A few years ago I went to see “Avenue Q” on Broadway, mostly because I’d heard its funniest song used in a World of Warcraft machinima vid and thought any play that makes a song out of internet porn was a must-see.
(…Yes, I’m a geek. If you didn’t know, now you know.)
There was another song in the play, called “Everyone’s a little bit racist”. This one wasn’t funny — not to me, anyway, though lots of people in the audience laughed. A sample of the lyrics:
Everyone’s a little bit racist
It’s true.
But everyone is just about
As racist as you!
If we all could just admit
That we are racist a little bit,
And everyone stopped being
So PC
Maybe we could live in -
Harmony!
The core flaw of the song lies in its unquestioned flattening of the power structure of racism. It equates racist jokes with acts of historical discrimination; the attitudes of an oppressed group with the attitudes of its oppressors; and doesn’t address the continuing systemic aspects of racism at all. Racism, this song suggests, is just about people’s ordinary dislike for others who are different from them, and if we’d all just relax and let it all hang out, we’d get over it.
So yeah. ‘Bout as funny as a fart in a crowded room, or so it seemed to me. Needless to say, I was silent and uncomfortable during that song, while the theater full of white people laughed around me and had a grand old time.
I cite this admittedly old incident because I keep seeing the chorus of that song in the apparently-spontaneous mass-spewage of racist stupidity across multiple media formats that’s taken place over the past few months, and the debates that have resulted therefrom.
It’s probably not a new iteration; it’s probably just that I’m only now noticing this particular response pattern. But you can see several examples of it in this, one of the later conversations in the “RaceFail 2009″ debate that occurred on science fiction author John Scalzi’s blog. This particular convo was hosted by our very own ABW in her Srius Authar guise, with some peanut-gallery chiming in by Yours Truly in her Srius Authar guise. It was all terribly serious. Now, you should really take this conversation in context, if you can, though RaceFail was massive; here’s yet another summary and two preceding conversations that may help you understand what was going on. My own interpretation: for the previous two months, the speculative fictional blogosphere had been afire with conversations about race which incorporated some healthy helpings of racist behavior by noted authors, editors, and so on. An ongoing complaint in this debate had been that if it was only nicer, politer, less angry, then maybe some real conversation could take place. …Yeah. I know. So, the Scalzi conversations were an effort to generate this nice polite discussion. You’ll notice that in all three examples, the PoC in the conversation gradually just stopped talking.
Anyway, the thing that I kept seeing in these discussions was a refusal on the part of some white-identified folks to accept the “authority” that people of color have in discussions of racism. (Using scare quotes because I’m not sure authority is the right word. The earned wisdom of experience. Moral superiority, maybe. Agency? I dunno. I’ll go with authority for now.) PoC aren’t always right about what is racist, goes the refrain; sometimes they’re too angry to be reasonable, or too emotional to see the big picture, or too personally-involved to have the necessary detachment when they’re evaluating a situation. (Not like those always-rational white folks.) Some of them have hidden agendas which require them to make a racist mountain out of an innocuous molehill because their finances or their egos or whatever depend on holding a position of moral superiority. Or sometimes the problem is White Guilt, which leads white people to anxiously accept everything a brown person says as truth. We should all just talk as equals, these authority-resisters insist, rather than having PoC lecture whites about right and wrong in the case of race. Because after all, Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist ™.
There’s some truth in this. (No, really.) We’ve all seen the Al Sharptons of the world profit from others’ misfortune, and we’ve all seen white people who go overboard, seeking expiation of their sins rather than dialogue. The problem with this denial of PoC authority in matters of racism, however, is that like the Avenue Q song, it flattens the power structure of racism, again suggesting that everyone’s experiences are equal and therefore we all have important things to bring to the conversation.
This just isn’t true. Everyone’s experience of racism is not equal. And too often white people bring defensiveness, fetishization, exotification, implicit associations, and their own hidden agendas to the conversation, which just fraks things up on both sides. To be fair, some PoC bring these things to the table too; unfortunately we’ve all been hit with the racism stick. But one of the commonalities of the PoC experience in colonized/white-dominant countries is that eventually, most of us look around and notice the system, because its negative effects become impossible to deny. And in noticing the system, we do assume some moral authority. The system discourages acknowledgment, after all. It works best if it remains semi-visible, “silent but deadly”; even to notice it is a challenging act. The white experience has the opposite commonality — denial of the system’s existence, and of its beneficial effect on their lives. So even when whites begin to acknowledge the system, the habit of denial is hard to break. Denial of PoC authority is just another manifestation of it.
