iPod Indian

LAST WEEK, I WAS on the White Earth Indian Reservation in Northern Minnesota, and I came across this fantastic t-shirt. In San Francisco, as in most places around the country I'm sure, iPod billboards featuring the silhouetted hipster rocking out with the iPod in white relief are everywhere.

One of the things that's always interested me about these ads is there attention to but silence about race. It seems to me the artists of these ads often accentuate the ethnic markers (an afro, for instance) of the shadowed figures. It's a way of using semiotics to show that iPods connect cultures, cross cultures, and are consumed by cultures.

It is as rare to see an American Indian in a popular ad as it is common to see ads themselves. Name the last time you saw an Indian model for The Gap, Abercrombie and Fitch, Mercedes-Benz, Tag Heuer, Target, or Rolex. Also, think of the last time you saw any semiotic representation of an Indian using and enjoying technology.

Imagine my joy, then, when I came across this shirt. The woman I bought it from told me that at their last powwow, the sold more of these shirts than any other.

On one hand, I wonder about the decision to continue to indicate Indians through powwow and dance garb (fringes, head dress, feathers), but perhaps the entire image is a play on the power of icons, the ubiquity of racial and commercial semiotics.

Either way, I love the shirt.

Southwest Semiotics: Native American Roadside Texts

WITHOUT QUESTION, THE AMERICAN West is one large, complicated text, ripe for any number of readings. With its mythology of "free" land, the promise of gold, virgin wilderness, and the vistas of the Rockies and the Sierras, the West has enjoyed decades of a kind of cultural free pass. The Southwest, on the other hand, The West's younger troublemaking brother, has its own mythology, but nothing quite as grand as its bigger sibling. The main iconography of the Southwest's myth--for better or worse--is all things Indian. On one hand, the pervasiveness of Indian imagery reminds Americans passing through Native lands that Indians are still here. They are alive, well, and doing just fine. On the other hand, the stereotyping--especially among roadside statues and sculptures--continues to rankle.

For example, the Chief above giving the "Howe" greeting looms out front of Howe Chevrolet in Clinton, Oklahoma, just off of Route 66 and Interstate 40. It's been there for as long as I can remember, and it stands as the car dealership's main visual cue. But, it also reminds too much of the painful cigar store Indian, which (even if not intentional) evokes images of the stoic, "wooden," passive, and defeatable Indian. Even though this particular guy looks ready for the WWF, the idea that he is the icon for used Pontiacs and Cherokees is just too much.

The sign and statue to the left stands outside the Cherokee Restaurant and Trading Post near Hinton, Oklahoma. This guy, too, seems a bit stiff, but at least he is armed for battle. I'm not at all convinced he's wearing traditional Cherokee clothes, and again, he's bare-chested. I'm still waiting to see a statue of an Indian holding a book, looking through a microscope, sitting in a stately chair, or holding hands with a white woman. The problem with images like these is their reductiveness--it limits how we see Indians. We think we're smart enough not to equate these images with true Indianness, but if these are the only representations of Indians most Americans see, aside from the Land O' Lakes gal and the American Spirit tobacco guy and the Washington Redskins mascot and the Atlanta Braves mascot and the Florida State Seminoles mascot . . .well, you get the idea . . .

The collection of arrows surrounding the visitors to this Gallup, New Mexico gas station and convenience store also reinforces the Indian-as-warrior motif, though, with a better sense of humor. Again, rather than being reminded of the many contributions American Indians have made to American culture, the same old brave/savage notion gets reinscribed one more time. To be sure, the arrows are bright and fun and kind of cool the way they appear to have been lobbed from the outcroppings in just to hem in unsuspecting drivers in need of fuel, big cokes, and dream catchers, but very quickly, they can lose their campy charm.

