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From the page to the screen to the stage. Black artists have bemoaned the demand for them to perform struggle for white audiences.
Some call it poverty porn, others call it trauma porn. You may have heard the phrases misery lit or misery memoirs.
Yep, I've definitely heard those terms kicked around, but they focused on the end product, the movie, the book, the play. But there's a web of actors and interests that make sure these products exist in the first place. And that's why I've coined the term Black struggle industrial complex.
Okay, I see the system thinking.
You see it, and I've come to see that many relationships make up the Black struggle industrial complex, and multiple parties benefit from it. And while there's a bunch of examples of stories that have been accused of being trauma porn or poverty porn, some storytellers break the fourth wall and show us how they relate to this complex.
Stories like Percival Everett's Erasure, which was recently adapted into a movie called American Fiction, pull back the curtain on the black struggle industrial complex and shine a satirical light on all its moving parts.
I loved Erasure. The novel tells the story of Thelonious Monk Ellison, a black author and university professor who becomes frustrated with the expectations and stereotypes associated with the black literature. In response, he writes the parody of what he sees as stereotypical ghetto fiction under a pseudonym. To Monk's surprise, the book becomes a literary sensation and hygiens ensu.
When an early screening of American Fiction came to Atlanta, you know, we had to pull up. If they want stereotypes, I'll give them one. What is this? Nobody's gonna publish this.
I just want to rub their nose, isn't it?
We love it?
What?
You know? We had a lot of thoughts after the credits rolled.
I guess I want to start by asking you, Katie, what is your initial gut reaction to the film now that we finished it.
Gut feeling, liked it, thought it was funny, entertained, liked some of the changes, didn't like other changes.
My gut reaction is that it was fun like it seemed very mainstream and that's not kind of how I imagined the book Erasure to be. The black struggle industrial complex was real in that movie.
Indeed, it had all the parts.
Okay, go ahead and break it down for us, Katie.
All right, So the anatomy of the black struggle industrial complex is well complex are with the most obvious the creator. And as we saw in Erasure, in American fiction, there are two types of creators, the ones who chaf against the demands to present black struggle stories and those who see it as a ticket for individual material gain.
So the main character interrature and American fiction, Thelnius Monk Ellison, is clearly the former. And would you say his foil Juanita May Jenkins, who was renamed Centaur Golden for the movie, author of the best selling Weeze Lives in the Ghetto, is an example of the latter.
Yeah, I would the movie gave us more insight into Wanita's mindset than the book, like in the scene where Monk confronts her about her books perpetuating stereotypes. And by the way, going for it, I'm going to refer to her as just Juania, but we mean Juanita in the book and Cintaa in the movie My Thing is some people's actual stories are what some would call stereotypes. Stereotypes don't come out of thin air. Some folks actually live
that life. But one of the major tenets of the black struggle industrial complay is a pandering to white people's guilt or their need to be liked or feel cool. It varies, but the black creator supplies what they need.
Hmm, okay, can you explain more what you mean by that?
Yeah. So, both Monk's book My Pathology or later renamed Fuck, and Wanita's book We Lived in the Ghetto are held as honest, raw a true representation of what it's like to be black in America. Juanita even says that was part of her motivation for writing the book.
What really struck me was that too few books were about my people. Where are our stories? Where's our representation?
But both Monks and Janita's books aren't true or representative of anything they know personally. Monks is completely made up, and that's the gag. Our Ratio delves into this more than American fiction. But Fuck My Pathology is about a deadbeat dad who assaults black women and fantasizes about stabbing his mom. There really aren't any significant white characters, so it gives the white audience of heuristic experience. Even the title my pathology points to all the problems in this
black community being the black people's own backwardness. It never touches on systemic issues. Denby Dan's rappers crack.
You said you wanted black stuff. That's black, right. So white people get this gritty story from the hood without having to feel guilty about how they may have contributed to making the conditions of the.
Hood exactly And similarly, we learned from reading A Rasure that Juanita spent a week in Harlem with her cousins and wrote her book. Otherwise she's lived a really privileged life, went to a prestigious school, got a sought after job upon graduation. Monk is a PhD. Both his siblings are medical doctors. His father wasn't empty. His family seems extremely well off. They have two houses, a beach house and a primary residence, and a living maid, so both of
them are cappin. But they get put on this pedestal of being the few to speak for millions of black Americans. And I'm not saying hood shit and trauma shouldn't be written about. But who gets to write about hoodshit and trauma is what's interesting to me when it comes to the black struggle industrial complex.