So the next time you encounter someone who cites the Avenue Q chorus in a discussion of racism, I suggest the following refrain:
Everyone’s a little bit racist
It’s true
But some are still more so than others
Like you!*
(Yeah, OK, I’m not a musician, shuddup.)
The whole show’s a celebration of mediocrity; the message seems to be that you’re not perfect and shouldn’t try to be, and that we should all abandon our dreams if they don’t work out. It’s unsurprising that the show’s ideas on race are equally lacking.
Oh God, there was a *third* installment of that? Now I have to go read it.
I am still trying to wrap my head around the number of white people in those threads who somehow never encountered a discussion about racism before (?) or at least managed to be completely unaffected by them.
I’m also still trying to examine my own privilege in the setting: i *left* fandom early, and have just been touching it with a long pole the last few years, and then a combination of sexism in person at our local SF bookstore, and Racefail all over LJ, makes me think “you know i could mail order books and never talk to any these people again.” and wonder if it’s just the privilege of backing down from a lot of ally work, or if it really is that I don’t think the old SFers are worth it.
I don’t think that’s entirely true. Take this bit, for example:
Right there we have one minority character generalizing about Jews and whites, and complaining about the smelly [probably brown] taxi drivers. When the Jew and the Monster chime in on this last complaint, the black character points out that even being able to complain about this is a sign of privilege to which he doesn’t have access.
Admittedly, Avenue Q isn’t discussing this very seriously, but then it also doesn’t take seriously the possibility that, say, Kate Monster might object to internet pornography because it’s damaged a prior relationship; she’s just assumed to be a prude whose concerns ought to be laughed aside.
Thank you so much for posting this! I’m a huge geek for musicals, but that song has always bothered me.
For me, the problem with the song isn’t that it fails to acknowlege that some people might be more racist than others, but that it frames racism as purely an individual flaw — “no one’s really color blind” — and doesn’t have any awareness either that there are systematic problems which are not at all even-handed, or that acting to remedy racism isn’t the same as being racist.
And PG, even the lyric you quote has significant flattening of racism; note that “the whites have all the power” is seemingly just as racist and problematic, according to the song, as “the Jews have all the money.”
Essentially, the song’s view of racism is limited to the idea that people make generalizations based on race, or make racist jokes, or fail to be color blind.
If that’s your* entire view of what racism means, then all generalizations are the same, and organizing a school for the oppressed monster minority becomes just as racist as saying the Jews have all the money, or that the Mexicans should learn to speak English. If Kate wasn’t such a racist, she wouldn’t even notice who’s a monster and who isn’t, according to the song’s ethic.
(*The word “your” here is used generically, and doesn’t imply that I think that’s your view, PG!)
I’m also a bit disturbed by the actively racist humor used in the song — in particular, the fun made of the Asian woman’s accent. I suspect the creators of Avenue Q (one of whom is Latino, iirc) didn’t mean the song to be taken seriously, and I’m being too serious. On the other hand, Jeff Whitty, who wrote Avenue Q’s book, certainly doesn’t think that excuse flies when Jay Leno tells gay jokes.
For anyone who’s curious, you can see and hear the song performed here, and lyrics are here.
You know, thanks for this. That song always troubled me too, but there’s so much else in the musical that I find howlingly funny that I just rationalized it. I told myself that the point of the song was to make fun of people who think that way, since all the characters involved sound illogical and more than a little dumb.
But the fact remains that the song is a huge comic relief for people who do think that way, and for those audience members the song does nothing to correct or subvert the assumption that a little bit of racism is okay.
So, not good enough. Now I feel better equipped to challenge this, and things like it.
Amp,
Agreed that the song completely disregards systemic racism and treats racism as merely a personal failing that pretty much all of us share to some extent (like, say, the failure to be charitable), and therefore for which we should cut each other a little slack. (The impetus for the song is when Princeton asks Kate Monster if she’s related to Trekkie Monster, and she accuses him of racism.) However, systemic racism is a rather large thing to take on in a single song and the entire musical is focused on interpersonal relationships and individual experiences, not on any large themes. As I said in my initial comment, I’m sure someone who has had a very bad effect on her life from internet pornography would find “The Internet Is for Porn” to be a horribly over-simplified and dismissive way of treating the pornography issue.
Wrt the letter to Leno, Whitty’s objection seems to be that Leno perpetually treats gay people as the butt of jokes and stereotypes them, almost objectifies them; they don’t exist as fully-realized human beings in Leno’s humor. In contrast, I don’t think it can be said of any character in Avenue Q that they are nothing more than the stereotype; the Asian immigrant who mispronounces some English has the song that does the best job of any part of the musical at combining comedy and realism (“The More You Ruv Someone”). But then that song might be seen as minimizing the seriousness of domestic abuse, inasmuch as Christmas Eve is invoking the idea that it’s acceptable to want to kill someone you purport to love.
