One year on, Australians still fail to realise that there are situations in which minstrel shows may be inappropriate

Oprah is coming to Australia with three hundred of her fans, courtesy of John Travolta’s private jet. I only found out about this last week (which makes me tragically out of touch with current events, rather than, y’know, someone who has no interest in reading or watching anything that considers this newsworthy) because Ballarat, my hometown, really, really wants her to take a detour after she leaves Mel-Born, forsaking the self-explanatory Great Ocean Road in favour of popping by and going on a gold mine tour. Well, the council want her to, anyway, because they think it’ll be good for tourism and boost the town’s image.

The big problem here is that, while Ballarat is a tourist spot, it’s a heritage tourist spot, catering to 1) People who are interested in the history of Australian gold mining, and 2) American film producers who don’t want to build 19th century gold rush town sets (Most recently Ghost Rider). The less-big problem is that, apart from people who work in tourism and publicity, literally nobody in Australia cares about celebrities having visited their hometowns. This cultural gulf is regularly demonstrated whenever an American celebrity appears on an Australian talk show, announces “My flight landed in SYDNEY today” and is visibly shaken by the awkward silence which follows in lieu of wild applause.

Ah, yes, cultural gulfs. Almost exactly a year ago, the embalmed corpse of popular variety show Hey Hey It’s Saturday arose from its tomb to revenge itself upon a world that dared to treat celebrities as people whose job it is to entertain an audience, rather than an untouchable showbiz aristocracy whom the audience has the privilege of watching fumble around and laugh at their own jokes. It did this by repeating every single mistake that got it axed in the first place, including booking a black and white minstrel act. As a tribute to Michael Jackson, who had recently died. Everyone involved defended the act as some kind of legitimate impression, even though the people involved talked like Amos & Andy, dressed as indistinguishable golliwogs, the guy playing Michael had white facepaint and the choreography was worse than our year six musical. Hey Hey was then renewed and is, at the time of writing, still on air. This isn’t precisely why I don’t have a television anymore, but it certainly didn’t help.

The outcry was… muted, at least in the mainstream media, on the basis that ‘Australians aren’t racist’ (even though Sydney was overrun by honest-to-God race riots less than five years ago, and I live in an area where Indian migrants have been the victims of “curry bashings” directly outside the building I live in), because they don’t personally see the problem with minstrel shows. It’s the same attitude that kept the BBC running The Black and White Minstrel Show until 1978, and why nobody cares about the specialty golliwog store on the way to the train station; American minstrel culture is, well, American, and in an Anglo context it’s very easy for the images to lose their connection to real suffering, violence and exploitation and become abstract oddness. I’ve read people defend The Black and White Minstrel Show on the basis that the minstrels “may as well have been purple” because it was a platform for showbiz musical numbers rather than skits about slavery. This is an accurate description of the program’s content – you can watch a bit here, although obviously it’s understandable if you don’t want to – but they weren’t purple, or green, or orange, they were specifically dark brown with exaggerated lips, eyes and fuzzy wigs because those features carried specific racial connotations. Failure – or, more likely, unwillingness – to understand the implications of the image doesn’t alter those implications, and failure to grasp why minstrelsy isn’t harmless fun by two thousand and nine is willful, pig-headed ignorance.

(Traditionally, this is where some idiot decides to jump in and whine about people being “offended”. Racism, or any other -ism, is not bad because it offends people, it’s bad because it degrades and dehumanises people, and this has real consequences. Returning to the 2005 Sydney race riots, whether or not the Lebanese Muslim community were offended by the white community stereotyping them as rapists and terrorist sympathisers is irrelevant next to the fact that, by stereotyping them as rapists and terrorist sympathisers, the white community were able to justify forming mobs and using physical violence to try and force anyone vaguely swarthy out of “their” country. It’s infuriating to hear these things discussed as if they’re a purely academic debate about whether or not we’re too politically correct, when in reality it’s people trying to deal with something that’s real, immediate and dangerous)

What does this have to do with Oprah? Well, there’s a recreated gold rush mining town called Sovereign Hill that think they can tip the balance and lure Oprah to Ballarat by sending her a video about how awesome they are. Being a recreated gold rush town, most of the activities there involve mud, mines and horse shit, which is fun (well, apart from the last one) if you’re in the mood to get covered in dirt and told off by cockney policemen for not being a proper lady, but is unlikely to appeal to, y’know, Oprah. Similarly, the chance that you might find a gold nugget by panning in the creek is hardly an incentive for someone who could comfortably buy most of the country.

Also, they wrote her a song.

Here are the lyrics for the audible parts, transcribed by me.

Down on the Sovereign Hill they’re talkin’
’bout a special lady comin’ to town
A world-famous star will be walkin’
Up the street of the 1850′s town

Oprah she’s a lady
Last night she flied
All the way to Sovereign Hill
Travolta at her side

Perhaps she could go on a mine tour
Maybe try her luck down the creek
I’m sure she’d love to take a coach ride
They run all day and all week

Oprah she’s a lady
Last night she flied
All the way to Sovereign Hill
Travolta at her side

We’ve not had a star this famous
Since the Queen herself came to town

Oprah she’s a lady
Last night she flied
All the way to Sovereign Hill
Travolta at her side

Firstly, Fred Durst? I’m sorry for that time I made fun of you for rhyming “bitch” with “bitch”.

Secondly, while the lyrics were clearly written in a hurry – I hope, anyway, because the thought of someone spending time on them is genuinely depressing – the music wasn’t. It’s from a song called “Nellie was a Lady”.

