People of color are often portrayed as passive actors, rather than agents of change. My father has become pleasantly odd through the decades, doing most of the cooking, always offering food to visitors and friends, asking questions of curiosity and humility about my queer/trans life, and becoming increasingly frustrated with the ways that imbalances of power hurt the world (and his children).
Every resistance is colored by the oppression whose conditions it seeks to alter. Black is beautiful. Queers are sexy. Trans people are powerful. These tropes, while serving as forms of resistance, still leave much unquestioned. We are united only by mistreatment and by the complex ways we have internalized mistreatment; alliance ought not be reduced to Facebook debates and comment-policing. Meaningful engagement requires depth of involvement and continued tenure in community spaces. As the phrase “social justice” becomes increasingly trendy, how people understand what constitutes “social” and “justice” becomes evermore problematic as it is stripped of meaning. We have to learn rigor and what it can look like. We must not focus only on that which affirms us. As many queer spaces are predominantly shaped by those who have been socialized female (women, female-assigned-at birth genderqueer and transgender people), we have to contend with an effect of internalized sexism that no longer requires the presence of straight men to function: we demand interpersonal affirmation because we are denied structural approval in so many moments. When we become locked into specific roles, we are unable to be allies. We need to strengthen our communities so we can be allies to one another and to those outside our immediate circles.
I do not perceive much humility within our communities, beyond self-labeling as such. One result of our oppression as queer people, people of color, and trans people is that we are given the binary option of being a know-nothing or a know-it-all; by this, I mean that in a world that recognizes intellectual posturing as a form of authority, we might not be taken seriously if we demonstrate any admission of partial knowledge. Instead, we flaunt pseudo-knowledge and personal experience as the be-all-end-all. Somewhere along the lines we conflated experience with expertise. While experience and second-hand information can be incredibly useful and powerful, what becomes of us when we try to universalize our experiences inappropriately? It is an act of strength and vulnerability to admit that we are confused, that we don’t know enough, and that we can always push ourselves to be better. If we refuse to fight against class oppression by sidelining issues faced by working class whites, we denigrate the rich history of solidarity between working class whites and people of color. Competing with one another is also a product of internalized oppression – who do we push back on most? How do we engage people across difference? Call-out culture borders on verbal abuse – how do we become strong enough to be hospitable and patient? The violence of conditioning people into different groups is a form of violence that begins when we are all small children and have no say over who influences our perspectives. We must keep this in mind and we must assume that everyone is doing the best they can with the information they have been given – our job is to pay attention to what keeps information away from groups of people and to how we can build relationships to gain the entitlement to push back on all the -isms that come up. We must do all of this while holding ourselves accountable to the -isms that largely go unquestioned in meaningful ways in our own lives.
Drawing binary oppositions (POC/white, black/white, straight/queer, etc.) and focusing energy and attention on white people and all the ways they fuck up distracts us from the work we need to do in so many moments. It is also draining. The hardest thing for us to accept is that white people as individuals do not oppress us, but that structural racism positions people across imbalances of power to enact mistreatment on others. Internalized racism makes it so that we cannot be strategic about how we respond to racism when it shows up interpersonally, so we rage against each white person as if they are the whole structure of racism, freezing both white people and ourselves (people of color) in place. We also need to understand that constructs of race in the United States are particular to this time and place and that what constitutes a white person in San Francisco is different from a white person in the North East United States or a white person in the South or in England or South Africa and so on. Gaining an international perspective will help us think more critically about how race functions here in the U.S.
If we want to study race to gain a nuanced critique of racism, we have to include white people, both as agents of change and as a historical category of study. If we study any group of people, we are bound to find out that there are always margins. Who lives in the margins of whiteness? Might we consider them friends? What has allowed for the flattening of our analyses of white people? Returning to my initial point about pop culture criticism, I would like to emphasize that we can’t allow mainstream representations to shape our politics of dissent because this further perpetuates black/white binaries, which has been a part of racial discourse in this country for at least 400 years. Perhaps now there have been some shifts in more progressive spaces to nominally expand this to a people of color/white binary, but the binary dominates the discourse of race nonetheless. If pop culture analysis is scholarship, I am hesitant to think about what this says about rigor and depth within critical academic thought. Our relationship to easily accessible material lends itself to reactivity, as we are not choosing our own subjects of inquiry outside of market demands; we know that popular culture (including most online news sources) cater to profitability. If the dominant forces are providing us with the majority of our material to critique, they are essentially formulating our resistance for us. Until we learn how to cultivate more capacities around creative interventions and alliances with regard to race, our ability to name racist problematics will never intervene on the devastating effects of structural and institutional racism on our communities.
If you are interested in engaging in dialogue or offering comments/critiques, I’d appreciate your feedback: chicomorenotumblr@gmail.com. Thanks.