I’m pretty sure if I go through Avenue Q, there’s going to be something in every single song that’s treated as a joke even though it’s quite serious.
See, here’s the thing. It’s a song from an over-the-top comic musical, so whatever.
What bothers me is that people use it as an actual argument. And it’s ridiculous: I’m racist, in that I have prejudices and preconceptions about people from other racial groups. But Tom Metzger and David Duke are racist in a very different way, in that they actively hate people of other racial groups and want to deprive them of opportunities (Metzger may even want to kill them, though he disavows those statements).
If I woke up one morning and was told by an angel that I would become a white supremacist by evening, I would kill myself. It’s bad enough being an ordinarily racist and clueless white person–I would never want to live a life dominated by hate.
Using scare quotes because I’m not sure authority is the right word. The earned wisdom of experience. Moral superiority, maybe. Agency? I dunno. I’ll go with authority for now.
How about “more experience in being on the shit end of the stick of racism”?
This seems to be a problem with a lot of humor (or attempts at humor by white, ostensibly liberal people) about racism, going back at least to Archie Bunker. There’s this problem of what, exactly, it is that we’re laughing at, and the related problem that the joke works both ways. That is, if you’re racist, you can still find it funny without being discomforted or re-examining your own position.
In the interest of full disclosure, I’m pretty sure I laughed at that song. I think some of the humor comes from the idea that being called a racist is the worst thing in the world, so no one ever wants to admit to even a little bit of it, and yet, well, everyone is a little bit racist. It’s obviously pretty important, though, where you take the discussion from there. If that’s the end of it – everyone is racist so we should stop caring if people are racist and we should stop working on our own biases – obviously that’s a problem. If that’s the beginning of it – the beginning of working on your own racism, looking at systematic issues, etc. – that’s good. I find the argument the song endorses the first approach somewhat persuasive. But I’m not sure how you make the second approach funny.
So I see two, not at all mutually exclusive, reasons why so much humor about racism ends up being problematic in just this way. One is that the writers/artists don’t really know how to make the second type of point in a funny way, so they go for “edgy” outrage humor, assuming the over-the-top-ness of the stereotypes will indicate our mutual disapproval of that sort of thing, throw in some stuff like the line PG quoted about not getting a cab, and hope the audience gets what they were going for. Two is that the writers/artists don’t want to upset their mostly white audiences too much, so they just don’t probe too deeply.
I like this song better.
I like this song better.
http://www.spaff.com/poesy/sexist.html
It was originally inspired by Mel Gibson’s drunken outburst, but it keeps on being relevant.
Three is that they may (like many people) simply have an understanding of or opinions about racism which is different from the understanding and opinions which you have.
Personally, I am more inclined to think it is a lack of thought about or agreement with your perspective, and less inclined to think that the writers know all about racism, know just what they are doing and choose not to offend their audience too much. Or that they know all about it and are simply not skilled enough to express themselves.
See, as an artist, I think the possibility that artists aren’t skilled enough to express what they want to express is huge. I see professionals wrestling with that all the time.
However, I agree that this — writers know all about racism, know just what they are doing and choose not to offend their audience too much — is unlikely to be occurring on a conscious level.
Okay, so I had this whole long response to Sailorman, but what it boils down to is that it wasn’t my intent to suggest the thought process I described was occurring on a conscious level (and re-reading my comment, I wasn’t very clear about that). I’m not thinking “We know exactly what we SHOULD say about racism, but we’re going to do this other thing,” but more “Let’s do something funny about stereotypes and racism, something about how we’re too uptight, but we don’t want to make it out like big deal racism is okay, and don’t make it too didactic or serious.” I’m actually trying to extend a benefit of the doubt, that they didn’t intend the take-away to be “It’s okay to indulge all my worst prejudices because everyone’s a little bit racist,” any more than Norman Lear’s intent was to turn Archie Bunker into a folk hero standing up to the PC police. I do think this tendency (whether intentional or not) to make racism somehow cute or lovable when trying to be humorous about it has some relation to being aware that the (white) audience may see something of themselves or a family member in the racist character and not wanting to be too, too harsh on that character.
chingona,
A good point, and one that I think works within the plot as well. If Princeton’s thoughtless question to Kate Monster is seen as making him A Bad Person, then it doesn’t make sense for Kate Monster to be with him. Whatever quantity of racism (a little bit?) is embedded in that question has to be forgivable, a minor flaw rather than a cardinal sin, or else the romance doesn’t work and the audience is obligated to root for them to break up like it’s a Lifetime Movie (“girl, he’s no good!”).