The article offers his take on the currently-raging debate over King Tut’s complexion, which is taken as a signifier of his (and therefore Egypt’s) links to Sub-Saharan Africa and is also taken as bearing on the matter of whether Egypt should be understood as “African” or “Middle Eastern.”

(Whatever. Everyone who has ever seen a Hollywood film knows that the ancient Egyptians were white, just like Jesus! You can click the head for a pictorial history of Tut, and if you haven’t heard this story, background reports are at the end of this post.)

This week’s hoopla actually started in 2005, when a major museum exhibit was accused of whitewashing Tut’s image. The exhibit featured “new” images of Tut popularized by Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, who in 2005 led a team of anthropologists and forensics experts France, Egypt, and the United States. Just this week, Hawass declared:

“Tutankhamun was not black, and the portrayal of ancient Egyptian civilisation as black has no element of truth to it,” Hawass told reporters.

“Egyptians are not Arabs and are not Africans despite the fact that Egypt is in Africa,” he said, quoted by the official MENA news agency.

As you can imagine, that one didn’t go over too well.

There is plenty to say on all of this, for instance how we pick and choose when and what race signifies, or how even what counts as racial is subject to similar ebbs and flows and desires.

This new Tut-tutting also points to a fundamental ambivalence in the African-American cultural tradition. Before the rise of Afrocentrism, our main relationship to ancient Egypt was in the allegorical essence we distilled from the book of Exodus. In that story, my friends, Egypt was on the wrong side of righteousness. (I am reminded here of Black Woman‘s take on this week’s events: “I’m actually kind of relieved about this news. I always feel a bit guilty around Passover time like my people had something to do with the oppression of Jews. Looks like Black folks are off the hook!”) Further, if indeed Egyptians are some kind of hybrid people (and I know that technically almost everyone is some kind of hybrid and blah blah blah, but please bear with me), but if they’re hybrid people historically located at a geographical crossroads, do they still count as “black,” in the 90s kente-cloth sense that the protesters mean it? After all, if Barack Obama isn’t “black enough,” what does that mean for ol’ King Tut?

But I am being silly, for I really do get it. Something about Hawass’ comments, in their focus and intensity, went right under my skin. And that is why I am so appreciative of this Stephen Barnes piece, which really elicits a deeper sense of what is at stake. I can’t quite reproduce its overall tone in a quote, so I really recommend reading it and its comments, here.

Here is the gist of it:

If you don’t think Tut was black, fine. But don’t think black intellectuals who claim he was are doing anything other than what people have done since the beginning of time. The hunger of blacks to see themselves in history is not a radical revisionism but a core human need.

In a Jules Feiffer cartoon, two intellectuals, one white, one black, sit across the table from each other. The black man says: “You have your history. White history. Written by white men, to promote white power. We want our history. Black history. Written by black men, to promote black power. Our demand is separate but equal lies.”

I’ve never forgotten that cartoon. It contains a basic truth: Everyone wants to think the world revolves around him. Many indigenous peoples have a name for themselves that means, simply, “the people,” and the mythology of many groups in the world suggests that God created them first, loves them best, and created everyone else later . . . and less.

Indeed.

Something is very wrong with this. It’s difficult to be sure. But I am reminded of sitting in my tiny study in my old Flatbush apartment. Looking out the window, I see a squirrel perched on a fence post, chowing down on a chicken wing.

A chill goes through me. Oh Wayne.

“Skulls Confirm We’re All Out Of Africa”

Well, apparently UNICEF Germany, like The Guardian, might have already gotten the memo:

But maybe they also took it a little too seriously? (curtsy to Black Women in Europe, via African American Political Pundit)

BWiE also includes a letter from a Black German media watch group:

dear all,

This link was forwarded to our media-watch organisation by disturbed readers:

http://www.unicef.de/4500.html

This is an actual ad-campaign by UNICEF Germany!

This campaign is „blackfacing“ white children with mud to pose as “uneducated africans“.

The headline translates “This Ad-campaign developed pro bono by the agency Jung von Matt/Alster shows four german kids who appeal for solidarity with their contemporaries in Afrika”

The first kid says:

“I’m waiting for my last day in school, the children in africa still for their first one.”

second kid:

“in africa, many kids would be glad to worry about school”

third kid:

“in africa, kids don’t come to school late, but not at all” (!)

fourth kid:

“some teachers suck. no teachers sucks even more.”

Besides claiming that every single person in “Africa” isn’t educated, and doing so in an extremely patronising way, it is also disturbing that this organisation thinks blackfacing kids with mud (!) equals “relating to african children”. Also, the kids’ statements ignore the existance of millions of african academics and regular people and one again reduces a whole continent to a village of muddy uneducated uncivilized people who need to be educated (probably by any random westerner). This a really sad regression.

Bottom lines of this campaign are: Black = mud = African = uneducated. White = educated. We feel this campaign might do just as much harm as it does any good. You don’t collect money for helping people by humiliating and trivilaizing them first.

There’s more at the BWiE site.

Gee, I better get on this question of when blackfacing = whitewashing (or is it the other way around?)! But really, what we do when even the good intentions are hurtful and tiresome?

