Why Must You Pull The Race Card…Again?

Yesterday I came across this post on Tikkun Magazine’s blog that [indirectly] asked for feedback as to whether or not the movie Avatar was racist (I commented on it by the way). It linked this article/rant that the movie fell into the the trap of using White privilege so hence White guilt to drive its point home. I read these pieces with no expectations that I would be seeing the film later on that evening. After seeing it, this is what went through my mind (seriously).

“How in the world was that movie racist?”

Now I am your run-of-the-mill liberal when it comes to being a proponent for inter/cross-cultural understanding. I am not the type of person to bury their head in the sand about these issues; because I think that it makes for a better society. And I appreciate well articulated protests to elements of our popular culture that smell of racism. But I really had to roll my eyes at this. Couldn’t the film have gotten brownie points for making the lead character a paraplegic? (As a temporarily disabled person, I appreciated Jake Scully’s character and attitude a lot!) And also, I know that there is a great danger in ‘crying wolf’ in regards to racism. It causes others to not take racism seriously…or give it the full attention that is deserves.

Ironically, both of those articles were written by White people. So the title of my article hearkens to me, and not them! This is because I recognize that I tend to talk about racism a bit too much. However in this case, it was hard to resist the ability to show others that Black people are not trigger-happy when it comes to calling a situation “racist”. I can only hope that other non-minority liberals would follow suit. Actually I lay no personal blame here; a lot of it has to do with the conditioning that seems to take place in many of our institutions of higher learning; that there is a clear liberal slant given to critical thinking. Almost anything that exists among our popular culture has to be deemed as “politically correct” before it is allowed to pass on without criticism. By looking for these problems and issues, you miss the greater picture and the ability to just accept our culture for what it really is.

Avatar was a great movie, one of the better ones I’ve seen this year (thank goodness I got it in before the end!). Reading the reactions of others did not make me sit and critically tear the movie to shreds while I was watching it. In the end, I felt good about that — that I had not grown ’so touchy’ to the point where I would not be able to sit and simply enjoy an entertaining film. But don’t worry, my mechanism for getting offended at ‘innocent racist behavior’ was well intact; for also earlier in the day, I saw an entry on Snopes about this:

Now that right there is racist. Someone creating a black baby doll and putting a hat that has “Lil’ Monkey” on it — the thought that anyone even imagined that was ok is mind boggling. A White man joining up with blue aliens and converting to their ways is not even in the same ballpark…

So please; please try to enjoy life without thinking that everything is part of a conspiracy theory to ingrain the notion of White/European supremacy into all of us. It is not a conspiracy — in many ways, that is how it is. Perhaps in 200 years, will have Sino-supremacy to deal with, and many of the world citizens will have to deal with inferiority issues about not being Chinese. It is what you have to put up with when you don’t live in a utopia.