myprofessormadememakethis

[myprofessormadememakethis]

The Problem with Edward

Mr. Edwards and the Spider reminds me of a typical preacher instilling existential fear in his congregants by evoking hell as a consequence. I think this threat of eternal torture to dissuade people from sinning is extremely dystopic. The word itself tickles the part of my brain that recalls violently homophobic evangelicals preaching on stage.

Additionally, though the spiders may represent sinners in the poem, I find this comparison of people to insects gives the poem a disgusted quality. It invites the kind of judgement that leads to repression, and so often in the church that repression never protects people.

For example, condemning homosexuality does not prevent people from turning out queer. It drives people towards either suicide or atheism, and as the minister’s black veil reveals—it turns people into enemies.

Robert W. Weir, Embarkation of the Pilgrims, 1843

- Ysabella Porche

[myprofessormadememakethis]

The Ideal in Protest Novels

“The Writing Master,” 1882. Thomas Eakins

Protest novels might just do more harm than good. They often present an idealized, sometimes softened version of oppression to fit morals and narrative arcs into one beautiful story. What would it mean if a protagonist, who is on a journey of resistance, fails, after all?

However, I find that the more I learn about racism myself, the more I see the inconceivable horror undergirding our lives. James Baldwin, who wrote extensively about this idea in Notes of a Native Son, understood the extent to which the cruelty of white supremacy subjugated him. He watched the government kill his friends whether they were Black, gay, or simply too subversive for the government’s liking.

I find this part much more poignant. The protest novel is a pipe dream. It undergirds the most vapid forms of liberation I’ve seen in media through the portrayal of interracial relationships and gleeful gay kids finally finding acceptance. I won’t say the media is inherently bad, but it paints a vision of the world that does not exist.

In fact, just like Baldwin, many queer people have felt death beside the joy. Yet, novels tend to only portray one over the other. Thus, they may never be able to fully navigate the evil and the pain queer Black people witness.

Notes of A Native Son provides such a deep and foundational knowledge of the Black Queer experience that the novel is much more beneficial to read when trying to understand oppression than a protest novel.

- Ysabella Porche

[myprofessormadememakethis]

Shame

“Illustrations from The Minister’s Black Veil,” Paolo d’Altan

The Minister’s Black Veil is another piece of American Literature I struggled to grasp the meaning of. It wasn’t until I listened to this interview featuring Zadie Smith that i had begun to understand the piece and the characters who were deeply disturbed by the veil.

“The subject had reference to secret sin and those sad mysteries which we hide from our nearest and dearest, and would fain conceal from our own consciousness, even forgetting that the Omniscient can detect them. A subtle power was breathed into his words.”

The Minister’s Black Veil

The veil represents shame.

In Christian communities, shame is a powerful tool that can deny the human experience and lead to people suppressing natural desires. Everyone wants to be perfect, or at least, everyone wants to appear perfect.

Thus, when the minister appears throughout the town, shamelessly exposing the fact that he does sin, the community becomes deeply uncomfortable. Additionally, he never reveals the reason for his veil, which exacerbates the issue. In this way, the minister becomes a mirror.

The veil physically blocks his eyes, which in gothic literature often represents identity. The sin itself is also non-specific, leaving a guessing game that can only be laced in projections about the sins individuals in the community may have committed themselves.

While the minister himself appears to be doing this to punish himself, it also seems he was attempting to deepen his connection with others when he begs his wife to share her shame with him so that they may be closer. Maybe the story points to a deeper issue in christian communities.

Stereotypical Christian sins often revolve around sexuality in some shape or form. This has a particular impact on young girls who are expected to be docile and virginal. Acknowledging the patriarchal aspects of early American Christian society reveals an important critique about the gender social hierarchy. It buries emotions and identity.

I think of the painful loneliness women feel because their desires are seen as inherently evil and realize that the Minister’s goal was to deconstruct these dynamics and create a stronger community.