Like who gets propped up and puts to the forefront and what agenda is that serving?
Yeah, because on the other hand, works that have been accused of being trauma porn often have a white savior involved, so the white audience can identify with being the good guy, like.
Twelve Years a Slave, Freedom, Writers, The Help.
There's so many but works to speak to trauma and indict white supremacy, capitalism, and fascism as a culprit, those books get banned. George Jackson's Blood in My Eye would never be a part of the Black struggle industrial complex because it's not serving either role of making white people feel better or pandering to their guilt.
Do you think Wanita and creators like her who play into the system are cognizant of what they're doing.
I do think there's some cognitive dissidence going on. Like to talk about representation, I think is a popular cop out, like any depiction of black people on the screen is a good thing, But deep down, I do think they know what they're doing like.
In the movie when Monk likens Juanita's writing to a drug dealer rationalizing selling drugs by saying that he's just giving folks what they want, and Janit equips, well, I think drugs should be.
Legal, and I mean, it's a really attractive deal. In this instance, millions of dollars are on the table for whoever is willing to make these stories, So I can see why and how someone would rationalize it.
And Monk quickly realizes that too, that no matter how much he despises it, in order for him to be a materially successful author, he has to give up all the Greek mythology writing and embody these stereotypes, even if he does so under a pen name.
I mean, and even in the book in the movie, Monk chafed it against it, but then ultimately wrote his parody and he was saying like, oh, you know, I'm doing it to stick it to the man, but also like, you're not dumb because you saw that we lives in the ghetto, which is essentially the same type of which
you're doing really well. Mentioned Yeah, so you saw that you needed money to put your mom up in this assisted living center, so you're against it, but you're like when push comes to shove money talk and you took that money, you weren't like now I'm just playing, y'all are also stupid. I'm gonna be on my moral high ground.
And broke, and that's that on it.
So, as creators ourselves, what has been your experience with the black struggle industrial complex? Like, have you been tempted? Have you participated in it?
It's such a tough question because I don't feel like I've ever been tempted to amp up my blackness for any sort of writing that I've ever done. I've also never been explicitly asked to do so, Like nobody's ever said you have to add more struggle in here, or you have to add more trauma in here. But I am often in a position where I am one of few black wrins who is working with the publication, and so I'm working on black assignments that were given to
me because I'm black. But I also choose them because it's within the realm of things that I write. I care about blackness and I care about writing about it, so it's a choice on my end too. So it's two sides of the coin. Where the editors and the publications that I'm involved with have power in what they're assigning me. But I also have my own powered agency and the things that I choose to either pitch and or take and continue to write because I care about them.
And I'm fortunate enough to say that I have had the privilege to be able to choose to write what I want to write. And I've never been in a space where for money, I absolutely have to write a thing, and have to write a thing that I know is going to be lucrative for me. But I would like to know your experience with it too. Have you ever been tempted?
Yeah, So there was this time when I was like pitching my business for like different grants and stuff, and there was like a competition I was a part of, and you had to pitch your bit business and you know, maybe it's like a five minute pitch. And I noticed that it was like a mix of people. It was like black people, Latino people, white people, all pitching their businesses.
And so my business a black bookstore. I was talking about just like how I grew up, how my mom was like really into like teaching me and my brother how to read and really loving black literature. And then I also shared that my grandfather never knew how to read, and he lived to be eighty two and he never learned how to read. And I thought that like really
fit into the story. And we would practice the pitches in front of each other, right, and so then I would like hear other people's pitches get a little more, you know, like sob story is and I'm like, wait, am I doing that? You know? So it wasn't like anyone saying like, oh, like you really need to like pull out that struggle, which my grandfather not knowing how to read. I didn't see it as like something as like a struggle for me personally, like definitely a struggle
for him. But if anything, it really just emphasized how much reading was important. So I talk about the cop in your head, but also the white taste maker in your head, or like knowing that white people may feel guilty that my grandfather didn't know how to read because he grew up in like Jim Crow, Mississippi, and they
had a hand in that. So I think that was one example where I felt like kind of uncomfortable and I was like kind of seeing it play out even I think about that with like the book that I'm writing now, I'm like, did I get this book deal just because like black stuff was going on and like white publishers and editors feel guilty about all the shit black people were going through in twenty twenty and they're like, Okay, like you get a book deal now. You know what
I'm saying. And it's not that I'm personally like writing anything that I think is handering to that, but I'm writing the book in general that I do think is a product of that.
