The other day, I heard Dave Chappelle bitching that MTV always makes the black people on the show The Real World seem crazy. They set up a situation where there’s one black person and six white people, and the black guy starts to feel alienated and freaks out; this is subsequently viewed by the rest of the cast as an overreaction to a non-existent racial problem.
I recently saw an episode of The Real World: Philadelphia, and guess what-Dave’s totally right. After the most of the cast goes to a club, Karamo, the show’s token black guy freaks out after being questioned by the police; apparently someone had telephoned the police and reported the presence of a black man in possession of a firearm at the club. Another cast member, MJ, tries to calm down and claims that Karamo is “overreacting,” and that the call was just a prank call which probably wasn’t a “racial thing” at all. Needless to say, Karamo and MJ get into a big fight (which, in typical Real World fashion, takes a whole episode to resolve).
What I find astounding by this situation is the fact that none of Karamo’s white housemates can understand why he had to make a simple “prank call” into a “racial thing.” Well Karamo, like anybody in his position would be, was upset about the “prank call” because it was a “racial thing.” If a black man at a predominately white club gets accused of holding a firearm, it definitely has racial implications, and when racism occurs, its victims tend to get a bit upset.
This is not to say that anybody who has been a victim of racism is justified in behaving in whatever way they want. It’s just that victims of racism should be treated with a little empathy. We have a tendency to characterize people who are extremely vocal about racism as people with an “agenda.” In an internet interview on mtv.com, another of the character Sarah’s housemates claims that Karamo definitely has just such an “agenda.” Of course Karamo has an agenda! His agenda is to avoid being the victim of racial discrimination. Karamo’s agenda is everyone’s agenda.
Our tendency to characterize people like Karamo-people who have an agenda-in a negative light stems from two sources. One can be said to originate within the very “community” of traditionally oppressed groups. There is a real tendency of some very loud people to use past racism as an excuse to play the identity politics game. From bell hooks to Dead Prez, these figures use their political identity (whether that is defined by race, gender, sexuality, religion, etc.) as an excuse to send out a “Get Whitey!!” message that’s just as divisive as racism itself.
The other source of this suspicious about “agendas” is the widespread belief that racism doesn’t exist in North America, or that if it does it exists in the South or in the suburbs or in Ohio. It doesn’t exist wherever “we” live. In general there is a tendency to think that wherever we are has evolved past racism; that racism is someone else’s problem because we’re a progressive liberal-democratic society that has beaten racism once and for all.
What is dangerous about this assumption is that it disguises an appropriation of the discourse of progressive enlightenment by the political right-an appropriation that lies behind our division of the world between First and Third, Developed and Developing, West and everywhere else-that exists to weaken progressive social policies like Affirmative Action. It has been going on for a long while and it is time that we critically evaluate it, not just in academic circles, but in popular culture as well.
The soothing idea that we live in a “progressive Western society” has caused us to resist questioning things for fear of looking like we, like Karamo, have an “agenda.” We shouldn’t be afraid to identify things as racist or oppressive where we find them; we should trust our gut. The Real World is racist. The popularity of William Hung stinks of racism. The assertion that “everyone has an equal opportunity” is definitely, implicitly, racist. Profiling by airport security and by policemen? Yup, racist, and not “minimally observant” as Dennis Miller claims (what kind of racist shit is that, Dennis?).
And what’s really shocked me is the fact that very few people have been linking George Bush’s victory in the election last week to racist politics; guess what, they played a role too. They played a role because-I’m not sure if you know this-racism is alive and well on this continent, and we cannot become complacent in reassuring ourselves of the contrary, no matter how easy it makes watching TV.