Zadie Smith says shame is productive for creating change. I agree. Had the community been open to admitting their sins, they may have forged a stronger connection.

- Ysabella Porche

[myprofessormadememakethis]

Interracial Love Does not Solve Racism

“No More Washee Washee,” C. 1890

“There was also on Liu Kanghi’s side an acute consciousness that, though belonging to him as his wife, yet in a sense I was not his, but of the dominant race, which claimed, even while it professed to despise me. This consciousness betrayed itself in words and ways which filled me with a passion of pain and humiliation. “Kanghi,” I would sharply say, for I had to cloak my tenderness, “do not talk to me like that. You are my superior.... I would not love you if you were not.”

The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese

While it may seem like, in this quote, Minnie, the protagonist of the story, is a slave to patriarchy, history recontextualizes many of the issues that crop up in her relationship. In the Making of Asian America: A History, Erica Lee writes, “Many of the Arguments in favor of restricting Chinese immigrants also framed the problem explicitly around the sexual danger that both Chinese men and women allegedly posed to the country and its citizens…Moreover, Chinese men were depicted as undermining gender roles in American society, because they engaged in ‘women’s work’ of cooking and cleaning.”

If Chinese men are then stereotyped as effiminate, which then translates into their oppression, then Minnie’s desire to place Liu in a patriarchal position is not born from her own subscription to male-dominated society. It is born from a desire to place Liu in closer proximity to whiteness.

When she becomes conscious of her social standing within her relationship, the guilt and shame eats away at her, leading to her attempts at structuring their love around the ideals she has come to value in white society. Additionally, the imposition of patriarchy here may also be Minnie’s own prejudices bleeding through.

This crops up again when Minnie asks of Liu monogamous relations (because she has already stereotyped him as hyper-sexual) to which he points out that not every Chinese man follows the tradition of taking a second wife.

While narratively, I understand the constant contrast between Liu, her current husband, and her ex, there is a racial aspect to the aggression she characterizes in her ex versus Liu. It almost manifests as a battle for desirability between white and Asian men.

“There was nothing feigned about my Chinese husband. Simple and sincere as he was before marriage, so was he afterwards. As my union with James Carson had meant misery, bitterness, and narrowness, so my union with Liu Kanghi meant, on the whole, happiness, health, and development. Yet the former, according to American ideas, had been an educated broad-minded man; the other, just an ordinary Chinaman.”

The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese

Of course, this quote does say that Minnie adores her relationship with him, but this love she has found is predicated on the rejection of her white ex. Thus, I find that Minnie never overcomes the racist notions that typically keep white people from racially mixing. Rather, she brings it into an intimate space with a non-white man all the while desiring, to a certain extent, whiteness in him.

- Ysabella Porche

[myprofessormadememakethis]

Should Love Be Passionate?

“Study of a Girl in a Japanese Dress” c. 1895. William Merritt Chase

I have many critiques of the Story of One Woman Who Married a Chinese, but I am brushing them aside for now in favor of a question I have been contemplating for awhile now: Should love be passionate?

Throughout the story, the protagonist contrasts her husband with the man she eventually marries—Liu Kanghi. Her ex-husband is passionate, but abusive, whereas her current husband is quiet and loving. Practicality undergirds Liu and Minnie’s relationship. He meets her and invites her into his life to take advantage of her sewing skills, and she eventually agrees to the proposal he makes after spending some time with her when it becomes evident that her relationship with her husband will not sustain. Despite all this, she lives a long happy life with her current spouse, which begs the question once more: Is real love only passionate?

I think this answer is somewhat found in the text. There is a clear cultural contrast between how Minnie approaches relationships versus Liu. This contrast comes from a European perspective influenced by the romantic movement, whereas Liu operates from a Chinese one. This means that our ideas of what love should be or what it should look like are culturally constructed. This story knocks on our heads and asks us to reconsider passionless love as devoid and worthless.

