I come from a minority group where we take some pride and comfort in our clan, because the only time we see ourselves on TV is the Connor family and before that the Bunker family. Blue collar. But in popular television culture, even the Blacks are rich like the Huxtables and living in Bel Air.
The whites, in the Scholastic books in my local used book store, are from families that go to Disneyland and send their kids to summer camp and think going to university is perfectly normal. Not like my relatives—except cousin John, because the army paid for his degree. (I got a degree too, working through school in middle age without a loan)
Some of my best friends are white, but you got to admit: Except for television, they think Blacks are poor and living in the US south or the inner city.
OK, not you and I, of course not, but most other people mostly do. Call it a stereotype, or call it oversimplifying. Whatever. Blacks do rap and jazz, they don’t do crooning like Sinatra. I get it: Pop culture today is for escape. White kids romanticize the problems of criminal rappers and then wear ghetto fashion, the way my own peers romanticized our uncles in WWII, and then exchanged our hair cream for buzz cuts, our cotton coats for bomber crew jackets. I get it. But still—When was the last time popular culture showed a Black male homosexual? Maybe in an indie Kevin Smith movie, or a comic vampire movie or… And a Hollywood gay man cannot be a leader among white gays, and cannot take his gay peeps to a ritzy beach house.
It’s as if Black people of diversity are erased from pop culture. I should write a book called Erasure. But I can’t. It’s been done and the movie version is called American Fiction. I saw it tonight. As for gays, in the movie a white gay is friendly and offers to make a healthy smoothie and generously dances with an old lady. He is shown in a bathing suit, paired with a shirt for dancing at a wedding, while the Black protagonist wears a tuxedo. The symbolism is obvious: What counts, for both men, is how they are inside.
Did I like the movie? Yes! I admire the writing because the easy way out would have been to script an evil antagonist. Maybe a drug dealer loan shark who personally hates the protagonist. Forgot that noise: The movie actually puts me in a good mood. Let some other film show my people. Let some other flic show shootouts and car chases. American Fiction shows folks who don’t mean to be evil, just well meaning in messy real life. The car? Not for shootouts, and not “pimped up.” Just a nice sports convertible for an honest Black man. God bless America.
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Sean Crawford
March, 2024
Blog note: Speaking of race, I hope to write about my mother next time. My dad served in Germany in the war, on the side of the Allies, fighting against racism and fascism. He met my mother, after her fiancé got shot down, and made an honest woman out of her, and so us six kids were born.
Update: In case anyone from the Curzon art theatre sees this (I know several folks looked at my Poor Things piece) I want to say that when we did a discussion in the lounge after the premier of Zone of Interest, what choked me was how the lady said the price of curtains from a camp victim. When I was in my teens (25 years after the war) my mother told me the price of bedsheets she had gotten after someone she never met was sent to a camp. She said so with anger, I suppose to cover up her sadness. To still know the price after all these years meant my dear mother must have been carrying a lot of shame. And she was in Canada, not in Germany where folks can at least share their twisted shame and secrecy culture, twisted enough for many today to support Russia over Ukraine. (Hannah Voight finally had to write A Burden of Guilt (The English title) to be transparent for the German boomer kids—and adults bought out the first print run)