John over at Theory My Culture has a nice post on the recent brouhaha over a British group asking Borders to remove Tintin in the Congo from shelves.

(And don’t worry, I’m not jumping on the tintin hate bandwagon lorry… I’ve hated this tintin shit my whole life!)

At the center of his post, John asks an interesting question:

how do otherwise decent adults (let’s work with that assumption) come to accept these sorts of images and storylines as appropriate for their children? That’s what is happening here, of course. Buying racist books for children who, by definition, are initially clueless about such vicious history and violence. Why put those children at risk of this grotesque ideological constellation? There are better educational tools for little brains, if you’re thinking about that angle…

I think this goes to the heart of a particular version of postmodernity. I imagine the buyer of these books saying a couple of things. “I loved them as a kid!” “But he’s so cute!” “It’s ironic now!” I understand those sentiments. They aren’t entirely foreign to my initial instinct. I’m both nostalgic for things – especially cute things – of my youth and I love both irony and sarcasm. But there is a lot at stake in this disposition.

Hmm. As a shameless connoisseur of random little cute things, I come across a lot of Tintin, who seems to be the Francophile’s Hello Kitty. And the cuteness factor leads me to add one more thing to John’s list of rationales, and that’s the “it doesn’t hurt anyone” angle, which is the one I most often hear, and which I assume is supported by the speaker’s underlying rationale, “Clearly it’s fine. After all I’m fine.” (Read: “I’m not a racist.”)

Now, I could do a whole thing about how you might not be fine. About how we might imagine that this kind of racist imagery, this random cultural phenomenon, does in fact have real social consequences. Though I also know from experience that, when making such an argument, the person one is talking to invariably asks for “evidence,” that s/he be given an example of how imagery makes consequences.

I can make that argument, and I have very fancy conceptual tools for doing so. But I have to say, as I get on in my old age, all that evidence-making gets quite tiresome. The request shifts the burden from the person in the act to the person who feels affected by the negative consequences thereof. So why not just cut to the chase?

I hate Tintin because Tintin makes me feel like shit. If you love Tintin, Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg, then I cannot help but imagine you as somehow complicit. So maybe, then, it is not about you; it is about me. And it is up to you figure out what that means to you. It is up to you to determine what I mean to you.

That’s one race card, redeemable for one saucy wink.

Here’s some background:

What Parsons’ refers to as “the personal” in Obama’s remarks I simply see as his willingness to speak on silence and inaction in the media– especially when it comes to justice for black people. And even though he’s not talking about anything new, there is something particularly striking in the specter of disproportionate sentencing in this cultural moment, this moment of Paris Hilton and Scooter Libby, of Genarlow Wilson, the Newark lesbians sentencing, and the Jena Six. (Jesse Rae Beard, one of the h.s. students, is pictured, left.) Obama took a good opportunity for shifting the norm, by using specific examples to make other candidates seem too abstract and less connected to the cultural moment, without affecting his own reputation for being “intellectual,” but here humanized, relatable.

The story is a good one. Below it is a Jena Six background story, since I haven’t posted on the case yet:

And here’s a background story related to the Jena Six, whom I will say more about in a later post:

Related posts at $3.60:

More on Barack Obama

More on Genarlow Wilson

More on Michelle Obama

Related posts by me at Cypher&Syllable:

More on Michelle Obama

Here’s a quote from BET, but there is more to read at Jack and Jill:

“Hot Ghetto Mess” is an entertaining, tongue-in-cheek examination of the good, the bad and the ugly of Black popular culture. Utilizing comedy, man-on-the-street interviews, video clips, pictures and music, “Hot Ghetto Mess” aims to shine a spotlight on prevalent images in pop culture and examine what role they play in American lifestyle. “Hot Ghetto Mess” goes where most shows fear to tread. As host Charlie Murphy guides viewers through shaking booties, thug life, baby-mama drama and pimped-out high schoolers, “Hot Ghetto Mess” will explore what these images really mean to all of us. Cutting edge, original, relevant and irreverent, “Hot Ghetto Mess” is like the traffic accident you can’t look away from. Viewers will laugh. They’ll cry. They’ll think. They’ll learn, and hopefully they’ll recognize they’ve GOT to do better.”

You’ve got to be kidding me. No, of course, you aren’t…

Update:Oooh! According to a site called What About Our Daughters, advertisers are indeed already pulling away from the show… Hmm, this should perhaps be followed more carefully…

Via Racialicious, I found this article at the L.A. Times, regarding Edith Isabel Rodriguez’s death at the Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital:

… the existence of a security videotape showing the woman writhing for 45 minutes on the floor of the emergency room lobby and the public release this week of two 911 calls in which witnesses unsuccessfully pleaded with sheriff’s dispatchers for help.The case — first reported by The L.A. Times — has crystallized people’s fears that even in their most desperate moments, the emergency system won’t take them seriously.

Indeed. Though it’s interesting that the LAT story, as well as others I have looked at, take the angle that Rodriguez’s death is about a failure in the U.S. healthcare system. I won’t dispute that, but it is also important to recognize that this isn’t something that could “happen to anyone”; it’s not, as Arthur Caplan is quoted as saying in the article above, about “a kind of morality tale of a society gone cold.”

