Welcome to another episode of Civic Cicher. I'm your host, rams' Jah and I go buy the name q board. Yes, indeed, it's been a great year so far, almost done with it and we got a lot for you to stick around for as we head into the last couple of episodes of the year. Uh, stay tuned because today we're going to discuss a couple of things, you know, a more conceptual show. We haven't really had a chance to do a lot of these because the year has been
so full of events. But we're going to talk about black face and why it's so offensive for those that might not know, you know, for people that you know, ask the question, and it's the big deal. Come Halloween, you know movies or you know, a costume party or whatever, what's the big deal. We're gonna kind of peel away a couple of layers there. We're also going to talk
about what a culture vulture is. Now, there's you know terms that a lot of folks here, you know, culture vulture might be someone who's really in art or something like that, but if you've heard it in certain circles, especially like black brown, you know, indigenous circles, culture culture means something very different. You've hurt that. We're gonna peel away a couple of layers of that as well and really try to zero in on what that means and how that feels. Also on the show, we're going to
discuss Santa Claus and the roots of Santa Claus. You know, there's a lot of people every year around this time that you know, discuss black Santa Clauses in the mall, and there's actually a connection to black Santa historical connection to a black Santa Claus that you may not know about.
So we're going to discuss that for our way Black History fact as well as some other things that we're going to discuss, not the least of which is, you know, our a story about a gentleman who is facing I believe it's one hundred and ten year sentence for some a truck driver in Colorado that you know, we'll give us a chance to examine how sentencing were in this country. But first we're going to do like we always do
at this time and discuss some ebony excellence. And fortunately we got a chance to talk a little bit about this before we started recording today. So Bell hooks Q this is someone that you know about to some degree. So I'm going to read a couple of things here about her. This I believe came from Wikipedia.
Yeah.
Wikipedia. So we're just gonna, you know, dedicate a little time to her, just so you're aware.
So.
Gloria Gene Watkins who passed December fifteenth, the better known by her pen name Bell Hooks, was an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist. The name Bell Hooks is borrowed from her maternal great grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. The focus of Hooks's writing was the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she described as their ability to produce and
perpetuates systems of oppression and class domination. She published more than thirty books and numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. Her work addressed race, class, gender, art history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism. Also as an academic, she taught at institutions including Stanford University, Yale University, and the City College of New York before before in two thousand and four, joining Brea College in Brea, Kentucky, where
a decade later she founded the Bell Hooks Institute. South End Press published her first major work, Ain't I A Woman? Black Women, and Feminism in nineteen eighty one, though she had written it years earlier while still an undergraduate. In a decade since its publication, Ain't I A Woman has been recognized for its contribution to feminist thought, with Publishers Weekly in nineteen ninety two naming it one of the twenty most influential women's books in the last twenty years.
And what we were discussing before the show is that an example of a life well lived. Unfortunately we did get to talk about her. You know, our show is only a year old, but you know, posthumously, we're going to take a moment and honor her as our testament to eb any excellence. So rest in peace. Bell Hooks. Thank you for all of your contributions to.
Such an appropriate title to Ain't I a Woman?
Right exactly?
You know, speaking of feminism, you know, shout out to Sojourner truth and just I don't know, man, maybe that's something that you know, maybe in the future we can spend some time diving into because I don't think people have as complete an understanding of the feminist movement as they should or about sojourn are true who we have to, you know, bring her up in the way.
Black Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And you know, not to take too much away from what we're talking about next. But I actually got a chance to check this workout in my in one of my classes that doctor Westernberg taught when I was in college. Doctor Westernberg, for those who don't know, is if frequent contributor to the show here. She was my teacher once upon a time, and this book written by Bell Hooks was one of the books
that we used as textbook in our class. And so bell Hooks is a name that we know very well around here. And the plight of women, black women, black people, all marginalized people is all kind of intertwined and between her and Angela Davis and so general truth and so forth, these are folks that really kind of helped us to be as free in the world that we're living in today. So one more time, shout out to Belle Hooks, thank you very much for a life well lived. Now, why
is black face so offensive? So I pulled us a little bit more from Wikipedia here just to kind of set the stage, So bear with me. Blackface is a form of theatrical makeup used predominantly by performers of non African descent to portray a caricature of a dark skinned
person of African descent. In the United States, the practice gained popularity during the nineteenth century and contributed to the spread of racial stereotypes such as the happy, go lucky darkie on the plantation, that's another word we need to revisit, or the dandified coon. Keep that word here as well.
