‘Portlandia’ Edges into ‘Stuff White People Like’ Territory

(IFC)

If Stuff White People Like were a television show, it would be Portlandia. The show, which stars former Saturday Night Live comedian Fred Armisen and Sleater-Kinney-co-founder-turned-music-commentator Carrie Brownstein, is airing on the Independent Film Channel and is set in—you guessed it—Portland. And what better place to set a series that mocks mostly white, urban, liberal culture than one of the whitest cities in America?

There’s been much debate about what, if anything, constitutes white culture. But it does seem clear that there is just as much a stereotype of white liberal culture as there is of white conservative culture. As much as we imagine the average white social conservative to be an SUV-driving, megachurch-attending, McDonald’s-eating, GOP-voting, Wal-Mart-shopping white person, we also imagine the average social liberal to be a yoga-doing, farmers-market-shopping, arugula-eating, library-card-holding, bike-riding, latte-sipping, liberal-blog-reading white person. [Full disclosure: This last weekend I attended a yoga class, checked books out form my local library, and stopped in at a store that specializes in local meat and dairy. I also have been known to occasionally nibble on arugula and pursue the occasional liberal blog.]

The shorthand for this stereotype is often “hipster” or “aging hipster”—someone with enough time and money to update a Tumblr and form opinions about the latest indie rock band while Tweeting about it incessantly. If you need further help on this concept, feel free to browse the archive of the New York Times style section. Of course, there are urban liberals that are non-white (incidentally an idea the Times style section also delved into). The reality is, of course, much more complex than that: Not all that partake in hipster culture are white; not all whites are hipsters. But for all of the complexities, these stereotypes still exist—the culture typified in Portlandia is indeed predominantly white.

And Portlandia isn’t afraid to mock such culture. The pilot episode, which has been getting some love from sites such as Videogum (itself highly beloved among hipsters), features a musical number titled “The Dream of the ‘90s Is Alive in Portlandia” that skewers urban white liberals who seem to never work. This is perhaps a bit of a sore spot since unemployment is 9.4 percent nationally and Oregon’s is slightly above that, at 10.5 percent. One skit even features a cameo from Boardwalk Empire star Steve Buscemi (which also features issues of Bitch magazine in the background). Urban liberals might find some of the actions of the characters uncomfortably familiar.

Of course, the show, for all its comedic gems, opens up larger questions about what kind of race-based mockery is acceptable. Indeed, people had issues with Stuff White People Like for that very reason. Even mocking white people on the basis of race is still problematic because it more mocked a specific subset of urban culture and class than it did white people specifically. Portlandia suffers from many of the same problems. It is written by, produced by, and stars white people of a certain class. There are a few non-whites in the ensemble scenes and they may bring in non-white comedians/comediennes down the road, but by and large, Portlandia is a show made for white people by white people. That’s not to say non-whites can’t or don’t watch the show and enjoy it, but the show definitely comes from a specific perspective of urban, white, middle-class/upper-middle-class, liberal culture.

Ultimately the show is a savvy exploration of self-mockery of a subset of lefty culture. Sometimes it’s good to take a moment to laugh at the absurdity of a culture taken to an extreme. It’s a medicine arugula-eating liberals might be happy to take.

Cross posted.

Justice Brennan, Sexism, and Desegregation

OK, so admittedly over the break I geeked out on Supreme Court stuff. Majorly. I read a tome of a biography on now-deceased Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. called Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion by Seth Stern and Stephen Wermiel. The book itself is an engaging and fascinating read and it made me wish that one day I have the opportunity to write such an interesting and well-written biography of someone admirable.

But Justice Brennan, as admirable as he was -- he was considered moderate when he joined, but eventually became one of the most reliable liberal votes on the Court -- he was by no means perfect. One of the points the authors take pains to describe is that Brennan, despite reliably voting on behalf of the rights of women and minorities, did little to integrate either into his professional or personal life in a meaningful way. He even once declared that he might have to resign if he had to serve on the Court with a women. (When Sandra Day O'Connor joined in 1981, Brennan did not, in fact, resign.)

They even describe during the early 1970s his reluctance to hire female law clerks, including distinguished UCLA law professor Alison Grey. When Brennan again rejected another female candidate on the basis of her sex, it took a letter from Brennan's former law clerk Stephen Barnett to convince Brennan to change his mind. Bennett argued that not only was Brennan surely headed toward a sex discrimination lawsuit, but that his bias was also inconsistent with his own opinions.

Bennett wrote: “your blanket refusal to accept a woman clerk is not just ‘sexist,’ and not just contrary to government policy; it seems to me that it is literally unconstitutional, under the decisions” Brennan had written or joined in. Brennan than hired his first female clerk, Marsha Berzon, who was appointed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals under former President Bill Clinton.

Likewise, though Brennan's opinions were key in desegregating schools (he preferred the word "desegregation" to "integration" which a friend who had recently traveled in the South made Southerners think of interracial marriage), his own life was quite segregated. He'd moved out of Newark before a large African American population had arrived, and when he moved to Washington to take his job on he Court, he lived in the very white neighborhood of Georgetown. Though he briefly attended a Catholic church started by African Americans who had been banned from another Catholic church, he stopped attending after a while. Brennan hired his first (and only) African American law clerk during his last term on the Court.

Brennan is probably like many liberals even today, who might advocate for progressive policies but find their own lives quite racially or even gender segregated. Sometimes it helps when someone else holds up a mirror for you.

Slavery and Our Country's Past

On Wednesday Michelle Obama asked a group of 6th and 7th graders visiting the White House, "Did you know that African American slaves helped to build this house?" It's a rare moment of honesty about our country's past.