Do you feel like your motivation for writing the book is because you knew that you could capitalize off of the moment.
Yeah, I thought it was like very of the moment, like we need to capture what's going on with the black bookstores. So yeah, I think I'm thelonious girl.
I think that's going to stretch too far because he went way into it. He went deep, deep down in the whole. Girl.
I'm writing my pathology too.
Girl, I don't think that's the case. I think you're overstating it. I think for me sometimes it happens more on the end, where the work is already published in the editorial process, versus it being during the content creation stage, and I have white audiences inevitably reading the work and
they compliment me on it. Sometimes I question the value of my work because I'm wondering, do they just like this just because it gets a peek into a black mind, the black thought process, you know, Black society, that they get an insider's view of it all. I wonder, is this because I'm a great writer, or is it like they say, like they really enjoyed the work. Is that true?
Or is that because of all the other toppings piled on top of it that they get to get this view from a person who they consider thoughtful and conscientious about black things.
And I think that's like kind of the central issue that you know, Polonius is battling with because he is trying to write really like in depth characters who you know, have like an interior life and like great dialogue in his books that he likes writing, and nobody likes them, no one reads them, you know, like they're in the
wrong section of the bookstore. But then when he writes just kind of like a parody of black life, it takes off and it makes me think about, like how much did the author of a racer Percival ever identify with the main character. Because Percival has written a lot of books. He's also a professor, and not saying that his books like we're doing as bad as Thelonious is, but this book and in the book, you get to read the entirety of the parody book he wrote. So
this book has that ghetto shit in there. And so this is the book that gets adapted into a movie. Right in a.
Way, this is kind of ironic to think about, but Percival Everett's thoughts in this book are kind of a stand in for the race because this is something that we have to do a lot, which is kind of ironic because part of this whole thing that he's railing against is like being able to represent the race with these caricatures and stereotypes and identification with black struggle. So I think that it's very telling that this is the book that got an adaptation and got a lot of
big names in it. I think that's worth mentioning too, because there are Sterling K. Brown's in the movie, Issa Ray's in the movie, Jeffrey in the movie, Erica Alexander is in the movie. So there are a lot of big names in this, So it was clearly something that the studios thought was going to be a big draw for people, because they were willing to get people who
are such upstanding actors in it. So yeah, maybe in a way, this is kind of like representative of what the author was talking about in the book.
More parts of the Anatomy of the Black Struggle Industrial Complex after the break. Since money is a big factor in the Black struggle industrial complex, let's look at the next part of the system.
Let me guess the buyer.
The buyer.
The buyer has the money, they're funding the whole operation.
Yes, the white taste makers wield so much power in this situation.
In American fiction, they're portrayed as kind of oblivious.
If there's already so much buzzy because of the.
Movie deal, Michael B. Jordan is circling.
We want to put them on the cover and one of those scarves, I guess you would call them tied around his head a do rag.
That's it easily tricked.
Is this based on your actual life?
Yeah?
You think some bitch ass college boy can come up with that shit?
No, no, no, I don't. They're prejudiced, only allowing a certain black narrative to be mainstream, but they aren't depicted as overtly racist.
No, not at all. The buyers of the Black struggle industrial Complex product aren't waving Confederate flags or storming the capitol. And as far as being oblivious, I think that's just not true. Like they want to come across as oblivious to deny culpability, but they know what they're doing. As writers, I think the people we deal with the most are editors as we're writing for these publications. You see, these editors can give a yes or no on the stories
that get written and eventually public. They're the tastemakers and the king makers. If they decide they don't like you or what you're saying, it's not going to get through them. And of course you can self publish or find other publications. But there's a difference between being in the New York Times in a random blog, and it's so much power. They're not going to give it up just because you
point out to them that it's unfair. They know, and they're on the right side of the unfairness sucks for everybody else.
The director of American Fiction Court Jefferson, talked about this in an interview with the BBC, he said, I realized that people would ask me, do you want to write about this slave? Do you want to write about this drug dealer? Do you want to write about this gang member? And I realized that these kind of rigid restrictions as to what black life looks like were being placed on me, even in the world of fiction, which blew my mind. They're also the middlemen, like the agents.
Yes, they're exactly that.
