Avatar links

Some really perspective critiques of Avatar. Apparently while I was offline there was a lot of criticism of it as racist - which I didn't understand at first. Starting out with LGM:

Annalee Newitz writes that "[w]hether Avatar is racist is a matter of debate," but it isn't: the film is racist. Its fundamental narrative logic is racist: it transposes the cultural politics of Westerns (in which the Native Americans are animists who belong to a more primitive race) onto an interplanetary conflict and then assuages the white guilt that accompanies acts of racial and cultural genocide by having a white man save the noble savages (who are also racists). Unlike King Kong—which wrestled with the racial logic of the original—Avatar reproduces the racist logic of its source material. This is not to say the film is not also a condemnation of American imperialism or disastrous environmental policies, because it's that too.

Makes sense when you read the whole thing.

I like zunguzungu's thoughts on the childlike racism/primitivism of a particularly American type ("Avatar and the American Man-Child"). It's not necessarily racist, in the sense of being negative. But it is patronizing, beause the quality of the natives that Sully admires is their infantalism, their habitus of a pastoral adventureland that he wants to join:

This is why, for example, Jake Sully is such a spoiled brat. To note that he is the worst stereotype of the ugly American isn’t nearly enough; he’s profoundly satisfied with his ignorance and his self-absorption is so awesomely complete and all-encompassing that it seems perfectly natural when other people make huge investments in him, to the point that he makes saying “thank you” all about him. He isn’t surprised or humbled when it turns out that the entire world revolves around him – who else could it possibly revolve around? – and when he first puts on his Na’vi avatar, he thinks nothing of ignoring the advice of people that know better and doing exactly as feels like doing. A shameless and shallow asshole, the only thing that makes him even slightly uneasy is his intermittent “video log” because it forces him to confront how thoughtless he is. But while people will excuse the shallowness of his character on the basis of it being just a popcorn movie or a kid’s movie, or whatever, that shallowness isn’t a bug, it’s a feature, just as George Bush’s mask of ignorance was precisely what made him appealing to so many Americans.

Jake Sully, in other words, is a Western fantasy of spoiled childhood: pure id, he revels in the toys that the world has provided for him without understanding that someone had to make them, without ever questioning his own right to have them. I think that’s why I don’t feel contempt for him, but visceral, gut-level, and troubling disgust. I recognize his desires, because we not only have to get past them to be adults, but because they stay with us. Perhaps we still are, on some level, the sociopaths we were when we were children (that I type this while home for the holidays, in the bedroom I occupied when I was seven, only seems appropriate). Yet it’s also one of the worst aspects of the American cultural tradition that going back to childhood is somehow the fountainhead of political virtue (see, for example, Jefferson, Thomas and Roosevelt, Theodore) because it’s so rarely the childhood of curiosity, games, and sociality that the tradition extols, but rather its reverse, a very particular fantasy of careless anti-social boyishness that tends into misogyny so easily because, to again refer us to Nina Baym, it feminizes the “encroaching, constricting, destroying society” that we American boys must seek to be free of by lighting out for the territories.

Interesting connection to the frontier thesis (as he notes).

this is why you don't give cameras...

...to 24-year old soldiers, or inbred royal twits. Prince Harry strikes again.

all about the benjamins

Amanda at Pandagon links to a post on lynching:

When one of those collections fell into the hands of a professional historian, it opened up a whole large statistical universe of lynching incidents, each of which came with a location, one or more names, dozens or hundreds of faces that can be identified, and importantly, a date. That made it possible to research not just a few lynchings, but hundreds of them, and to compile statistics on what had happened before and after them. And the terrible, but fascinating, bit of secret history turned out to be the immediate aftermath of over half of those lynchings. Over half of those lynchings turned out to involve black men who owned their own successful farms and/or businesses. And the day after the lynchings, those farms and businesses were sold to white neighbors, in closed auctions, for pennies on the dollar, and the surviving real heirs were run out of town. And in a terrifyingly large number of those cases, historians were able to show one or more of the following facts. The buyer was the person who made the initial accusation against the victim. And the buyer was a relative of one or more of the following: the mayor, the chief of police, the local minister and/or the municipal judge.

What's incredibly frustrating is that he doesn't link to the original study. I'll ask the Americanists in the department.