You have to admit, the teepee remains one of the most resilient Indian texts. Even here, in Arizona, where no one really lived in teepees, they perform strong semiotic work. When coupled with the "Geronimo" sign, it's really a twin billing of weirdness. At least Geronimo, who was Chiricahua Apache, was born in what is now Arizona (then, Mexico). But the teepes? The designs? Teepees as icons of Indianness are nothing new. From Oklahoma to Arizona all the way up to Washington, there are roadside teepees, restaurant teepees, and even hotel teepees. Yes, they are everywhere, but, their ubiquity doesn't make them good.

Of course, no one is accusing any of the proprieters of racism, but it is unlikely drivers in the Deep South would see similarly caricatured statues of African American slaves or visitors to Brooklyn see hulking likenesses of Jews. So, the question remains--why is it okay to caricature Indians?

While most would agree that these kinds of Indian texts play with stereotypes and are a bit tacky or campy, it becomes more problematic with images like "The Guardian," another bare-chested Indian warrior who sits not along the road but atop the rotunda of the Oklahoma State Capitol building . . .

The Poetics Of Miscegenation: How Poetry Can Speak To Issues Of Race

IN THE PAST MONTH, race has strolled down the red carpet of American popular culture in recognizable but surprising garb. On the one hand, the overwhelming popularity of the website Stuff White People Like has foregrounded the icons of bourgeois whiteness through humor and self-mockery. On the other hand, Barack Obama's candidacy for president, the views of his pastor, and the various comments and strategies by Senator Clinton, her husband, and their staff, have lit America's preoccupation with race from a different angle. Most of the time, Americans tend to turn to journalism, history, or sociology to get a better glimpse of the nuances of race, but with National Poetry Month around the corner and with a recent release of a special gift edition of Natasha Tretheway's 2007 Pulitzer Prize winning collection of poems, Native Guard, this seems an appropriate moment to explore the matrix of poetry, American culture, and race--especially the nearly taboo issue of miscegenation.

Senator Obama has talked a great deal about being a child of an interracial marriage, and his prominence has made the issue of mixed relationships and miscegenation part of a national discourse for the first time in decades. One of America's greatest writers, Langston Hughes, asks important questions about miscegenation and misogyny in his daring 1927 poem, "Mulatto:"

O, you little bastard boy
What's a body but a toy?
The scent of pine word stings the soft night air.
What's the body of your mother?

It would appear that one of the goals of Tretheway's book is to answer Hughes' provocative questions. Tretheway, whose father is white and whose mother (now deceased) was black, explores the tensions and violence at the heart of mixing races. In her short but powerful poem "Miscegenation," she maps the transgressions of her parents as they leave their home state of Mississippi to marry:

In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;
they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.

They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name
begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong--mis in Mississippi.

Though her parents no doubt believed they were engaged in a kind of exodus of liberation and love, Tretheway can't help but hear the resonances of foreboding (sin and mis) in their escape, as if the long-armed ghosts of history were the puppeteers of her parents' relationship.

Indeed, for Tretheway, miscegenation is all about crossing borders, sometimes, even the border of the body (as Hughes suggests). Tretheway's mother was murdered by her second husband, and though Tretheway does not draw a direct line between her murder and the legacy of violence against the bodies of African American women, one senses through poems like "What The Body Can Say," "What Is Evidence," "Myth," and "After Your Death," that the poet may see her death as the culmination of a chain of events that began with that first exodus from Mississippi. When Hughes asks, "What's the body of your mother?," one wonders if Native Guard is Tretheway's probing and deeply felt answer. That said, Tretheway masterfully avoids making easy assumptions or tying off the narrative with over-simplified palliatives; instead, she leaves it up to the reader to connect the dots of history, land, violence, and love.

Though no one would expect a book of poems to unlock the complex problems of race in America, Native Guard does provide some measure, some lineament of understanding of the effects of racialized America on an individual. It may also allow Americans to see the person who could very likely be their next president through a different and clearer lens.

Stuff White People Like: Redux

LAST WEEK, WHEN THIS site was mentioned in a Houston Chronicle story about the web-phenom, Stuff White People Like, The Weekly Rader received more hits in one day than it had received for the entire calendar year of 2008. Clearly, the interest was less in TWR and more in what TWR had to say about what white people like. One thing I do know, white people like Stuff White People Like.