The story of Edith Rodriguez’s death is a story about how people of color are treated in the American healthcare system, a system whose structural brokenness amplifies the moral and ethical emptiness with which many blacks and Latinos are treated in American social systems. That system, it is safe to say, has always been cold as ice.

You can hear the emptiness in the calls made to 911, as Ms. Rodriguez was writhing on the hospital floor, bleeding and vomiting. And you can also hear the callers hearing it– which makes an understatement out of the LAT‘s assessment of the situation as “crystallizing” people’s fears. It didn’t “crystallize,” i.e. make apparent or bring into focus. It was merely a repetition of the too-real surreality people face everyday.

Even if you’ve heard the report discussed on TV, this one is worth listening to. Many of the accounts are quite edited and I’m not even sure where CNN gets their transcripts from; they’re barely related to the original text. An abridged transcript follows (my emphasis in color):

Operator: What’s your emergency?

Caller: There’s a lady on the ground… and we’re here in the emergency room .. and they are overlooking her.

Operator: Well, what would you want me to do for you, ma’am?

Caller: Send an ambulance out here to take her somewhere where she can get medical help.

Operator: OK, you’re at the — you’re at the hospital, ma’am. You have to contact them.

Caller: They have — they have a problem. They won’t help her…

[...]

Operator: … This line is for emergency purposes only. This — 911 is used for emergency purposes only.

Caller: This is an emergency, mister.(crosstalk)Operator: It’s not an emergency. It is not an emergency, ma’am.

Caller: It is.

Operator: It is not an emergency.

Caller: You have to see how they are treating her.

Operator: OK. Well, that’s not a criminal thing. This line, 911, is used for emergency purposes only.

Caller: It is an emergency.

Operator: … life threatening emergencies. It’s not. OK?

Caller: May God strike you too for acting the way you just acted.

Operator: No, negative m’am. You’re the one.

The painful quality of this conversation. It begins with the Kafkaesque surreality of this interaction as a scene of fundamental non-communication: “It is an emergency”; “It is not an emergency,” and it deepens the symbolic weight of an already tragic death.

There is something important in this conversation about recognition, about who has authority to understand a situation, and who has the power to ignore or negate that authority. I hear this in the ways the first caller signifies the power dynamic she is experiencing. You can hear her holding her voice, trying to sound knowledgeable and official as she talks to the operator, but also using language that signifies her awareness that she and the woman dying on the floor are fundamentally unrecognizable as subjects: “they are overlooking her.” And the caller knows whom she is talking to. “This is an emergency, mister.”

He hears something in her voice too. Is it race? What in her voice tells him that he really doesn’t have to listen? That this person has nothing relevant to say or cannot possibly know what she is talking about? Maybe it’s by virtue of where the call is coming from, a poor city hospital, an emergency room qua primary care facility, supposedly filled with people lacking wherewithal, lacking knowledge.

His condescension, cloaked and bathed in protocol, is in the “OK, you’re at… the hospital,” and his authority is implicit in the “OK. Well, that’s not a criminal thing“– which comes in response to the caller’s insistence that she who is present, not he who is not, knows and understands what is happening in this moment. Speaking on the problem of representing traumatic events, the holocaust scholar Dori Laub once noted that many situations we might think of as crises in witnessing– meaning that we aren’t getting testimony that really presents an event properly– instead constitute crises in listening. People are signifying, but we don’t recognize it, and thus don’t hear it.

I am not suggesting that the operator should be anything but official and professional, but here there is something specific in that tone. It’s hard to hear it if you aren’t used to hearing it. The caller is familiar, and it sets her off.

I am sure the 911 operator was shocked when the curse came: “May God strike you too for acting the way you just acted.” Her “too” is broad, aligning the operator with the dominant power structure that has brought them all to this tragedy. Who knows what race he is, but the operator is speaking through and for a kind of power. Tellingly, after her curse his diction switches more fully into a language of structural authority, “No, negative ma’am. You’re the one.”

10-4 ma’am. I don’t hear you.

I am reminded of when I was in labor with my son (you know, the one stolen by Sanjaya Malakar’s sister). It was after midnight on a Sunday, and the anesthesiologist, white and grumpy, was clearly irritated with my needing him, or rather, needing my epidural. He was cold and rough with me. Not rough like mean but rough like I was meat, which is worse.

The nurse, who was black, noticed this, and said something like, Marisa here is a professor at [insert fancy college name here]. It is silly, but this is information I often withhold unless relevant. I dislike giving some people the pleasure of “knowing” me, when otherwise I might well be, let’s say, invisible to them. The nurse, meanwhile, deployed it, thus assuring me better treatment.

It worked: thus informed, that ass stopped in the middle of what he was doing (i.e. preparing a needle for my spine), walked around the bed, held out his hand and introduced himself. In my affiliation I had suddenly flashed into subjecthood, transformed from she who required no recognition into she who was someone to know. To care about. To connect with.

Needless to say, we didn’t hit it off. I think my disinterest in him stressed him out.