Final Flashcards
1
Q
4 Frames of Colorblind Racism
A
- Abstract Liberalism
- Naturalization
- Cultural Racism
- Minimization of Racism
2
Q
Color-Blind Racism
A
- The ideology that explains contemporary racial inequality as the outcome of nonracial dynamics, as the product of market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomena, and the blacks imputed cultural limitations.
- Compared to Jim Crow racism, the ideology of color blindness seems like “racism lite”
3
Q
Abstract Liberalism
A
The fame of abstract liberalism involved using ideas associated with political liberalism (ie: “equal opportunity”) and economic liberalism (ie: choice, individualism) in an abstract manner to explain racial matters
4
Q
Naturalization
A
Naturalization is a frame that allows whites to explain away racial phenomena by suggesting they are natural occurrences
5
Q
Cultural Racism
A
Cultural racism is a frame that relies on culturally based arguments such as “Mexicans do not put much emphasis on education” or “blacks have too many babies” to explain the standing of minorities in society.
6
Q
Minimization of Racism
A
Minimization of racism is a frame that suggest discrimination is no longer a central factor affecting minorities’ life changes (“it’s better now than in the past” or “there is discrimination, but there are plenty of jobs out there”)
- This frame also involves regarding talking about discrimination exclusively as all-out racist behavior
7
Q
The Tom
A
The good Negro who always keeps the faith, never turns against his “white massa,” and remains hearty, submissive, stoic, generous, selfless, and kind
8
Q
The Coon
A
- Amusing black buffoon
9
Q
Pickaninny (Coon Sub-type)
A
Negro child; harmless little screwball creation whose eyes popped out, whose hair stood on end, and whose antics were pleasant and diverting
10
Q
Pure Coon (Coon Sub-type)
A
Unreliable, crazy, lazy subhuman creatures good for nothing more than eating watermelons, stealing chickens, etc [Rastus Character]
11
Q
Uncle Remus (Coon Sub-type)
A
Similar to Uncle Tim, but he is quaint and naive and philosophizes comically
12
Q
The Tragic Mulatto
A
- Negro child of mixed blood; “a victim of divided racial inheritance”
- This character usually gets viewed more sympathetically in films, and s/he usually sets the moral standards as well
13
Q
The Mammy
A
Big, overweight, cantankerous woman who usually takes care of the white children. In cinematic representations, she is desexualized, a fabrication that ensures that the figure is not a threat to hegemonic structures of power despite the fact that she controlled black men
14
Q
Aunt Jemima (Sub-type of The Mammy)
A
An Uncle Tom blessed with religion or a Mammy who wedged herself into dominant white culture. They are generally sweet, jolly, and good tempered
15
Q
The Brutal Black Buck
A
Plays out the fear that every black man longs for a white woman
16
Q
Black Brutes
A
Barbaric black out to raise havoc
17
Q
Black Bucks
A
Big “baddd [blacks]”, oversexed and savage, violent and frenzied as they lust for white flesh
18
Q
Welfare Queen
A
A pejorative phrase used to describe someone, usually black, who collects excessive welfare payments through fraud or manipulation.
19
Q
W.E.B Du Bois
A
- American sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist
- The “Souls of Black Folk” (1903) was his first and arguably most famous work
- His “Black Reconstruction in America” (1935) challenged the predominant idea that blacks were to blame for the failures of Reconstruction
20
Q
Double Consciousness
A
Double consciousness is a concept that Du Bois first explores in 1903 publication, “The Souls of Black Folk”. Double consciousness describes the individual sensation of feeling as though your identity is divided into several parts, making it difficult or impossible to have one unified identity.
21
Q
OscarsSoWhite
A
- Started by April Reign in 2015 (editor of the BroadwayBlack.com)
22
Q
Reverse Racism
A
- prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism on the basis of race directed against a member of a dominant or privileged racial group.
- Referenced in respect to #OscarsSoWhite hashtag movement
- [Actors] cries of reverse racism and blaming actors of color for their own marginalization are commonplace in Hollywood
- These arguments falsely assume an equal playing field while dismissing institutional racial bias that privilege white actors for roles and recognition.
23
Q
The Great Migration
A
- 1910 - 1970
- 1.8 million blacks migrated between 1910 and 1940 from the South to the North and West. Between 1940 and 1970, the Great Migration continued as 4.4 Million more blacks left the South
- As a result of housing tensions, blacks creates “cities-within-cities,” which fostered the growth of an urban African American culture.