There is no question, the site is crazy, over-the-top, steal your beer popular. In fact, at the time of this particular post, Mr. Lander's site had over 17 million hits since whitening up the web in early January. Indeed, the main question the reporter had for me was why SWPL is so popular. Though I was quoted correctly, there is much more to say about this site and why it has struck such a chord.

The first reason it's popular is because it is benign. The topics are funny, the photos are oh-so-recognizably vanilla, and the tone is non-threatening. In short, as I say in my previous post and as many others have observed, the site is not really about race but about other things like class, yuppiness, and coolness.

Because the site is innocuous, people feel free to post unfettered. Were the site really about race, racial politics, Affirmative Action, slavery, Native American genocide, Japanese interment, or modern day hate crimes, the site would have a different look and feel. It would lose its breezy self-mocking tone. Right now, the site does not ask to be taken seriously. If it confronted true racial problems (racial profiling, graduation rates, anti-Arab sentiment), then it would have to change its presentation.

So, one reason the site works is because it points to harmless signposts of racial differences that we all know exist. We are all painfully aware of racial divides in the United States (see my post about Obama and race, for example), and SWPL gives us permission to laugh at the commodities that are the fetishes of a certain kind of whiteness--the whiteness of San Francisco, Austin, New York, Seattle, Portland, Boston, and Chicago. These signposts of whiteness are iPods and coffee rather than the Stars and Bars or the swastika. In other words, they are more about consumption than skin color, more about acquisition than Aryans.

The site pokes fun at cultural affluence as practiced by left-leaning college educated people in urban areas. As I write elsewhere, I grew up among many White people in rural Oklahoma, and almost no White person I know in Oklahoma fam land likes anything on this site. Stuff White Oklahomans like (which, as I type this sounds like a winning Web site), would include Chicken Fried Steak, trailer parks, iced tea, OU football, the 4th of July, watermelon, The Old Testament, and Ronald Reagan. I don't foresee any of these on SWPL, though I guarantee that in the United States, more white people like Chicken Fried Steak than Asian Fusion.

One more reason SWPL has resonated is due to its very smart awareness of what I call "Overculture," which is the subject of my next book. Stuff White People Like is fantastic at mapping the icons of Overculture--those popular texts that indicate an ubiquity in American consumer and popular culture. For example, Starbucks plays music heard on The Wire, which gets written about in Slate, which has an agreement with NPR, which reviews books available in Borders, which sells coffee and expensive sandwiches. Overculture is a new kind of cultural map that circumscribes everything that has hit a tipping point, everything educated people should either consume or be aware of--any text, whether it is a book, a film, a TV show, food, a city, or a belief that can help shape identity.

Stuff White People Like has struck this chord of Overculture like no other text, so it will stay popular as long as there are icons of identity formation out there that make their way onto America's cultural playground. As long as they stay on the playground (and not the battlefield), this will continue to be fun. If SWPL really turns racial, though, play time will be over.

Obama Lucky To Be Black! A Special Mid-Weed Post

AS SOMEONE WHOSE JOB it is to pay close attention to language, especially heightened language about race, gender, and class, political discourse in the United States over the last ten days has been unusually . . . meaty.

From Samantha Powers' Howard Dean-esque rants about Hillary Clinton to the Elliot Spitzter fiasco to the Geraldine Ferraro footmouth, the follow-up footmouth, and the final footmouth last night on NBC, it's been a rough few days.

The Ferraro's transgressions, however, seem even more disturbing than Spitzer's. His sins remain errors of hubris and desire; they are private. Ms. Ferraro's sins, however, stand as errors of community and common good; they are public. As such, they add to a mounting discourse of reverse racism that perpetuates the misguided notion that ethnicity=identity=accomplishment.

Though she made several observations about Senator Obama's good fortune in regard to his race, this is her most troubling:

If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.