A Streetcar Named Desire comes to mind the more I think about this. Stanley, much like Minnie’s husband, is abusive, but Stella remains with him because she is obssessed with the heightened emotions their relationship brings. As I consider what makes passion, I realize that, in the American literary tradition, intense love tends to be characterized by abusive power dynamics. Sexy men riddle the pages of romantic fiction, adorning brooding attitudes and lashing out at a moment’s notice. Possession drips all over these men’s love, causing them to perform regrettable acts like smashing windows in pure rage (ex. Chuck from Gossip Girl). In more extreme cases, these men forgo the sexual boundaries of their love interest, but all of it is a symbol of their uncontrollable passion…or is it?

The toxic masculine fantasy that somehow also fills the feminine fantasy of being weak and relentless is almost mind-boggling, but if passion as constructed in literature is an extension of male domination, maybe these perspectives on love are symptomatic of a deeper discourse about gender ideals under patriarchy. In a strange way, women build their sense of femininity around men. This manifests in the desire to be subjugated because that is the socially constructed role for feminine individuals.

Maybe, then, we should throw out these ideas about love. Maybe love can be calm. Maybe love should lull like the sea.

- Ysabella Porche

[myprofessormadememakethis]

Fear and Edgar Allen Poe

“The Plantation,” 1825

Edgar Allen Poe’s work confuses me for the most part. The senseless acts of murder and horror failed to resonate until I stumbled upon an article about white fear and immediately thought of The Fall of the House of Usher. The whole story follows this family that has destroyed itself from the inside out, surrounded by opulence. If I take this situation from outside the confines of the story, I think of how wealth is acquired, specifically in America, and wonder how the Ushers came into their wealth. The answer is most likely exploitation.

This is why I find the configuration of this story interesting. Rodrick, a man, buries his sister, a woman and listens to her movements as she attempts, and eventually succeeds, to escape her tomb. Additionally, Madeline has no agency. She’s Rodrick’s twin sister and they’re married. Their fates seem to be intrinsically tied, even dying at the same time as him. Her identity is wrapped up in his, and throughout the story, she is trapped in a tomb her brother placed her in. Then, Rodrick desperately ignores the evidence that she’s alive instead of simply freeing her from the place he buried her. I say all of this to say that Madeline is in a fight for liberation, and while this particular story is about two white people, I found this dynamic and this article helped me recontextualize the meaning of fear in this story.

White fear often allows for discrimination against Black people. This manifests when white people call the police on Black people in any given space or exact violence on Black people themselves, artificially enforcing segregation. This happens because “the presence of a black person in a shared, white-dominated space becomes a threatening symbol of black advancement at the expense of whites.” It’s a reminder of an inner fear that we see play out in a lot of American fiction. The people they have subjugated will come take their revenge, but just like Madeline ended the story merely wanting to hold her brother not harm him, the violence anticipated by many in a world of true racial equality is pure projection.

Maybe Rodrick was afraid Madeline would kill him because he would have done so if it were him.

- Ysabella Porche

[myprofessormadememakethis]

Pocahontas

The ”peaceful” Pilgrims massacred the Pequots and destroyed their fort near Stonington, Connecticut, in 1637. A 19th-century wood engraving (above) depicts the slaughter. The Granger Collection, NYC

Pocahontas provides insight into the mechanisms that go about justifying the United States’s existence. While the colonizers are villainous, not all of them are criticized. For instance, John Smith is solely there to prove he’s one of the good ones so that the people of the Powhatan (Pocahanta’s tribe) appear to have an unjustified disdain for white people. It sets the tone for a Romeo and Juliet love story between Pocahantas and John Smith that is completely ahistorical and rewrites the violent history. Through the power of love, this couple brokers peace between the colonists and the Powhatans and all is well.

