Racist
memes (memes = the elemental foundations of culture) arise
again and again in new forms out of the roots that are
deeply imbedded in the myths of Western Culture. The unique
form of slavery that was practiced in the West was fueled
by the stories and myths that justify dominance over Outsiders
and familial, tribal, and nationalist superiority. Slavery
is just one example; it transformed into Jim Crow and
eventually evolved into mass incarceration.
This process is sometimes conscious in
individuals but is most often, today, buried in the unconscious
through mechanisms of denial and the projection of the
evilness of self onto The Other. These social psychological
processes are constantly stimulated in the Public Mind
through literature, drama, and other forms of �entertainment.�
The roots of racism - out of which these memes arise -
are watered by the economy of the entertainment industry
and camouflaged through blinkered analyses. Memes have
social psychological power because they push deep emotional
buttons of fear and desire - broadly, repeatedly and consistently.
I find TV dramas instructive about the
status and twists of these memes in the Public Mind. Or
better said, what is instructive is how a very few culturally
powerful people - who make a lot of money because they
frequently convince those with money that they know what
attracts and holds public attention - evidenced by the
fact that their TV dramas are made and played - how these
few people view the Public Mind through the shape of their
dramas is instructive. Making a match between the artistry
and what will spark public attention and hold enough of
it sufficiently long to make money is both a science and
an art that is highly paid. You would expect the media
industry to attract the best talent available to make
these judgments. That such a thing as the Uganda related �Invisible Children� phenomena
happened is but one example of the many opportunities
that these highly paid gurus-of-public-attention miss.
It should not be startling to learn that
the preponderance of lost opportunities and �failed� programming
in US TV-land has to do with treatments or the lack of
treatments of ethnicity, race, and class. That is why
the public-attention market is racialized, gendered, ethnicized,
and economically stratified despite highly paid efforts
to cross those boundaries consistently. Artists and dramatists
segment the market and apply different combinations of
memes to hold the attention of segmented audiences. The
market is currently going through a re-sexualizing phase
to appeal to a lucrative, desperate-for-integration, homosexual
and homosexual-friendly audience. Dramas with highly mixed
memes that can hold the attention of highly diverse subcultures
are mostly beyond the abilities of the current talent
pool. Efforts to bridge those boundaries are noteworthy.
A recent TV-crime-drama made an interesting
and instructive attempt to crisscross memes of police
good-guy-ism and race. In this drama three pick-yourself-up-by-your-boot-straps
black college students reunite in the gritty urban neighborhood
where they grew up only to be shot down in the street
by three Hispanic young wanabe-gangbangers. Two of the
victims die on the spot and the young female victim lingers.
The white detectives work harder than usual - portrayed
mostly in the dialog - to show how much of an injustice
this shooting is and how much they really care for the
victims and their families. The acting wasn�t bad. But
the story unfolded to jar my cultural-competency-detector
and stimulate my natural aversion to the racist rot at
the root of Western Culture.
The drama made the principal shooter out
to be a psychotic-illegal-immigrant out to fully model
the infamous US gangster killers. I kid
you not! In the closing scene, a white male detective
has just reached his hand out to gently touch the hand
of the black mother at the bedside where the lingering
victim has died and offer his proverbial, �I am sorry
for your loss,� after which he walks away and says to
his partner, �I do not know how many hundreds of times
I have said that�but sometimes you really mean it.�
My moment of learning came when I flashed
on who are the most horrific psychotic killers in the
history of the world. It was a group of white males that
made the decision and carried it out to drop two atomic
bombs on Japanese cities, horribly killing hundreds of
thousands of innocent people. These are the only folks
in the world that actually used the most destructive WMD
ever known. Western history is the bloodiest - by far
- of any I know, and for the longest period of time. Mass
genocide through infection with smallpox contaminated
blanket-gifts was a germ warfare tactic repeatedly used
to effectively murder tens of thousands of Native American
women and children. Lynchings of black men were a family
picnic occasion in the South and �lynching� has hardly
ended. Today, US soldiers are pissing on corpses, cutting
off body parts, and taking gruesome souvenirs.
In the crime drama I watched on TV, the
Western psychotic-identity of a white male gangster is
stuffed into a young undocumented Hispanic character to
make heroes of the detectives and to gain sympathy from
a pro-lift-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps white and African
American audience. This is a fiction loaded with memes.
It has enough simplistic plausibility to be believable.
That is the art. But the structure of this drama is a
very old story/myth in Western Culture. It is the fear
of The Other meme that has been used all too often to
justify lucrative militarism, injustice, and to attract
eye-ball-attention for product sales. For me, this drama
set off alarms.
It lays out a narrative for middle-class-aspirational
blacks to fear undocumented Hispanics; it subtly counters
(through interracial fear) the expanding denouncement
of the racist nature and growing revulsion of the racist
consequences of the criminal justice system and the incarceration-industrial-complex;
it facilitates denial and furthers the social psychological
projection of internal evils onto another Other.
These Western Cultural dramatists and
their rich backers are the same guys that do not know
who I am as a black male whose character structure has
evolved from my ancestors. My ancestors and their stories
were interlaced with these dramatists� ancestors and their
stories in many cases for hundreds of years, with too
little melding and mending. The - most likely white -
dramatists� character and perspectives emerge out of the
same cultural �soup� as my own, and yet, they have little
sense of how viscerally grating is their vision to me.
They seem to have little sense of how they are promoting
lethal racism.
It has started anew again.
BlackCommentator.com
Guest Commentator, Wilson Riles, is a
former Oakland, CA City Council Member. Click here
to contact Mr. Riles.