After typing the above quote, I realized I was at a loss of what to write next. I was so baffled by its obtuseness, I had nothing enlightening to say about it. There are so many things wrong with her assertion, it's hard to know where to begin. On one hand, my training as a close reader of texts makes me want to parse each misstep in her statement, pointing out how ill-informed it is. On the other hand, it seems prudent not to endow her observations or her defensive responses with detailed unpacking.

I would say only this: her statement comes in a long, long, long line of seemingly benign observations about race and accomplishment that are neither benign or observant. Her defense was that her words were taken out of context, that she never intended racism; rather she praised the Black community.

In the world of literary studies, this is a classic case of connotative versus denotative meaning. The denotative meaning of a word is its literal dictionary meaning. In a purely denotative world, "that dude is hot" would mean that the dude's body temperature is higher than it should be. Connotation is the cultural associations attached to a word or idea. In our pluralistic, connotative world, "that dude is hot" means that the dude is attractive.

Denotatively, Ms. Ferraro never comes out and says "Senator Obama is less qualified than Senator Clinton, and he only achieved what he achieved (admission to a good college, a law degree from Harvard, good teaching position, state and national congressional seats) because our culture has decided to lower the bar for Black people because Black people are inferior."

Because she never literally said this sentence, Ms. Ferraro claims she was not being racist. But, our culture has a history of coded speech about race; hot button words and phrases that denote one thing and connote another.

One of the many things Obama's candidacy has done is make our vision sharper to better see through such language. No one fell for it, no one bought it, no one believed it.

The great irony of her comments, though, ignores the larger issues of race that are probably, for some, still affecting his candidacy. Sadly, there are some--maybe Ms. Ferraro--who simply will not vote for someone who is Black. In other words, if Mr. Obama were a White man, he may already have the nomination.

Stuff White People Like: A Blog Review

OUR FAVORITE PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR, Mike Spencer, wrote in with some smart observations and questions about a relatively new blog called Stuff White People Like (http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/). The blog has only been up a couple of months, but it's already received almost 2.5 million hits--roughly 2.5 more than this one. Though it's difficult to tell much about the main personalities behind the blog, it appears to be curated mainly by a guy who posts under the name Clander, a resident of Los Angeles who rides a bicycle (see post #61). His ethnicity is undetermined, but he has a disarming ability to look at mainstream American culture the way an anthropologist might see some heretofore undiscovered tribe.

Each entry on the site features a snazzy picture and an example of stuff White people like such as products (coffee, tea), stores (Whole Foods), items (kitchen gadgets, Apple products), personalities (Mos Def, John Stewart, Ira Glass), experiences (difficult break ups, marathons, recycling), ideas (knowing what's best for poor people), and culture (Juno, NPR, irony). Most of the entries are pretty funny and in general, delivered in a self-aware droll tone that endears more than annoys. There is a playful mocking of the fetishes of upper-middle class North America that is hart to resist.

In his classic investigatorial way, Spencer hits on the main issues of the blog? Does the race of the person posting affect the tone of the post? And, is the site about race or, as Spencer correctly intuits, really about class?

At present, the entries are warmly sarcastic. There is a sort of meta-teasing involved. No one really asserts superiority or inferiority on account of race. The site is much more about icons of accomplishment and learning.

Which makes the site, as P. I. Spencer notes, about the icons of economic class, and, more specifically, left-leaning urban markers of class. A conservative site in the rural South on "stuff white people like" would probably not include Michel Gondry (#68), Sarah Silverman (#52), or Asian Fusion food (#45). I grew up in Oklahoma around a lot of White people, and pretty much no one I know in Oklahoma likes John Stewart, the Prius, marathons, NPR, Juno, or Mos-Def. They sure don't like Barack Obama (see #8 and my previous piece about Obama and the Plains).

What the site gets right, though, is how American culture associates mainstream urban and suburban whiteness with yuppiness. There is a kind of predictability absent of edge or self-awareness that infuses a great deal of what we might call literate commercial culture. SWL does a nice job of poking fun of the things a lot of us might be embarrased to live with but don't want to live without.