Bonus link in the Pandagon post comments - a PBS documentary about Sundown towns ("Banished")

Don't usually quote in entirety, but this is too precious. From kos:

Politico:

Top Republican strategists are working on plans to protect the GOP from charges of racism or sexism in the general election, as they prepare for a presidential campaign against the first ever African-American or female Democratic nominee.

The Republican National Committee has commissioned polling and focus groups to determine the boundaries of attacking a minority or female candidate, according to people involved. The secretive effort underscores the enormous risk senior GOP operatives see for a party often criticized for its insensitivity to minorities in campaigns dating back to the 1960s.

Step one: stop being racist. Appearing less racist then becomes less of a challenge.

Report itself is of possible utility in discussions of republican party's long-term racism.

Wilson's 'fascism' (sic)

Orcinus reader and historian who specializes in Wilson writes in to destroy the Pantload's chapter on Woodrow. A short summary:

Sure, Wilson was a racist. But so were most Americans at the time (note the lack of resistance to segregation, and the Republicans' declining to reverse Wilson's racist policies in the federal government once they took over). As this prof says, "To put it crudely, all fascists are racist, not all racists are fascist."

He grades Wilson on Payne's 13 points of definition:

• Wilson fails on the 'fascist negations' (being liberal himself, disliking communism but not really caring about it, and thinking conservatives too backwards);
• on fascist goals he gets a full point for suppression of dissent, plus a half point for imperial interventions in Mexico and Haiti;
• on fascist 'mobilizing passions' he gets a meager two points: one for strong executive aspects, and two halfpoints on a few others.

So that's a total of 4 of 13... and that's with him being generous. Wilson does similarly bad on Paxton's list. In total:

Wilson isn't scoring too highly on the fascism scale. Basically he fits Jonah's version of fascism because he supported reform and was a racist. Not exactly a convincing argument. Where's the love of war? It's not there. Where's the scapegoating of a minority? Again, it's not there, expect for a short period during the war. Where is the religious hatred? Wilson appointed the first Jewish and Catholic professors at Princeton and the first Jewish member of the Supreme Court. Where is the love of the military? Wilson respected the military but believed it had to be subservient to civilian leadership.

But what about showing Birth of a Nation in the White House? That means he's racist! And therefore fascist!

Birth of a Nation! I hear you cry. Yes, he saw it in the White House. (It was, for what it's worth, the second movie shown in the White House, not the first.) He was friends with Thomas Dixon in grad school, briefly. They stayed in touch, but were not close. Dixon asked Wilson to view a new movie that was a wonderful new teaching tool. Wilson loved movies and agreed. It was shown in the White House because Wilson was in mourning and so could not go to the theater (his wife died in August 1914; Birth was shown in February 1915). Did he say "It's like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true."? Probably not. The only eyewitness account, taken down decades later, claimed he sat silently through the movie and left without saying a word. I've held his program from the movie. It's been wadded up into a ball. His friend Dr. Cary Grayson picked it up and saved it. Did Wilson wad it up as he sat? We don't know, but it is an interesting possibility. He treated most of his theater programs gently.

Wilson MAY have told D.W. Griffith that "it's like teaching history with lightning", especially since the movie was promoted to Wilson as a new teaching tool. But the rest of the quote is likely Dixon's invention. I've spent a couple years tracking down the origins of this quote and I am fairly certain now that he did not praise Birth as in the quote, and in fact he refused to endorse or condemn it.

What a great service Dave provides by forwarding this professor's detailed thoughts. As for the Pantload... Dave himself has some comments on his sources. Lively and Abrams... lovely. A lot of other crap in there too.

I gather he just found the weight of historical evidence, which clearly shows a vicious anti-homosexuality as an expression of Nazi ideology in action, too "confusing" because it tended to obliterate the non-sequitur he wanted to publish.

A very serious argument that has never before been made with such care! Can't wait to get my hands on this. But refuse to pay more than a buck or so for it used.

why we hate... or think we do

Article online (In-Mind.org) by social psychologist Alex Gunz summarizing some useful research into authoritarian politics. Interesting critique of the Frankfurt School:

Psychologists have long noted people's over-fondness (at least in the western world) for explaining actions in terms of the personalities of the actors involved. We tend to neglect the possibility that a person who falls, for example, might have been tripped, and that they aren't just clumsy. This bias is so commonplace that psychologists have named it the fundamental attribution error. Perhaps it isn't surprising, then, that the first attempt to explain prejudice chalked it up to an authoritarian personality.

Goes on to talk about Altemeyer, recent takes on this issue. Pretty good intro usable for students.