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🕑 Added 2024-01-07 19:05:29 +0000 UTC

Comments

Brontesaurus Rex

That was fantastic, sorry in advance for novel-length comment. I'm not an artist, but I am a teacher in a majority white school and I wonder all the time how much I'm holding up and playing to whiteness in my position, even when I use it to teach these white kids about Black history and antiracism. I haven't seen this movie in way too long, but it has a very special place for me. I don't know what it's like NOT to be a fly in the milk; when I was in high school in the early 2000s, I was one of maybe 10 Black kids in a student population of 1600. One of the other ten kids was my sister. It was Bamboozled that gave me words to describe things I didn't know how to explain to those people, and planted seeds for my eventual understanding of the harm that had been done to me. I couldn't actually acknowledge, let alone face it, until I was well out of there and I'm still unpacking it many years later. But I did get in a couple of good shots. My choir teacher made us sing "Old Kentucky Home" my junior year and badly explained minstrel shows as a force for good in the process. Including me, three of those ten Black kids were in that choir class. At the end of the semester I did a short presentation on the actual history of minstrel shows and showed the class five minutes of Bamboozled to demonstrate why she was a complete goddamn fool. Their horrified silence was delicious.

An Oni Moose

I will say that I've had pretty good instincts from the beginning. I was a young kid growing up in a Leave it to Beaver suburb in the East Bay just a few freeway exits away from all the action when the local news was showing the Black Panthers, and the only thing I understood about any of it was that those were the coolest and most righteous people I'd ever seen and I wanted to know more. And the more I learned, the more I was confirmed in my initial assessment. Contrariwise, I have *always* been put off by any sort of bow-and-scrape subservience or any of the other behaviors called out here. I *hate* being put in the position of Boss - knowing how *I* feel about bosses, I can feel the underlying hostility behind it. But some of these folks are smoother than that; some have even perfected the art of using radical-sounding rhetoric in service of pulling things to the right. We faced that in the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s; that's a long story, but that experience did inoculate me a bit to that sort of thing.

An Oni Moose

I just watched this on Nebula. I have a kind of mirror anxiety as a white* consumer of black-created content - am *I* one of the "good ones", supporting and promoting stuff that does right by the community, or am I (inadvertently) supporting the wrong kind? Being a leftist and having at least a CliffsNotes understanding of all the concepts under discussion here, I like to think I know what's what - but how can one ever be certain about oneself?