24
Q
Mass Incarceration
A
- Refers to the unique way the U.S. has locked up a vast population in federal and state prisons, as well as local jails.
- The United States has the highest per capita incarcerated population in the world. The incarceration rate has risen 600 percent in the past 30 years, the race influences nearly every aspect of incarceration including arrest rates, conviction rates, the probability of post incarceration employment, educational opportunities, and marriage outcomes.
- One in three black males born today can expect to spend some portion of his life behind bars
- Black youth aged 10-17, who constitute 15% of American youth, account for 25% of arrests
- The average sentences for blacks on weapons and drug charges were 49% longer than those for whites who had committed and been convicted of the same crimes - this disparity has been rising over time
- Blacks complain that police are more violent with them
25
White Savior Trope
- The white savior genre is recognizable through the presence of a white person as "the great leader who saves blacks from slavery or oppression, rescues people of color from poverty and disease, or leads Indians in battle for their dignity and survival"
- Enables interpretation of nonwhite characters and culture as essentially broken, marginalized, and pathological
- Shows relationships as redeemers (whites) and redeemed (blacks)
26
Whiteness
- Whiteness is not so much in crisis as it is an identity constructed as crisis. Whiteness is perpetually a crisis of legitimization given that it must constantly engage in the Herculean feat of claiming a superior and righteous subject position regardless of the external changes around it
- Nelseon Rodriguez and Leila Villaverde say "Whiteness has historically been appropriated in unmarked ways by strategically maintaining as colorless its color (and hence its values, belief systems, privileges, histories, experiences and modes of operation)
- Ruth Frankenberg says "Whiteness, as a set of normative cultural practices, is visible most clearly to those it definitively excludes and those to whom it does violence. Those who are securely housed within its boarders usually do not examine it"
27
Noble Savage
This character was deemed worthy because it was unspoiled by material developments and the trappings of modernity. It was often billed as a nonwhite, indigenous, and exotic savage that the white explorer would discover on his colonizing mission.
- Morally superior to the Europeans because the Indians were untainted by greed and modern science
- Emphasized by the European Romantics, the idealization of Indians was used as a moral measuring stick in Europe
- Appeared in John Dryden's The Conquest of Granada (1672) as an idealized picture of "nature's gentleman"
28
The Moynihan Report
- Moynihan found that the family structure was the fundamental problem with the Nergro family, and the female-headed household was the outstanding culprit
- The Moynihan Report shifted the blame for an apparent lack of progress from racism, capitalism, and patriarchy onto the shoulders of black women
- Daniel Patrick Moynihan's The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965)
29
Warrior
- Savage Warrior
- Heroic and noble warrior/hunter
- Depicted as stoic and in touch with nature
Peace-loving but willing to fight if necessary
30
Shaman
- Represents a deeply religious and mysterious character
| - Medicine men/healers with sacred knowledge
31
The Vanishing American
The notion that Indians were doomed to disappear, either through assimilation into white culture or through the attribution of warfare and disease
32
The DeMille Indians
- In 1940, Cheig Thunder Cloud (Victor Daniels) submitted a petition for recognition of a group of Native American entertainers in Hollywood working for Cecil B. DeMille
- This petition sought to legalize a technologically defined identity while seemingly making no specific land claims and involving no treaty rights
- Hollywood Indians were engaged in a complex dialogue with the American forces of hegemony
33
Why was the DeMille Indian Petition Important?
- Marks movement from the Hollywood Indians as a constellation of visual images predicated on white generated stereotypes to a political understanding of the ways these images circulate in pop culture
- Demonstrates how these images were deployed in different communities
34
Rhetoric of Universality
- Employeed by Rees in the marketing of Pariah
- Reese frames film as beeing about identity, "not checking a box," and being true to oneself, to which everyone can presumably relate.
- In Pariah, the rhetoric of universality has an indelible relationship to capital and to the commodification of difference that must be address
- Pariah becomes universal through the trope of the unloving, overbearing black mother, reminiscent of the kind of black woman deployed in the Maynihan Report
35
Redfacing
- The cultrual and ideological work of playing Indian boyh on-screen and off-screen
- Through redfacing, Native actors became human shields to absorb, deflect, redirect, and placate the fantasies projected on these "celluloid Indians" by the dominant culture
36
Visual Soveregnty
- The creative self-representation of Native American visual artists
- Randolph Lewis defines "representational sovereignty" as "the ability for a group of people to depict themselves with their own ambition at heart."