By the middle of the century, blackface minstrel shows had become a distinctive African art sorry, a distinctive American art form, translating formal works such as opera into popular terms for a general audience. In the early twentieth century, blackface branched off from the minstrel show and became its own. It
became a form in its own right. In the United States, blackface declined in popularity beginning in the nineteen forties and into the civil rights movements of the nineteen fifties and sixties, generally considered highly offensive, disrespectful, and racist by the turn of the twenty first century, though the practice or similar looking ones continues in other countries. All right, So why is this important. Well, I'll start and I'd love for
you to jump in here. Q. My belief, my human belief before we even talk about things like race or you know, anything else. My human belief is that you teach people how to love you. That can be people in your family, that can be romantic partners, that can be your friends, whoever. You teach people how to love you. And what is love? Love is admiration, it's respect, It is any combination of adjectives that foster a jovial, happy, good natured relationship back and forth volley between two or
more persons. You know, this is my definition I'm making up on the fly here, but I think it fits. And I think that we're all here today listening to this show because we believe in love. And you know, for those that don't, you know, I'm sure that you can appreciate my idea that we teach people how to
love us. Right. You know, folks come, they might come with the right intentions, but you know, it's very easy for people to you know, overstep or say something out of line or whatever, you know, and it's our job if we recognize that they're not trying to upset us, to show them, Hey, I see what you're doing here. This doesn't work, but this might. Let's try that again
in the future. The reason we're talking about blackface is because I can imagine a non black person wanting to dress up like Shaquille O'Neal right, putting on the jersey, the headband, the shoes, everything, looking in the mirror, and saying to himself. In this example, this is a man we're talking about, I look like a white guy wearing Shaquille O'Neill's jersey. I don't look like Shaquille O'Neil. What would really set this off? I love Shaq, Shaq is
my guy. I want to look like him for Halloween. What would really make this pop? Well, if I just take a little bit of paint, put it on my arms, take a little bit of paint, put it on my skin, then that really helps sell that I'm trying to be Shaquille O'Neal right. Excuse me. So with that said, I recognize that a lot of times people that and I know you, I tend to be a little bit more generous, a little bit more forgiving when it comes to this
sort of stuff. But I can see and I my assumption is that most people who kind of step out of bounds with respect to this do so at least in the examples of where I see where I can see, you know, the benefit of the doubt, you know, working in the favor of the person you know, committing the offense. And as you know, that's the way I work. I tend to get folks the benefit of the doubt. I don't assume that someone is trying to be out of
line until I have something that confirms that. You know, my I move the way that I move, I move with love, I try to move with respect, and I all I have is the assumption that other people are moving in that way. I know that not everyone is, but I until I know that they're not moving with those intentions, I give them that same courtesy that I
would hope to have. Right, So, when a person steps out of line, when they, you know, do something like this, I imagine that the question, you know, because obviously there's backlash all the time for folks that do well. Not all the time, but you know, especially folks on a folks on a public stage, or folks that have friends that really love them. They say, hey, yo, that's that's wrong. You don't want to do that. They might not get
the why. So I think that when we peel back the layers of the history here, we can kind of you know, I say, I use this term a lot to breathe a little bit of life into this. Now I am familiar, a little bit more familiar with the history in this country of black people. I got it, honestly.
You know.