Reading the Plains: A Close Look at the Oklahoma and Kansas Primaries

IN A NIGHT OF many surprises few were more puzzling than the shockingly different outcomes in the Democratic primaries in Oklahoma and Kansas. As I write this on Tuesday evening, my home state of Oklahoma voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama 54% to 31%. On the other hand, the Okies' neighbor to the North--some would say their virtual demographic twin--went for Obama, who snatched an amazing 73% of the Democratic votes across the border in Kansas.

How is it possible that two nearly identical states with so many things in common (values, agriculture, a strong rural base, lots of wheat, a hatred of Communists, and bigger hatred for all Nebraska sports teams) embrace such different candidates? Of course, Obama's mother was born in Kansas while her father was in the Army, so that may have had some significance; but it's hard to imagine that a transitory birth in the 40's actually affected people at the polls in 2008. Rather, I suspect it has something to do with the very different role that race has played in the ontology of the two states.

Kansas has enjoyed a long history of being among the more progressive Plains states in regard to race, particularly slavery. The so-called "Free Staters" of Kansas fought immigrants from Missouri and other Southern states (sometimes called "Border Ruffians) who hoped to make the new territory a slave state. Bolstered by their own immigrants from the Northeast, the influx of pro and anti-slavery forced reached a head in 1854, and pre-War skirmishes broke out over the next four years. Guerrilla fighters on the side of the Free-Staters during these wars became known as "Jayhawkers," which is now the mascot for the University of Kansas. Eventually, Kansas entered the Union as a free state, and Kansas has nourished a long legacy of racial tolerance.

Not so for Oklahoma.

In terms of both African American and Native American racial issues, Oklahoma has a complicated and difficult past. This began when the Eastern half of the state was set aside as Indian Territory, eventually becoming the termination point for the Trail of Tears. Even up into the 20th century, Oklahoma was a major site for Indian removal and relocation. In addition, Oklahoma bears the burden of the nation's largest race riot--the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921--in which over 300 people were killed. Indeed, at times, there was a kind of triple-segregation in Oklahoma: red, black, white each together, each apart.

Though it is the 21st century and Oklahoma's racial issues are less incindiary than they were 100 years ago, a legacy of cultural memory remains, as do important symbols. For example, I wonder if the University of Kansas logo (Jayhawks) serves as a constant visual reminder of the values that helped found Kansas, and as such daily reinscribes into the consciousness of Kansans their anti-slavery history.

Similarly, I wonder if the OU mascot (Sooners, named after the people who sneaked early into the Land Rushes) serves as a different kind of indicator of the State's troubling history of segregation and Indian Removal. White Oklahomans didn't really engage in wars to keep Oklahoma "Native" or to protect African Americans. In fact, race has always percolated under the surface in Oklahoma; never fully ignored but never fully tapped either.

This is not to say that Kansas hasn't had it's own racial issues; to be sure it has. And, in recent years, Oklahoma has tried to do better with its Native heritage. But, we see daily the many ways in which American culture and values were shaped by its earliest settlers and their cultures and values--in a country of states, should we expect them to be any different?

And so it is that two States who should embrace the same presidential candidates are among the most diametrically opposed in this regard. We think that the past has passed, but as William Faulkner noted, our past is often our future.

The Wire: What Does It Mean To Be The Best Show On TV

ON SUNDAY, THE FIRST episode of the final season of The Wire aired on HBO. Much has been made of the elliptical Baltimore-based series, now in its fifth year. Ellen Gray of the Philadelphia Daily News claims it is the best show on television, and Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate, has called it "the best show ever broadcast in America."

Even so, The Wire's visibility on the red carpet of popular culture is far overshadowed by the better dressed Mad Men, Dexter, The Sopranos (even in death; perhaps especially in death), Lost, Rome, and Pushing Daisies. In fact, The Wire made none of the top ten lists of 2007 on Metacritic. If so many viewers and critics appreciate the show, why don't they love it? Is there something about The Wire that both impresses and repels? Perhaps it is not possible, even in 2008, for America to fully embrace a project that foregrounds poor African Americans, violence, urban corruption, and an ambivalence about the drug war. Perhaps America is only ready to confront some of its values.