This narrative is somewhere along the lines of the stories white people pass around the turkey at Thanksgiving where they insist they’re not celebrating indigenous genocide but actually their alliance with the people they displaced to occupy their land. Turning a tragedy into a celebration and rape into a love story is beyond disgusting, but the existence of this horrific movie and many Americans’ casual enjoyment harkens back to a question we asked in class. Do Americans have a duty to care about politics? I would say yes. People often say that politics are inconsequential, but politics is built into the walls of your house , on the land you stand, into the movies that defined your childhood. If you never question what is wrong with things like Pocahantas, you let the settler-colonial state win. You let indigenous people be erased.

It’s high time people educate themselves and bring a Native context into their general knowledge of America’s history. I found Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s book, “An Indigenous People’s History of the United States,” useful for this very reason. It does not solely focus on Jamestown, but it does provide a comprehensive history of the United States from the perspective of the colonized.

-Ysabella Porche

[myprofessormadememakethis]

My Complicated Relationship with Period Pieces Part 2

Bélizaire and the Frey Children, 1837, Jacques Aman

Apple TV’s Dickinson does not want to be a historically accurate piece by any means. In fact, there are times I appreciate the story stretching historical fact to to certain plot points in the show. However, I do wonder about period pieces and their role in promoting an idealistic past, one that is rotten with genocide and the birth of white supremacy. While many modern period dramas, like in Dickinson’s case, attempt to soothe your worries about the ethics of this time by giving you characters who were “abolitionists” (while never actively fighting the problem and the show brushing past the presence of slavery), this soft acknowledgement does not feel like enough. At the end of the day, these shows aim to make themselves aesthetic and beautiful and brimming with passion (like in Bridgerton’s case). Certainly, if someone was white during this time, life might have been rainbows and sunshine, but I find the existence of these films to be somewhat disturbing as much as they are entertaining. You cannot have diversity for historical accuracy, but when the diversity is included it feels like I might as well be watching a mundane version of Lord of the Rings. As a Black woman, I suppose I cannot merely forget what the past was in reality. So, what does it mean if we romanticize it like this?

- Ysabella Porche

[myprofessormadememakethis]

My complicated relationship with period pieces part 1

Carl Rungius, “Two Cowboys in the Saddle,” 1895–1950

Billy the Kid contains a slew of tropes that cater to a male audience: the rugged, brooding womanizer (protagonist), the loyal cast of characters who are just as domineering, the women who fall at Billy’s feet…and the women who fall at Billy’s feet. As much as society loves to complain about “wokeness” encroaching on everything it holds dear (white supremacy and cisheteropatriarchy), all of these modes of oppression seem to live on free in period dramas. The story is just like any other action story where the women are merely objects in the background rather than their own people. If they are not there to enhance Billy’s desirability, then they solely exist to provoke other characters into conflict like the bland love story between Billy and Barbara that fell completely flat.

Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee is one novel that pushes back against this romanticized portrayal of cowboys who were often terrorizing indigenous communities. Billy and his family were part of the westward expansion, and his family died on the way. Indigenous people are present, but they are more often than not silent antagonists with one line here or there. Wild West films often depict the settlers as sympathetic, and this book offers a nice counter narrative.

-Ysabella Porche

[myprofessormadememakethis]

The Pearl and the Quest for Power

Felipe Santiago Gutiérrez, Indian Woman with Marigold (Mujer indígena con cempasúchil), 1876, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Ronald A. Belkin, Long Beach, California

Kino, the main character of John Steinbeck’s The Pearl, aspires to move between the colonial world and the native world. This is exemplified in the doctor, living in the lap of luxury, who turns his nose up at native customs, and his patient, Kino’s son, in favor of “civilized society.”Wrapped up in these racial dynamics is also a class dynamic, the riches associated with whiteness and the indigenous people relegated to poor towns. When Kino is unable to access that other world, he is overcome with a feeling of degradation and powerlessness, until he discovers the Pearl.