It reminded me of last weekend, when my cousin was visiting D.C. we went to the top of the Washington monument, something I've never done in the two-and-a-half years I've lived in the city. On the elevator on the way down, a man in a top hat and penguin suit that worked for the Park Service mentioned that "some may wonder" if the monument was built by slaves. The answer? Apparently no one is sure -- or willing to admit -- how many, if any, slaves were used to build the Washington monument.

Robert Mills, the architect of the monument, once wrote that "slavery is an evil" and some believed he paid everyone that worked on the project. But I tend to think that historic opposition to slavery is often mistakenly equated with modern equality work. Even if it's true that Mills opposed slavery and demanded that the blacks working on the project be paid, it's almost certain they were paid at a lower rate than the white workers. After all, it's clear that even as the country's foremost abolitionist, Abraham Lincoln still didn't believe in equality for whites and blacks. It was the attitude of the time, but that doesn't excuse it.

Happy Birthday NAACP!

Today is Lincoln's birthday. It's also the 100th anniversary of the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, one of the most important organizations in our country's history. I'm going to refer you to the Miami Harold's Leonard Pitts, Jr., who has a fantastic column on the subject today:

The Movement, which held a subsequent meeting at Harper's Ferry, W. Va., issued a statement that said in part, ''We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America.'' But the movement, hampered by various difficulties, soon sputtered and became inactive.

Then the riot came.

For six days in August 1908, a mob of white people surged through the streets of Springfield, Ill., lynching and maiming black people at will and at whim. The irony of this happening in the hometown of Abraham Lincoln, earnestly if somewhat simplistically revered as the Great Emancipator, was lost on no one, the rioters least of all. ''Lincoln freed you, we'll show you your place,'' they cried as they flogged black people through the streets.

The appalling spectacle energized white liberals like Mary White Ovington and Oswald Garrison Villard. On Lincoln's 100th birthday, Feb. 12, 1909, they joined with DuBois and other remnants of the Niagara Movement to issue a call for a conference on race.

That call -- a century ago Thursday -- was the birth certificate of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Lincoln may have emancipated the slaves, but it is the work of organizations like the NAACP that continue to work toward freedom.

Still Fighting Old Civil Rights Battles

Femocracy points to an LA Times article that reveals for many of those gays and lesbians of color, marriage isn't necessarily at the forefront of their civil rights concerns. It's not because they don't feel marriage is important, it's just that it falls far down on the list of addressing other highly offensive things that happen to people of color every day:

At a time when blacks are still more likely than whites to be pulled over for no reason, more likely to be unemployed than whites, more likely to live at or below the poverty line, I was too busy trying to get black people registered to vote, period; I wasn't about to focus my attention on what couldn't help but feel like a secondary issue.

It's a fair point in this contentious post-Prop 8 mania. Many gays and lesbians of color still have a lot of civil rights to work through, and may not consider marriage at the top of their priority list.

Black (not gay) in America

So I haven't seen CNN's Black in America. I probably won't watch it because it'll just end up making me angry. This always happens when a mainstream group sets out to create the definitive piece on a large group of people that isn't monolithic. One of the best criticisms of the the series was on The Bilerico Project today. The writer, H. Alexander Robinson, points out that they experience presented by the series came from a largely straight perspective:

In almost every segment there was an opportunity to bring Black gay men, lesbian women, bisexuals and transgender men and women into the discussion.

Yet there was nothing, not even a suggestion that we exist.

He also starts with a great W.E.B. Du Bois quote, "How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word. And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,--peculiar even for one who has never been anything else." It's hard to include all perspectives when you set out on such a project like Black in America, but it seems that there was little thought into anything other than a very specific perspective.

Accounting For Race

There is a WaPo article today about a study released on a 1994 adoption law that was designed to increase adoption of black children. The problem is that the law didn't really work; adoption of black children increased, but only marginally. The law forbids discussing race during the adoption process, and social parents can't specifically address the issues of white parents raising a black child.

The law had not significantly changed the situation, the new report found. In 2006, black children represented 15 percent of the nation's children yet made up 32 percent of the half a million in foster care. Black children still waited longer for adoption than white children, and the adoption rate for black children barely rose from 17 percent of those awaiting adoption in 1996 to 20 percent in 2003.

It seems to me that the main problem with the law is that it's the same kind of erroneous thinking that's been applied to affirmative action for years. The thinking seems to be that people don't want to take race into account so in the end it is non-white people that end up losing out.

Cross posted at Matt's.

SNL Makes a Joke Out of Race

Probably as a testiment to the fact that I no longer watch Saturday Night Live, I just read about this controversy today. It seems SNL used Fred Armisen, an actor of Asian and Hispaic decent, to depict presidential candidate Barack Obama in a debate skit.

Armisen has played Prince in a skit as well, with no controversey response. To me it is a bit reminicent of the old blackface comedy skits, but in "post-racial" America maybe people aren't up in a fury about actors playing characters of another race for comedic purposes.

For me the larger issue has more to do with SNL's casting generally. Perhaps they didn't have a black actor that resembeld Obama closely enough. It might be equally problematic to have one black actor who was a stand-in for every black male they choose to satarize. In my experience, SNL's cast is overwhelmingly white. The subtext could be interpreted as only white people are funny. (Obviously not true, if you've ever seen Dave Chappelle.) But why is it so hard to find black actors for Saturday Night Live's cast? If they did have a more diverse cast, it would probably change the dynamic, the humor, and the audience of the show. And that might not be a bad thing.