I grew up with educated parents who very much wanted me to be educated about the past and the present so that I would be empowered to walk the path that ultimately I would walk. I probably didn't know I'd be doing a show like this, but whatever their reasons, here I am so I can make the connections very easily. But never before I ever had a stage and the topic come up where it's like, well, listen, man, let's
try to meet people where they are. We're not mad if you've ever dressed up and warn the wrong thing, or you know, tried your best to look like Alan Iverson or whatever. But again, there's a why here. So I'll begin these minstrel shows, these actors dressing up in blackface. Originally these were white folks, and then later they became black actors. This was the only work that black people
could get is dressing up as caricatures of themselves. But we'll start with the white folks painting their skin black and painting the big lips and the and the big white eyes. It kind of looking like spooks. You know. This is we talked about darkies. This is the darky motif here. The characters in these shows were often based on stereotypes that were not true. Now, think of the time in this country. This is this is a funny story. Think of the time in this country. These white actors
and and story. You know, the screen are not screenplays, but whatever the show writers what are those called screenwriters or authors of the shows? Whatever? Play rights, that's the word. They would often write shows about the past, as you do. Right. So their past, their immediate past, was a time when there was slavery, right, So they would have these slaves
as extra lazy, right. They would have them, as you know, engaging oftentimes in sort of criminal behavior, not like like robbing banks or anything like that, but just kind of mischievous behavior.
Right.
And what it did you know, to to the to the to the black leaders of the time, the reason why that why in black circles. It was so offensive. What it did was it presented a view of black people to an audience that some of whom didn't really get to interact with black people. Right. And so if all you're seeing of black people is white people dressing up quote unquote as black people with a big lip paint on and the big white eyes painted on, and
all they do is their comic relief. They're silly, they're uneducated, they speak you know, broken English, they have these weird accents. They are lazy, they're you know whatever, they're like the not antagonist, but they're dimitted, dim witted. That's a great one. So this is this is all you know of black people, and this is the this is the Internet of the day, this is the cinema of the day, This is how populations were influenced.
Right.
So you begin to see that black folks, especially black leadership at the time, really didn't appreciate the way black people were portrayed by white actors in these shows. Right. And I don't know if it was from pressure from you know, black leadership, or if it was just an evolution of the genre. Later on, black actors began dressing up in black face, so they'd be people just as black as me and you Q. And this was the
only work that we could get as an actor. Only mainstream work is by dressing up and acting like a goofy, cartoonish version of ourselves. Right, And that's where you begin to see the beginnings of black folks really challenging and fighting in show business for black writers, for legitimacy in terms of depictions of black life and black people and
black households and so forth. And this is why you know, shows like The Cosby Show when it did air, I'm not talking about Bill Cosby, but when the Case the show did air with such a breakthrough because you know, there was a lawyer and a doctor on the show. It wasn't good times wherever they were just having a good time and hanging out and chilling. These were like educators raising a family, you know, in a big city. You know, these things were hard fought battles, and it started,
you know, on stages like this. And so back to blackface. You know the legacy of that is that you a person who does not live a black life, playing pretend, not only at best can you base whatever acting you do as an actor? You know we're not even talking about those folks who dress up as a Halloween costume. But whatever work you can do as an actor, at best, you are only going to be able to you whose
stories you may have heard. At best, you're only going to be able to use inferences, examples, you know, things like that. But the actual feeling and the lasting impression of this performance are things that you'll never know, but all the black people that exist in the wake of this performance will know. Right. And so it's not only is it offensive, but it's it almost disregards the actual people who have to live in the wake of whatever it is that you do based on whatever prejudices or
stories you may have read or whatever. Right, the disconnect is where black folks often find the problem. Later in the show, we're going to talk about some examples with that are indigenous brothers and sisters, right, So please stick around for that, But for now, just know that there's
more connections that we can make there. Now, another thing that I want you to know is that if you go back and kind of research this stuff, you know, be my guest, please go back and look at the Wikipedia page for blackface or just google it, and when you see when all this stuff was happening, you'll see all of these very racist caricatures of the darkie and of the coon and so forth. And I think I shared on the show before that I have some of
those posters in the backyard of my house. The people that own this house before, you know, put them up in the backyard and I didn't see them until a few years after living there because they're up under an awning or something like that. And it just goes to show that as recently as twenty ten when I bought my home that you know, people thought these things were okay, right, And I look at them. I haven't taken them down.
