File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_1998/postcolonial.9804, message 263


Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1998 13:08:41 -0400
From: janedoe-AT-echonyc.com (Theresa M. Senft)
Subject: Head Negro in Charge?


I've been thinking on Jaime Hovey's post on the "cute-ification" of the
term "Head Negro in Charge", and the ways in which this kind of tactic
*never* works. (Many) Bostonians would be unable to read the headline "Head
Drunk in Charge" with a corresponding article about (fill in Irish Boston
politician here)  in terms of race, because (don't you know) in Boston,
Irish is synonymous with White, and is therefore, not a racial category.

The reasons for this particular conflation of Irish and "white" in Boston
are complicated, and have to do with city's history of "The Brahmin and the
Brogue", but in many ways, the story of Boston is the story of how the
white-washing of assimilation works in the United States, I think.

I'd go so far as to suggest that this isn't just a story about a great
university (Harvard) hiding in the comfort zone (Cambridge) of an racist
backwater (Boston), but rather an indication of the mechanics by which
Western European immigrants to the United States become White People.

Its interesting to think about whether a headline like "Head Negro in
Charge" would have run in say, The New Yorker, given that Gates is a
(welcome, to this reader of that mag) member of its ad-hoc staff. And, to a
certain degree, this was the charge of the NAACP: there weren't any black
people on the Boston Mag staff to explain how the irony of HNIC on a Boston
Mag headline Just Wasn't Working.

But maybe we can open this out, a bit...Jaime, your comment has me mulling
over this: What is it about the ideological preciousness of "race" that
causes it to slip out of/resist certain kinds of obnoxious David
Letterman-style postmodern, uh "irony" I guess is the word?

The one place I can imagine the phrase Head Negro in Charge being used, to
some intersting ends, is on the (early days of) IN LIVING COLOR. And yet,
the very history of that television show, its weird trajectory (beginning
from the great parody of the American Express "Helpful Operator" who allows
a storeowner to play out his racist fantasies about a customer with an AM
card....ending up with the lionization Jim Carey as a multimillion dollar
symbol of All That is Wrong with Idiot White Guy Comedy) sort of begs the
question: is it *possible* to treat race ironically, in the US, without
your irony  being subsumed back into the same shitty system you tried to
critique?

I'm (I hope) not trying to seem overly pessimistic here...I don't want to
sound like some cheezy version of Foucault, yelling that the Margin Feeds
the Center, and all that. And, I think it's important not downplay the
subsequent success of the various black members of IN LIVING COLOR,
particularly the Brothers Weyan (sp?).

 I'm not trying to discredit IN LIVING COLOR for launching a whole bunch of
careers, and furthing others. HOWEVER, part of me thinks that Jim Carey's
status on IN LIVING COLOR, while originally a complex kind of thing (the
continual debunked Head Whitey), eventually wound up catipulting him
economic light years ahead of his black co-stars. And I guess I kind of
don't think the mechanics of this whole thing were an accident...

Any thoughts?
Terri

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THERESA M. SENFT                         |
                                         |
Co-Editor                                | email: janedoe-AT-echonyc.com
Issue 17 :"Sexuality and Cyberspace"     |
                                         | Mailing address: 7 Otokomi Rd.
WOMEN & PERFORMANCE:                     |                  Nantucket, Ma
A JOURNAL OF FEMINIST THEORY             |                  02554
Published in conjunction with New York   |
University's Dept of Performance Studies |
                                         |
Our website:                             | Terri's website:
http://www.echonyc.com/~women            | http://www.echonyc.com/~janedoe
_________________________________________|____________________________________





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