Spike Lee made some pointed remarks, recently, about Tyler Perry's movies perpetuating stereotypes and buffoonery. I just saw an American Experience on Chinese American filmmakers and entertainers and their sense of "otherness" and not having a place to belong. Marginalize, marginalize, is that all this American society does?
There is a post up now on Huffingtonpost.com about people of "mixed race" being the fastest growing group in America--with an accompanying picture of Tiger Woods and President Obama. I've been corresponding for years with a group of "mixed race" bloggers who are still trying to figure out what the hell it means, especially if you have the darker skin or broader features or almond eyes of a "recognizable" minority and get labelled as such. I used to get so angry when people, and they would, would ask me what my ethnic background was. I could easily have answered "white" or "mind your own business" (which was the more frequent reply), but what was the point? No body knows what these labels mean. I got a little bit of a sense of it on the day President Obama was elected, in that a continually marginalized group of people felt a pride and a wonder quite rare in their experience these days. But even he calls himself a "mutt."
And then there are the sub-groups--people with depression, people with chronic illness, people with frizzy hair, people who love cats. I used to sit in those depression groups and especially the early chronic illness groups and listen to the moaning and complaining and wonder where the "people who are depressed but truly hope not to be forever, dayum" or "people with chronic illness who want to know how to deal with this shit on a daily basis so they can live full and exciting lives"... Damnit. And we're all, no matter what color or ethnicity or gender or sexual orientation or where we fall on the spectrum of feline love, trying to figure this bitch out. And I want to wring life like an orange to get all of juice, don't you?
So, back to Tyler Perry--he doesn't need to apologize for his broad portrayals of Black life. Sure, his writing still ain't the greatest and there is definitely an air of buffoonary about some of the characters, but his stories, plays and movies are ALWAYS about redemption. About working through some stuff to progress to the other side. I LOVE the character of Medea, first because it's obvious he has such fun portraying her, second, because she is so herself and wouldn't be any other way and third because the wisdom she spouts is in my bone marrow from all the women I'm descended from, even the Irish, and Scottish and German ones.
I think it's just that we don't have the practice implementing our own integration--I don't know what the hell it means to be mixed race, if anything at all beyond the rich cultural nature of all of the places I'm supposed to come from. Still stereotyping myself as a "Black" woman, still talking that talk and feeling the marginalization, not having learned how to make it not matter.
1 comment:
I like this, Jo!
For me, identifying myself with groups that tell some very real part of my story and provide a particularized connection and kind of support, but nonetheless do not define me, encompass me, or speak to my wholeness... it's problematic. The support and connection is critical, especially when dealing with something as intractable as systemic racism or sexism and marginalization, or as stigmatized or misunderstood as chronic illness (especially if it is for the most part invisible to others), but I have found often that involvement in some groups organized around a particular aspect of my identity often becomes a group exercise in cultivating a rigid and exclusive sense of identity that is dependent on our experiences of victimization and marginalization. And I don't buy it. I think we need both acknowledgment of how we have been victimized or undernourished (either directly through overt violence, or far more commonly, through being devalued or unseen) and safe places to heal the legitimate pain of those experiences, AND we need a larger context that situates us in the felt sense of ourselves us ultimately undefinable, larger than any particular identity, and the playfulness and humor and humility that come from that sense of self. I don't know if I'm making any sense. But I relate to what you're saying about where are the people who can relate to these particular experiences of pain, and yet aren't wedded to these self-concepts and who want to "wring life like an orange to get all the juice". Sweetly said.
This problem isn't limited to groups based on a common identity of suffering either. It can be just as ridiculous and stifling and dishonest a dynamic with groups organized around positive experiences. People in the yoga world, for example, which is a part of my life, are often so self-consciously "I'm so YOGA", and they only have yoga friends, and only buy yoga clothes, and only listen to yoga music, and only think yogic thoughts..... bleh.
I wish we could find ways of honoring how essential our needs for belonging and support are that at the same time acknowledge how ultimately mysterious and un-pin-down-able we all are.
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