Yeah, he knew the plot, but was pushing Monk to not fumble the.
Bag because ultimately, the agent needs the black struggle stories to sell in order to get paid, so they're going to encourage it too.
They're offering four million dollars for the movie, right, behave the richer. I get the agent claims to be against sensationalism over substance, but is he really How can he be when his livelihood is so tied up in it and he's not even the creative So he's really just at the whim of two actors in the black struggle industrial complex. And I might add that in the book, there is a part where he says, you're gonna get
three million dollars for this movie. Deal that means I'm going to get three hundred thousand.
So he is calculated.
Yes, he needs to run with it, sir.
He don't even need that calculator. App he knows what his cut gonna be. And that brings us to the final part of the Black struggle industrial complexes anatomy the audience.
Okay, I think most people can identify with being the audience.
Yeah, exactly. It's the biggest potential group. So I'm going to break it down into two sections, the black audience and the white audience. And I know there's more than black and white people in the audience, but just go with me here.
Okay, black folks first, all right, and we can.
Relate to this perspective more too, because before we were creating, we were consuming. But in terms of the black audience's role in the Black struggle industrial complex, I think it's twofold. The black audience is there to one appreciate the representation, no matter how blackluster or unthoughtful it is. And two, because white people often just copy black people's taste in the arts, the black audience is used as a shepherd for the highly sought after white audience.
And when the black audience pushes back on certain media. We're accused of tearing each other.
Down crabs in a barrel.
I remember that happened with Queen and Slim.
Oh my god. I think the black audience is taken for granted, like we have to support every single representative movie or book, or even if.
It sucks, tell us how you really feel.
Okay, not too much, not too much. Let me move on to the white audience members, who, as we saw in American fiction, are really coveted and catered to.
Yes, like the reviewers and the white audience really pushed black struggle stories to the four. After Wanita read an excerpt from her book, a white woman is the first to offer a standing ovation.
Y'all, Sharondon girl, you'd be pregnant again if I is Ray, Ray is gonna be a real father this time around.
There's a strategic value behind what the white audience is doing. Similarly to the buyers, I think the white audience's reaction to these black struggle stories is treated as quirky or occurring by happenstance.
Like they don't know any better.
Yeah, but literally, the most folesh thing you could do is underestimate the whites and I think it's easier for folks to understand that with individual white people like Richard Nixon are the Koch Brothers. They're supporting a particular black vision over another one because the one they're supporting is more useful to them. For example, for example, Nixon supported
black capitalism over socialism. He said in a speech, instead of government jobs and government housing and government welfare, that government uses its tax and credit policies to enlist in this battle the greatest engine of progress ever developed in the history of man American private enterprise. During the campaign, Nixon co opted black powers rhetoric of economic self determination
to call for a segregated black economy. So while generations of white Americans gained wealth through the same government jobs and welfare, Nixon was now pointing Black America to the free market and essentially saying, hey, good luck. And he did that because it was useful to him. It steered the conversation away from radical thinking and radical narratives.
And you're saying, why audiences are doing something similar, but as a.
Mass yes, there's a collective intelligence white audience and says are exercising in the stories they're elevating, which tend to be more conservative, more escapist, and, in the case of a racier and American Fiction, more pathological. It's also a strategic intervention to steer the conversation away from radicalism, just like Nixon and the Koch Brothers, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefellers.
So I think when we as creators are talking about what the black struggle industrial complex does, it's not asking us to be more black, because we're already black. It's asking us to be a type of black that absolves and liberates white audiences from any obligation.
That reminds me of something else. The director of American Fiction said in that BBC interview. He said basically that it allows why audience members to say, quote, this depiction of race does not harm my self image because I'm not burning across on anybody's lawn, i don't own slaves, I'm not a racist, yep, wanting to be absolved. Hmm.
We'll have more on the other side of this break. I do think that white audiences could like take away the wrong thing from the movie American Fiction, the book a rasure, and even this podcast episode, like they even be sitting there thinking like, well, since everything I'm doing is wrong. I'm just not going to support black art at all since I'm doing it wrong, you know what I'm saying, which I don't think is the right thing to do. But if I was in their shoes and like.
You're giving them the much needed information that they always be asking for, child, what do I do?
No? I mean, if I was in their shoes, I would be like, fuck y'all.
Okay, truly, that's not the answer they want. You're not giving them the answer they want, you know what I.
