There does come a point in a movement when the mainstream capitulates and then pretends they were on your side all along, or at the very least were innocent bystanders.
I am too old to be in touch with current zeitgeist well enough to know whether this song is part of that kind of revisionist project. When I was younger, examples (re racism) were "Dances with Wolves" and "Forest Gump."
I do think the article makes some good points, and I would agree that the song is not smart or all that helpful as it is written. Ironically Macklemore and Lewis are smart writers. I think it's interesting that they have put so much energy into a not very good song. I agree that maybe they are doing it, at least in part, to deflect some of the criticism around two white guys getting so much more attention than African American rappers this year. I don't know the genre and the pop culture around the issue well enough to comment much. I am not sure why they are getting more criticism than Eminem has, for example. Is it partially a class issue? I did read that they are the first white rappers to gain success without being more or less sponsored by African American rap artists and without coming up through the institutions where most rap artists find recognition. They got fame through youtube, I think I read.
One thing that has bothered me lately was the Duck Dynasty controversy. That very well-educated redneck (he has a Master's degree in education) did not just make homophobic remarks. He as much as said that African Americans in his part of the world did not suffer under Jim Crow. That that wasn't much of a big deal is, to me, crazy-making. Talk about erasing history. And that guy really knows better. He chooses to believe that. That the Duck Dynasty brouhaha is usually referred to just in terms of his making homophobic remarks is telling.
I was stunned that pretending that racism was never all that toxic in the South got so little reaction. How successful has our erasure of the crimes of our past been? Are we doing the same thing re gay and lesbian oppression?
I read an article about a woman who said that Archie Manning lied in his autobiography about his high school years during integration. At the very least, Manning, President of his class, did not lift a finger to help the African American students who were being bullied in his newly integrated high school. He has completely rewritten history when he tells his story and accuses the people who have called him on it liars. And that video hagiography of the family that is constantly on ESPN mentions nothing of all that. Archie Manning was a moral coward. That is a story that gets told on little websites, not on ESPN.
I know Paula Deen got trounced for racism, but her lapses were so blatant that they were impossible to defend. That Duck Dynasty daddy's saying that the his Louisiana African American neighbors were singing happily in the fields before the Civil Rights era is somehow less objectionable than his homophobia? I still do not get that.
Culture wants to forgive itself, and to do so, it rewrites history. We want to hear Archie Manning saying, yes, it's good segregation is over without having to hear the stories of the African Americans whose persecution he sat by and watched. We want to remember it without the blood and the pain, without seeing ourselves, our parents and grandparents as people who caused terrible harm to others. The Help, written by a white Southern woman, may have ended on a too sanguine note and over-emphasized the role of young white people in change, but you do see vivid details of real harm done by people who lived on to become our beloved grandmothers and great grandmothers. That, to me, is helpful (no pun intended).
Macklemore and Lewis are smart guys. Not homophobes. Not racists. Decent guys. But are they helping to create that alternative narrative of the innocent straight white guy who was always on your side, who never wished us any harm? I am way cool with people coming to their own truths in their own time and with joining the cause at any point -- early or late. I am not cool with some picture of reality that says they were always there or that they lead the way. Allies, maybe. Activists or leaders. NO. Don't even accidentally look like you are.
|