When Juana, his wife, demands they throw the Pearl away after it invites evil into their lives, Kino violently pushes back, at some point, beating her. Juana, however, accepts this as a consequence for asserting her agency.

Juana, then, takes an interesting role in the novel. While she does subscribe to patriarchy, and she does not end the novel with a newfound agency, her marriage to Kino appears to be a perfect match. In being subservient to him, she soothes his bruised male ego, which demands domination.

I find this message both true, and simultaneously, I wish to reject the contents of the story which seem to embody that tired story of the dangerous native man who lusts for power and his primitive, docile native wife. I recommend reading An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz for a more expanded understanding of these stereotypes and how they have perpetuated violence.

-Ysabella Porche

[myprofessormadememakethis]

The Misunderstanding of MLK

Upon rereading Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, I am once again astounded by the public-school system’s dedication to inadequately contextualizing and redefining his message. Unsurprisingly, my high school lesson about the letter centered MLK’s claim that we have a right as American citizens to refuse to follow unjust laws, but his comments on how oppression breeds extremism were omitted. Especially in the current era, the relationship between the disproportionate prosecution and sustained destruction of a group is being painfully understated, despite the clear and indisputable link. It is easily understood how enforced mask wearing is linked to the terrorist attack on January 6th, but the painfully outnumbered, outgunned, and comparatively merciful military personnel of occupied Palestine (the only military presence that hasn’t been completely suppressed by their occupiers) is constantly and intentionally misunderstood.

—Arria Haigler

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Their Eyes Were Watching a Façade

Recently, I got in a semi-heated debate with my professor (not the professor who made me make this blog) in my African American Literature class about the gorgeously disastrous novel Their Eyes were Watching God. Before I discuss that, however, I am compelled to mention how innovatively graceful and charming Zora Neale Hurston’s voice is in the novel, as even her most scathing insult in the novel is written with such a soul-crushing beauty that I wonder how long she sat thinking of the line. This insult would be when Janie, the main character, tells her second husband, Joe, that when he is naked he “look lak de change uh life” (Hurston), which is to say that his genitals have been so abused by time and gravity that he appears to have transcended into an alien, advanced aging process. The aspect of Hurston’s writing that my professor and I disagreed on was the symbolism of Tea Cake being killed by the storm. I pointed out that the titular line of the novel occurs here, where Hurston finally says “their eyes were watching God” (Hurston), and I believe this storm being Tea Cake’s killer represents that Janie was attempting to found her happiness in a man once again, and she was allowing herself to be blinded by Tea Cake’s youth, vitality, and charm just like she did with her second husband, Joe. To me, the storm killing Tea Cake is a rebirth for Janie, as Tea Cake was revealing himself to be the same misogynistic, self-centered abuser who hit Janie and manipulated her with sex just like her former husbands and Janie needed to realize how her patterns were detrimental to her relationship with herself and her healing. My professor contested that the storm represented the end of Janie’s happiness with Tea Cake. This conclusion is incredibly surface-level and distasteful to me, as there is no intelligent comment on love and the place of women in marriage and instead suggests that Hurston was humoring herself by writing a self-indulgent Black struggle love story, which I feel is to completely ignore the overt messages about Janie being trapped in a cycle of abuse by her under-developed values and un-explored self-identity. In an era where the victims of abuse face heavier policing than the perpetrators, I believe it is dangerous to ignore how the expectations and beliefs forced on Black women manifest into complacency that, comparatively, looks like happiness.