At its core, The Wire is about value: the value of human life, the value of drugs, the value of law, the value of the political machine, and, perhaps most importantly, the value of values. In a capitalist culture in which everything has a price, what is a life or a package or a vote or a body worth? What are neighborhoods worth? What is the value of skin color?

The show sets out to explore these questions, but we rarely get answers. The Wire is no morality play. Unlike The Sopranos, Deadwood, and Dexter, which present themselves as theater, The Wire refuses to position itself. For new viewers, this be confusing, but it is within the show's nebulousness that it arrives at clarity. That is, from no position, it can interrogate everything.

The Wire navigates the uneasy waters of drama, documentary, journalism, and comedy. We don't always know its argument; we don't understand all of its themes. We rarely know how to feel because the show upends typical value systems. In so doing, it enacts what we might call an "emotional ethic." By this I mean the character of the show, its project, is strong enough not simply to advance its own ethic but also to enable us to view our own ethical spectrum through the world of the show. The Wire makes the irrational rational, the ugly beautiful. It can make what should be wrong, right, and, sadly enough, the opposite.

One of the main plot points of the third season involves "Amsterdam," a moniker for an area of drug and gang-ravaged Baltimore that an aging police chief secretly converts into a legalized drug zone. It is a rogue move. None of his superiors know about the experiment because it flies in the face of the department's standard practice of juking the arrest numbers. But, on many levels, the experiment works. Hoppers and Cornerboys leave the corners. Residents fix up their houses and return to their stoops. Violence drops dramatically; in part because cops monitor Amsterdam. One of the great ironies of modern television is born--cops overseeing the legal sale and distribution of drugs to the benefit of local neighborhoods.

This is a provocative story line for any show, and in any other program, such a plot would have come off as farce. But, because The Wire embraces complexity and ambiguity, they can tackle themes that other shows merely bungle.

Their most important theme in this regard is race. No other show on television excavates the deep connections between race, identity, class, capitalism, and family like The Wire. Though scenes switch quickly--sometimes without commentary or exposition--from the White world to the Black world, the main focus are poor African Americans in inner-city Baltimore. Last season, the show moved away from the flashier subjects of sex trafficking and drug legalization and honed in on the daily challenges of teachers and students in an all-Black middle school. Here, every student is on the cusp of every possible bad choice. Every teacher is handcuffed by horrible facilities, atrocious funding, and a mandate for higher test scores.

The show follows the lives of four young men, 12 and 13 years old, as they deal with their White teacher (a former cop from the previous seasons), the insanity of their home lives, and the pull of the corners. The layers of complexity in the lives of each of these boys could fill an entire season; so overwhelming are the obstacles around them. The show's brilliance lies in its patience. It takes its time peeling the onion away, revealing disturbing layer after mortifying layer. A palpable bravery lies in the decision to circumscribe what might happen. Some of the scenes in the classroom are exceedingly uncomfortable. David Simon, Ed Burns, and their team of writers possess an uncanny ability to capture the hoplessness and ennui of trying to teach and learn division and multiplication in this school in this city to these kids.

In many ways, The Wire resembles the social novels of the late 19th and early 20th centuries more than other contemporary television shows. Savvy viewers will see similarities in Zola, Dickens, Sinclair, and Ellison, especially in terms of how, even in the 1800s, we spend our children. Even the pace and plotting feels literary. So dense are the issues, so interwoven the stories, so precise is the detail, the narrative needs the patience of a novel to correctly unpack its story. The rise and fall of Frank Sobotka in season two is high tragedy Sophocles and Shakespeare would crib from.

To be the best show on TV, then, is to be not like TV.

I suspect when The Wire is no more, it will get some of the attention it deserves, but, just like the students in that middle school, it may not make a difference.