- Raheja's definition of visual sovereignty extends past cinema to performance art, studio art, Internet media and televisual.
37
Fourth Cinema
- Indigenous cinema
- Maori filmmaker Barry Barclay coined the term to describe a flexible space in which indigenous filmmakers "may seek to rework the ancient core values to shape a growing Indigenous cinema outside the national orthodoxy"
- These films are often screened for the home communities before their national and international release
- Transnational Indigenous media overturn Audre Lorde's dictum that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."
38
Trickster
- Closely aligned to redfacing
- Tricksters work in the service of their community, albeit in often clumsy, violent, outlier, sexualized, or humorous ways.
- Legends of Native American actors refusing to play dead when shot on film sets, replacing revolver blanks with life ammunition
39
Virtual Reservation
The space in which native american create and contest self-images and whre these images collide with mass-mediated representations of Indians by which the dominant culture can be thought of as a virtual reservation
- Film became a virtual reservation for a viewing public eager for Indigenous images but that lacks the spare time and money to visit a geographical one.
- Exemplifies the space in between "real" conceptions of space, physicality, and time and the purely imagined.
40
Karl May
German "thief" and "forger" who read all the ethnographies of Native American tribes he could while in jail. When released, he published the Winnetou tales and pretended he was actually Old Shatterhand, who visited America. He had, of course, never come to America at that time, and he didn't do so much until later.
- Most popular German author of all time
- May's Winnetou tales were adapted into eleven UFA sauerkraut westerns in the 60s
41
German Indianthusiasm
Hartmut Lutz coined the term Indianthusiasm to describe the German fascination with Native Americans
42
Sauerkraut Westerns
Harald Reinl's The Treasure of Silver Lake (1962), an adaption of Karl May novel of the same name, is the first sauerkraut western. Without its financial success, Calcinetta wouldn't have funded the first spaghetti western
- Tassio Schneider: Leone's spaghetti westerns deconstruct the western, while the sauerkrauts reconstruct the myths of the west.
43
Indianerfilme
- Serious of fourteen films produced in the former GDR that claim to be more anthropologically accurate that the sauerkrauts
- Sympathy lies with indigenous tribes
- Purpose: to create politically correct entertainment through an escapist and sensationalist genre
- These films overlook the deeply ingrained racism and sexism of the genre - they provide us with little more than well-known cliches of tribal life
44
Presumption of Guilt
- As a consequence of this country's historic failure to address effectively its legacy of racial inequality, this presumption of guilt and racial narrative that created it have significantly shaped every institution in American society, especially our criminal justice system
- The Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not address discrimination in criminal justice
45
Emancipation Proclomation
- On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln issed the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared enslaved people residing in the rebelling Confederate states to be "then, thenceforward, and forever free."
- Southern planters attempted to hide news about Lincoln's proclamation from their slaves, and in many areas were federal troops were not present, slavery reminded the status quo well after 1863.
46
13th Amendment
- In December 1865, the 13th Amendment was ratified. It prohibited slavery throughout the United States "except as punishment for crime."
- Deleware did not ratify the 13th Amendment until 1901; Kentucky until 1976; and Mississippi until 1995 (the paperwork was not submitted to federal authorities until 2013)
47
Convict Leasing
The practice of "selling' the labor of state and local prisoners to private interests for state profit. States used the criminal justice system for economic exploitation and political disempowerment of black people
48
Black Codes
Discriminatory criminal laws that created new criminal offenses such as "vagrancy" and "loitering." This led to the mass arrest and incarceration of black people. Then, they could use the 13th Amendment to use black inmates for forced labor for the profit of the state.
49
Terror Lynchings
- Between the Civil War and WWII, thousands of African Americans were lynched in the US. Terror lynchings were at their peak between 1880 and 1945
- Terror lynchings sparked the mass migration of millions of black people from the south into urban ghettos in the North and West.
50
Types of Terror Lynchings
- Lynchings that resulted from a wildly distorted fear of interracial sex
- Lynchings base on casual social transgressions
- Lynchings based on allegations of serious violent crime
- Public spectacle lynchings, which could involve any of the allegations above
- Lynchings that escalated into terroristic violence that targeted the African American community as a whole
- Lynchings of sharecroppers, ministers, and other community leaders who resisted mistreatment
51
Anti-Rascism
Bonilla-Silva urges personal and political movement away from claiming to be "nonracist" to becoming "antiracist."