—Arria Haigler

[myprofessormadememakethis]

Why Fledgling Frightens Me

The novel Fledgling represents completely the reason I repeatedly contest my appreciation for Octavia Butler’s work. Unfortunately, I recently made the assertion that Octavia Butler is reminiscent of a Black woman’s Sigmund Freud, which is an extremely harsh criticism coming from me, and Fledgling cements why I feel this way. The novel follows an amnesiac Black vampire named Shori who is prosecuted by the fellow vampire lineages because of her advanced abilities afforded by her Blackness, and in rediscovering this about herself, she has a sexual relationship with Wright, a twenty-year-old white man who clothes and houses her. The problem with their relationship lies in Shori’s appearance, as she physically appears pre-pubescent, around the age of twelve, but she is actually a sexually active, fifty-year old vampire who is approaching her prime mating stage. My issue (there are many, but to limit it to one) is that the novel asks us to explore the concept of children having autonomous sexuality, which is almost inarguably true, but both Freud and Butler frame this exploration negatively. The book asks the reader to consider that there may be a sexually promiscuous, malicious entity trapped in the body of a child who is able to expertly manipulate the adults and privileged people around her into achieving what she wants, and while I believe the value of exploring this even as a thought experiment is Freudian and dabbling in abuser apologist rhetoric, I feel that Butler asks us to view it through a female-empowerment, girlboss lens. Unless, of course, she is asking us to pity Wright, which is problematic because Wright shows attraction and a questionable interest in Shori and her adolescent body before and while learning she is a vampire. The entire novel feels like a stressful, misplaced Black woman empowerment novel that asks us to identify with Shori because she is a prosecuted Black woman and to pity Wright because he is influenced by the persuasive power of Shori’s venom, and both of these conclusions feel forced and strange. If Butler only meant to disturb me, she 100% succeeded. —Arria Haigler

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The Ease of Exclusion

I read “The Woman Who Married a Chinese” by Sui Sin Far, which follows the perspective of a white woman who married a Chinese man (and doesn’t even give him the respect of calling him a “man” in the title of the short story) after her first husband proves to be unfaithful, unloving, and intensely misogynistic. As is probably obvious, I have some grievances with the narrator, the first of which being that she seemingly extends more respect to her first, misogynist husband than she does her Chinese husband, Liu Kanghi, as she refers to him multiple times as “a Chinese” and does not appear to validate his manhood to other characters in the novel until it is challenged by her first husband, saying, “For all your six feet of grossness, your small soul cannot measure up to his great one” (Sui). Not only does the narrator bring up height, which strikes me as somewhat Xenophobic, this is the first time in the narrative when the narrator treats her husband’s being Chinese like it is simply an aspect of his person and not the defining characteristic. This particular line is also disturbing to me, when the narrator says, “Thus I met Liu Kanghi, the Chinese who afterwards became my husband” (Sui), which disturbs me because it would seem that he earned his personhood to her not by way of the fact that he was, indeed, a person, but instead because he assumed the role of her husband by being her protector and supporter. That said, there are elements of the story that make me want to validate this story as a romance and not the sad story of a marriage of convenience for both Liu Kianghi and the narrator. The first being that Liu Kanghi does not seem like his only drive is to marry the narrator for her status as a white woman. The second is that the narrator is immediately accepting of living with and defending Chinese people even though Xenophobia was at an all-time high due to the Chinese Exclusion Act. Which is tragic that I feel the need to give the narrator credit for, comparatively, treating a person like a person in the midst of intense propaganda, but in these times of unrequited genocide against Palestinians, it is all too easy to see how lucrative the propaganda machine really is.

—Arria Haigler

[myprofessormadememakethis]