Mean, Because it's like, Okay, well, y'all said, y'all wanted us to support black people, and it's floor back of businesses, and we went and bought this book. And now you're saying we're doing that wrong. Like now you're saying that we're supporting this ghetto fiction that supports stereotypes, Like damn.
I think the movie didn't focus as much on what the white people were actually saying about the book. In the movie, they touched on it a little bit when they were in the meeting. In the movie, they have a scene where they're doing these literary book awards and they have a cohortive people and it's like it's just Juanita and Thelonius are the only black people in the group, and it's like five or six people in the group.
And they don't talk about it as much in the movie, but in the book they give a lot of the things that the white people are saying about Juanita's book and about fuck and they talk a little bit about it in the movie where they talk about the quotes that were in the magazines and newspaper articles that were saying Juanita's book is so raw and real and emotional.
So the white people that were in the book, we're saying things like, this is the best black novel that I've read in the last however long.
It's like it'll be taught in schools in thirty years.
Yes, they were very complimentary of it. They praised it so highly, but they clearly, in the book and in the movie, really felt strongly about it being something that needed to be more widely read and definitely widely read by white audiences that they were the stand ins for. So in the end, they were the judges essentially and the gatekeepers for the images of black people that they thought should be disseminated widely. And while they were saying
these things. They were completely ignoring what in the book Monk was saying. But in the movie what both Sintara aka Janita and Monk were saying. They were like, Oh, you're a black person with thoughts about how blackness should be in the book, you know.
So, But I think it goes back to that like collective intelligence, Like there is an agenda to say that this poordly written book that was written in like one night, agree alcohol fueled night should be read by white and black and every other race students for the next thirty years. What you try to say about black folks.
Yeah, was it one night or was it one week? I thought it was a week, he said.
I thought he wrote it in one night.
It might have been different in the movie in the book, but in the book, I feel like he said he did it one week to others.
Either way, not very thoughtful. Yeah, you know what I'm saying. But yeah, I think that goes back to like there is an agenda. And even when like a black person who you say you respect because they wouldn't have been on this committee if they weren't respected writers, you say you respect them and respect their art. In their opinion, you're like nah, we got this, like we know what people should be reading, and we know what's the best black book of the century.
Also, it being a fictional character that they're talking about allows them distance that somebody, a black person, sitting right in front of them doesn't allow them. And in a way for white people who are so used to operating in that way pretending black people are invisible or and they truly are if it's not pretending, sometimes black people really are invisible to them in so many ways. It's
like you operate like that every day in life. I have definitely had experiences where white people treating me as invisible in places, so it's not hard for them to do that in a real room where it's like, in a way, they have more intimacy with the fictional characters because they live, breathe literary stuff, they are writers, so it's like easier for them to be in touch or in tune or ostensibly those things with this fictional black character who they could imagine more things upon as reading
it than somebody who's sitting right in front of them, because they operate within white supremacy, because it's how they're used to treating black people in real life.
Yeah.
So to recap the anatomy of the black struggle industrial complex, we got the creators, the ones who push back against and the ones who lean into it. We have the buyers, the folks paying the creators and funding these stories, the agents, the middlemen between the creators and the audience, both black and white and beyond.
You got it. And if you're looking for another movie that breaks the fourth wall on the black struggle industrial complex, I recommend watching Roda Blanks, the forty year old version. That's version not virgin. It's on Netflix.
And with that, it's time for roll credits, the segment where we give credit to a person, place, or thing for the week. Katie, what's you given credit to this week? This week?
I would like to give credit to clothes swapping. I'm in my not buy as much stuff bag, and it used to be like, whenever I thought I needed some piece of clothing, I would go buy it. But now I just ask somebody else, like do you have this? Can I wear it for this for this day? And sometimes I do? What would you like to give credit to this week?
This week? I would like to give credit to incense because Katie, you know I like smells it smells make me feel really good. So like when I wake up in the morning, it's a ritual for me to turn on my essential oil diffusers and like my incense. And I don't have that many candles, so if anybody wants to give me any candles, you can. But I love smells, so they made me feel better. So that's what I want to give credit to this week.
And with that, we will see you next week.
Bye y'all, bye. On Theme is a production of iHeartRadio and Fairweather Friends Media. This episode was written by Eves Jeffco and Katie Mitchell.
It was produced by Tari Harrison and edited in sound designed by Dylan Fagan.
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