Our “white people problems” problem: Why it’s time to stop using “white” as a pejorative →
[T]hat’s the big problem with the eruption of “too white” as a putdown: It turns real complaints that deserve a fair hearing into part of the nagging buzz of self-satisfied snark that pervades our culture today. There are too many people who disingenuously gripe about how “white” something is when they’re really trying to say that it’s not brassy or badass enough for their taste—that it’s salmon, not a buffalo wing.
So here’s the challenge to all you people who toss around “white” as a synonym for “lame” on the Internet: Suggest alternatives. Name a movie, a TV show, a book, a piece of music, or anything that meets your standards for non-“whiteness.” I’m not baiting you here; I’m asking sincerely. If you’re really interested in encouraging diversity, do so in a positive way, by calling attention to some valuable work that’s flying below the radar. Tell us to listen to Charles Bradley, or seek out the films of Ramin Bahrani, or read the comics of Gene Luen Yang and Derek Kirk Kim, or appreciate the nuanced depiction of the black middle-class on the much-missed TNT drama Men Of A Certain Age. Light the way instead of huffily trying to snuff others’ enthusiasm.
Unless of course you’re only race-baiting to score points and make yourself look cool. But you wouldn’t do that, would you? I mean, only a terrible human being would exploit centuries of struggle against oppression and marginalization just to get out of seeing a Wes Anderson movie.
This A.V. Club essay about dismissals of “white” art is definitely clumsy at times, but it gets to something really important by its conclusion. There’s absolutely appropriation at work when white folks invoke the criticism of something that it’s “too white” and thus, like, crappy or boring or whatever.
A term used by people of color to say, roughly, that there’s little for them to relate to in a particular work sounds very different when it’s used by white people to say that something they likely can relate to just doesn’t give ‘em the countercultural thrill they want. (I hear and read white people calling various things “too white” a lot, and it’s almost always a haughty dismissal of, I dunno, Norah Jones and, at least until Girls debuted, never a genuine critique of the work’s attitudes about race.)
In short, it co-opts a legitimate complaint, as Murray says in his piece, in order to snark at something. And, sure — Wes Anderson movies, or Mumford And Sons albums, or whatever are made by white people, but nobody would declare, like, Jim Jarmusch or Mark Ronson to be “white people” shit. Which means you’re saying, basically, that “white people” art is uncool, but white people can make not-white art, which seems to further marginalize actual people of color and the things they make.
You’re also, of course, saying that you’re such a Cool White Person that you don’t even get into stuff that all those less-cool white people do, which is classic appropriation. Just by rejecting Zooey Deschanel for her whiteness, you can enjoy a little bit of the outsider cool of being not-white, while still enjoying all of the cultural privileges that white people get — and doing nothing at all to change that.
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Noel Murray breaks the best graphic novels and art comics of 2011 into five parts, in the interest of fairness.
This is a fine list, and I don’t disagree with what was included for the most part, but it also speaks to something I’ve come to realize over the past few years, which is this: comics — especially literary, “mainstream”[*] comics, are so fucking boring these days.
There was a time when all of this stuff was super exciting to me — the notion that literary-minded, serious, artistic comics were on the verge of shedding the limitations that the superhero monopoly placed on them, and that we could see interesting, artistically-minded work find a major audience. I used to post on the old Warren Ellis forum talking about this stuff, and when I worked in a comics shop I pushed this stuff on people constantly. I really cared about it.
But looking at this list, it really feels like all that ultimately accomplished was to codify a new aesthetic done by a new set of dudes. I mean, look at the top three on the big list: Seth, Craig Thompson, Chester Brown. If you’d made this list at any time in the past ten years of “who are the most important people making comics,” you’d get those same names. Mark Kalesniko and Joyce Farmer, at numbers four and five, have been around forever, too. The list gets more interesting after that — though Rick Geary shows up again, of course — and then the subsequent lists are full of exciting, bold names like Dan Clowes, Ben Katchor, Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Adrian Tomine, etc, etc, etc…
It’s like if every list of the year’s best music focused exclusively on whatever Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Neil Young, and Mick Jagger had put out. (Or basically, if every list were made by Rolling Stone.) It’s not the A.V. Club, it’s the entire conversation about what makes “good comics” — basically, underground comics became a respectable literary genre around 6-7 years ago, and anyone who got successful and respected then is still the leading light in the industry.
Look at the Best American Comics series from 2010 and 2011 — still full of names like Peter Kuper, Ben Katchor, James Kochalka, David Mazzucchelli, Chris Ware (both years!), Los Bros Hernandez, R. Crumb, Peter Bagge, Jeff Smith, Paul Pope… Again, there’s nothing wrong with any of these people — they are all talented and I have enjoyed work from all of them — but this is not the way that a vital, exciting artform progresses. This is really boring.
And I think it’s interesting, because the argument back in the early 00’s, when people were busy trying to figure out how to advance the medium, was that we had to get past superheroes because the focus on them was crowding out the fresh new voices from the marketplace. The way that it turned out for the most part, though, those “fresh new voices” circa 2001 are still the same people dominating the conversation ten years later. I don’t think that was the point.
I’m a lot more interested in what Jeff Lemire is doing on Animal Man, or Scott Snyder on Swamp Thing, or Rick Remender on X-Force, or Keiron Gillen on Uncanny X-Men, or Matt Fraction on Invincible Iron Man, than I am in what Chester Brown or Seth are working on. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all of those guys (except maybe Snyder) got their start working in the same underground comics field that seems too crowded for new voices these days.
It’s funny — the whole superhero vs. “mainstream” debate, for me, was never about genre, it was about figuring out where the new and interesting work could best be done. Who’d have thought that Marvel and DC would turn out to be the answer?
[*] “Mainstream” is such a weird word to use when talking about comics, because for most of the format’s history in America, it referred to the genre that involved people in tights punching each other — not something that is particularly “mainstream” in any other artform. I’m using it here to describe genre-free literary stuff that gets respectable reviews.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lwz63dUy1j1r2igm4o1_400.jpg)