I live here now, you know what I mean. But I look at them and it's sort of a reminder of the world that I live in. You know, again, I live in Arizona, very red state. But you know, these things were funny. They were meant to be funny. They're meant to be comical to a white audience, and black people really didn't think they were funny. We recognized, Okay,
this is not who we are. But this is really the only form of entertainment, the dominant form of entertainment, and we have to live in a world in a wake of this. So these subtle influences, these subtle impressions over the population are going to affect our day to day lives. You know, we wonder why police pull guns out, you know, at the traffic stop if a person is black driving the car, especially a black male driving the car, versus any other type of person. You know, you can
trace roots all the way back to this time. You can trace them even a little bit further. But you know, these are things that really have helped tell the story of why such ignorant ideas exist about black people, just because these folks were trying to entertain folks based off of prejudices and so forth, not really caring what would what they would leave in their way, you know, in their real life consequences of this. So far, what do you think about.
This, Q Man? This there's so much to unpack, right.
You think about the idea of categorizing ethnicity as skin color in the first place, and that's where our problem starts, right and that in Africa there's no ethnic category called black that as a Western you know, Colonizer Urn, Sure we can and we can send a lot of time on the history of that and the political and societal reasons why it's even black versus white when neither color is really accurate, and describing the actual skin color of either population of people that you're talking.
About, not a pigment in your skin, that's literally it.
Yeah, And when you start when you talk about our Aboriginal brothers and sisters being identified at some point as red, people of Asian Pacific Island descent being referred to as yellow, if you start to depict people based on those descriptions, it could get problematic really fast. And you spoke of Halloween costumes, for instance, making.
That choice right, the white guy choosing Shack instead of you know, Larry Bird. You know, it's not like there's not a great player who would fit your skin tone. That could be you know, demonstratively less offensive in the
spirit of it. If I decided to be a character from the popular movie Rush Hour, choosing Jackie Chan's character as opposed to Chris Tucker's could get problematic really fast, absolutely, because the only way is for me to make it readily identifiable that that was the character I chose would be to wear some type of wig, to do something exaggerated to the shape of my eyes, and if I went so far as to color my skin different, it
would be obviously and instantly recognized as offensive, especially to the people that I know that are from that part of the world. And a Chinese roommate in college, you know, if he saw me in that cost of I think he'd be greatly disappointed in his former roommate.
And I think that that says that says it all. You know, there's there's this you know, there's people that are like, you know, why can't I say the N word?
Like I don't.
I just don't get it. It's just a word. It's in all music, blah blah blah, and it's like, well, you know, it just offends. At the end of the day, you know, we we try to, you know, give things some context, really bring things to life conceptually, some concepts to life. That's what I mean to say. But you know, at the end of the day, if you recognize that even a small minority of a given community might be
offended by something that you're doing. And again we'll peel away more layers when we get to you know, our culture vulture discussion. But it's just something that you just don't want to do you don't want to, We're not here to do that. There's so many options, and I think that that's an issue with America, among others, is that people feel so entitled to everything. Well why can't I do this? And then they fixate on the thing that they can't do. It's super wild. And I want
to make one more note too. For minstrel shows, they always depicted black people as being lazy and they were slaves. So who's really lazy the people that kidnapped people to do the work for them or anyway, let's talk.
About but before you before you move on though, that was intentional, sure, right, These people are not complaining because they're being overworked and and manipulated and exploited. They're complaining because they're lazy guys, Like let's you know, that's that's why they're not happy doing the work they we're asking them to do. Or they're as happy as possible, which you know you mentioned dandified earlier there that's another dress to the nines and really excited about this wonderful work
they have to do. And it's just you know, you said that there are most people that do the kind of Halloween constant thing mean no offense. I think most is being generous. Let's say some that's fair. I think I think most is going a little bit far. And you said those stereotypes often portray us in a negative light, let's say always, those minstrual stereotypes always portrayed us in a derogatory and negative light.
Stick around your radios. We're coming back with more cipy cipher right after this.