Another Nakba is Happening Now

Recently, I wrote a response to one of the readings in my Critical Approaches to Literature class that addressed the genocide of Palestinians, and I received a deduction on the response—which is not an issue in itself, but it was the fact that my professor deducted points because I said the British were currently occupying Palestine. I was taken aback. The exact note my professor wrote on my assignment is, “Your writing is mostly clear, but there is some confusion. You should say that Palestine "was" occupied by the British, not ‘is.’ Today, it's occupied only by Israel.” Something about this critique, which is just a small semantic change, really reminded me about the differences between how I as a Black woman view colonialism versus how a white man most likely does. To me, there is no separation between the act of performing and funding the grotesque and inhuman ethnic cleansing of an entire people, like what is currently happening to Palestinians, but my white professor believed the delineation between Israel and the creator of this apartheid state, Britain, was important for “clarity”. There are worlds and history of unspoken context in this delineation, because it almost absolves Britain, and by extension, the U.S., in their support and creation of Israel, as Britain is the entire reason for the occupation and the mindset of this invented state that they have the right to this land and both the British and the U.S. have self-serving reasons for committing this disgusting act. Our government and the British government have the same genocidal ideals it has always had, because to the white man or white supremacist with enough money and influence, any land occupied by an Indigenous population is unoccupied, because the lives of minorities are nothing but complications that can be eliminated with enough ammunition and disregard for human lives that aren’t their own. But Palestinians, the Sudanese, the Congolese, and those in Tigray know that their lives and voices hold an unknowable power when we magnify them and refuse to let them be extinguished.  

—Arria Haigler

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Heavy Thoughts on Heavy

Reading Heavy by Kiese Laymon inspired an array of emotions in me that were, well, heavy. As a young, Black girl who has always weighed more than her peers, the hyper-fixation of Laymon on his weight throughout his childhood—even as the pressing social and political matters unfolded around him—is something I can identify with all too well. Even though I am Black and I grew up in primarily white schools until college, unlike Kiese, I always believed that the instances of my discrimination were more based on my weight than they were my Blackness. I also identified with the complexity of Kiese’s relationship with his mother, as he remembers saying things deliberately to make his mother feel pain as he didn’t know how else to communicate that pain in a way that would not only be received but respected. Most Black people don’t respect pain, we all too often view it as an essential in our lives that must be felt, sometimes acknowledged, and then ultimately mitigated with prayer or hard-headedness. We treat it like a feral dog that jumps on us and bites us, and we kick it away until it stops and we can live “normally” again, despite the fact that it has left horrible scars, bruises, bleeding, and disfigurations on us and we know it will return tomorrow, because this is how we are conditioned to respect ourselves—passively, in a way that serves everyone but us. We believe in business as usual because that business protects the oppressor and simultaneously keeps us from having to ask the hard questions, like where did the dog come from? Why is it so aggressive? Will it ever go away? How long has it been here? And hardest of all, how do we stop this epidemic of angry dogs when it seems every Black person in the nation has their own, unique dog?

��Arria Haigler

[myprofessormadememakethis]

Uncle Tom's Controversy

There is almost too much to discuss about the 1927 film Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as the movie depicts its fully Black characters with greasy faces, incredibly phonetic accents, and insultingly unrefined and “low-brow” styles of dance while its “mixed” main characters are allowed complexity, angelic singing voices, and unrealistically graceful styles of dancing despite having the same enslaved background as the mass of watermelon-devouring Black characters. Also, they’re played by white people with straight hair in powdered white makeup. Like I said—problematic. But beyond the painful scenes like the one of a mass of Black children inhaling a watermelon on the ground in the street in seconds with their bare hands, the dystopian and unspoken message of the film is undeniable—white audiences of the 1920s (and arguably, today) cannot identify with human suffering unless it centers whiteness. Like the novel, the film is pulling at the heartstrings of the “gentle” southern white women of the time by depicting a white woman in the deplorable position of slavery, as a maleficent master tries to divest her enslaved husband and child from her. While the main character is mixed and described to have more Black features in the novel, there is an unfortunate appeal the film has to make to whiteness in order for the white 1920s film-goer to understand the suffering of slavery and the reverberations of that suffering, which is to play into Eurocentric ideas. The film plays into the idea that Thomas Jefferson wrote about, which is that people who are the color of “bile” are naturally inferior to those descended from Anglo-Saxons, and as we currently watch white Americans verbally assault Halle Bailey for playing Ariel the Mermaid and Rachel Zegler for playing Snow White, there seems to have been no progression from the 1920s, and this makes me question the merits of films like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, while I understand their controversial decisions.

—Arria Haigler