- Being an anti-racist begins with understanding the institutional nature of racial matters and accepting that all actors in racialiized society are affected materially (receive benefits or disadvantages) and ideologically by racial structure
52
Racial Ideology
- The racially based frameworks used by actors to explain and justiy (dominany race) or challenge (subordinate race or races) the racial status quo
- Racial ideology can be conceived for analytical purposes as comprising the following elements: common frames, style, and racial stories
- The ruling ideology expresses as "common sense" the interests of the dominant race, while oppositional ideologies attempt to challenge that common sense by providing
53
Mirror of Abjection
- Mass-mediated images that the media presents of oppressed social groups that shows their disfigured, (mis)represented selves. THese images define and overdetermine much of their lives and get played back at them as entertainment or "news." Most of these groups do not control the images, however.
54
Black Exceptionalism
- The system and politics behind art (and life) relies on black exceptionalism. This ensures that institutions and systems cannot appear as racist despite the fact that blacks need to negotiate their worldviews by negating these representations. Guerrero refers to this as "iconic tokenism"
- The media relies on black exceptionalism to maintain its post-racial myth
55
Whitewashing
- The practice of white actors playing characters of color
- This came from minstrel shows, popularized in the IS in the 1830's and 1840's
- Blackfase, Yellowface, Brownface
- Performers were mainly Irish and Jewish immigrants
56
Westerns
- Indian representations offered a vision of freedom to a continent still trying to shake feudalism
- Europeans could engage in stories of Indian savergy and sleep safely in bed because they weren't actually in the American West
- Noble Savage and the cruel, cunning Indian perpetuated the division between good and bad Indians. Good Indians are merciful in victory, but bad Indians engage in the most hideous tortures
57
Stereotype
- A widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing.
58
Blaxploitation
An ethnic subgenre of the exploitation film that emerged in the United States during the early 1970s. The films, while popular, suffered backlash for disproportionate numbers of stereotypical film characters showing bad or questionable motives, including criminals, etc. However, the genre does rank among the first in which black characters and communities are the heroes and subjects of film and television, rather than sidekicks or villains or victims of brutality.[1] The genre's inception coincides with the rethinking of race relations in the 1970s.
59
Blaxploitation Film
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssssss Song
60
Blackface
The makeup used by a nonblack performer playing a black role
61
Sambo
- Sambo or Zambo is a derogatory term used for a person with Indian heritage and, in some countries, also mixed with African heritage.
- Later, its technical meaning was expanded to include people having a mixture of black and white ancestry—mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, etc.
62
Third Cinema
Third Cinema is meant to be non-commercialized, challenging Hollywood's model. Third Cinema rejects the view of cinema as a vehicle for personal expression, seeing the director instead as part of a collective; it appeals to the masses by presenting the truth and inspiring revolutionary activism. Solanas and Getino argue that traditional exhibition models also need to be avoided: the films should be screened clandestinely, both in order to avoid censorship and commercial networks, but also so that the viewer must take a risk to see them.
63
Magical Negro/Minority
When the minority has a special ability and uses that ability to aid in the need of white people
64
Appropriation
The action of taking something for one's own use, typically without the owner's permission.
65
Jezebel
Portray black woman as sexual objects
66
Assimilation
The process of becoming similar to something.
67
Gentrification
The process of renovating and improving a house or district so that it conforms to middle-class taste.
68
Culture of Dissemblance
Coined by Darlene Clark Hine to describe a "cult of secrecy" practiced by black women in the Reconstruction era American Middle West to "protect the sanctity of inner aspects of their lives."[1] Though sometimes linked to assimilation, culture of dissemblance is different in that it was mainly used for black women to hide their sexualities and present an asexual image to the world in order to protect themselves.
69
Sherman Alexie
- American novelist, shortr story writer, poet and filmmaker.
- Wrote "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven." (1993), a collection of stories that was adapted as the film Smoke Signals
70
Iron Eye Cody
Espera Oscar was an Italian American actor. He portrayed Native Americans in Hollywood films
71
Pocahontas
was a Native American woman notable for her association with the colonial settlement at Jamestown, Virginia.
72
Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance
- Sylvester Clark Long, was an American journalist, writer and actor from Winston-Salem, North Carolina who, for a time, became internationally prominent as a spokesman for Indian causes.