“Nellie was a Lady” was a minstrel song.

It was made famous by these people, The Christy Minstrels:

Here is a sample of the original lyrics:

Down on de Mississippi floating,
Long time I trabble on de way,
All night de cottonwood a toting,
Sing for my true lub all de day.

Nelly was a lady,
Last night she died,
Toll de bell for lubly Nell,
My dark Virginny bride.

[the rest]

Now, by minstrel song standards, it’s not that bad. It’s got pathos and nobody says “mammy”.

It’s still a minstrel song.

Out of a pool of Christ knows how many 1850′s folk ballads, they chose to adapt a minstrel song. For Oprah.

People think it’s a good idea to greet the most famous and influential black woman on the planet by writing new lyrics to a minstrel song about a ‘dark Virginny bride’, offering to take her ‘back to 1850′ and Photoshopping her into a wanted poster.

D’ya get the feeling we haven’t worked through all our issues yet?

Two new thrilling episodes of stuff everybody reading this blog already knows anyway

Episode #2: Lady and the Tramp

The guy that runs Antimisandry.com has decided to fight feminism by adding explanatory subtitles to the “We are Siamese” song from Lady and the Tramp. Literally, that’s what he did. A grown man thought this was a good idea. Special guest appearance by Surface Agent X2-Zero!

Episode #3: The Wage Gap Myth

Antimisandry uploads a video of John Stossel interviewing Warren Farrell. It’s a triple threat! We learn that there isn’t a wage gap at all, except that there is and it’s just that women don’t want to do dangerous work, except that dangerous work doesn’t actually pay that well, except women would rather stay home anyway so just drop it.

I’d also like to point out that the original video had really, really badly desynchronised audio and I spent ages fixing it. Meaning I actually care more about Antimisandry’s videos than they do, ironically.

Imma go Web 2.0 on… your… arse. It doesn’t really work with an Australian accent.

Look who it is!

This is technically The Irate Gamer‘s fault. I’ll explain. The Irate Gamer is an inexplicably popular YouTube celebrity who earns his keep by getting angry at video games, despite not knowing anything about video games and being incapable of convincingly feigning anger. He also plagiarises a lot of his material from other reviewers.

Some people were, understandably, pissed off about this. They talked about it, left comments and got into arguments over it, but it was all quite vague. It wasn’t until people started making their own videos which pointed out his stolen material and lack of knowledge in no uncertain terms that the backlash against him really got moving.

So, this is me applying the same principle to the many, many Men’s Rights channels and videos that have cropped up on YouTube over the past few years. No leaving comments, no pressing “dislike”, no grumbling, no attempts to actually engage them in discussion,  just destroying their credibility in a YouTube friendly format. There’s nothing in it anyone reading this won’t have heard before, mind, but at least it’s more watchable than any of Paul Elam’s original videos.

Gamer Misogyny THE PREQUEL

Ah, the girlfriend, the bane of the modern roleplaying gamer. Yes, they’re soft and smell like flowers, but they sure don’t seem to understand gaming.

Scanned from Dragon Magazine, April 2002. Click to enlarge, if you dare.

I have an excuse, it’s 185 pages long and I never want to see it again

My pre-production document. Now I just need to film th

Oh.

Oh, shit.

THAT’S US GAMERS :D

A wargaming blog called Dick Move (“Hey, if I call myself a dick then I can use it to silence criticism AND look meta-textual!”) is attempting to pick holes in a post I wrote slightly over a year ago, and I’ll get to my specific thoughts on the matter later. I want to start with something more general, though, because it gets to the heart of every single problem I have mainstream SF fandom, and also because dedicating an entire article to arguing about Warhammer 40,000 canon with a stranger on the internet is going too far even by my standards.

Exiern attempts retcon, is still awful

Previously on Exiern, Drowemos realised he had no fucking clue where the story was going and threw in some random magical gender transformations, since he knows full well that it’s the only reason anyone reads this garbage. Of particular note was the character of Brother Thomas, now Sister Teresa.

Side effects of turning into a woman include long hair (even if you’re bald), the body of a twenty five year old (even if you’re fifty), instant nudity (even if you’re wearing an enormous baggy robe) and an obsession with shoes (even if you belong to an all-male order of wizards from a iron-age society where everyone wears leather boots or goes barefoot). This made the Drowemos’ claim that he had ‘spent some time thinking about what it would be like to live as a woman’ seem less than convincing.

Ah, but perhaps I was too hasty in my judgment! A mere four months and zero jokes later, it’s revealed that:

I hate this book

Nothing remotely interesting, believe me.

Oh shit, I’m still reading Spreading Misandry, aren’t I? Christ, where was I? Page 109? God, that’s less than a third of the way through. Do I have to?

Against our better judgment, let’s read “Spreading Misandry”, Chapter Four

LET’S READ SPREADING MISANDRY

CHAPTER FOUR
BYPASSING MEN: WOMEN ALONE TOGETHER

The bonds of “sisterhood” were heavily promoted in the 1990s, and only because political gains would have been impossible without solidarity. That solidarity was reflected in popular culture. Among the more obvious examples, in music were the Spice Girls, promoting “grrrl power”, and the annual Lilith Fair, developed to celebrate the music of female artists.

Should people who get the Spice Girls’ catch phrase wrong really be writing a book about 1990′s popular culture?

Let’s briefly read “Spreading Misandry”, Chapter Three

LET’S READ SPREADING MISANDRY

CHAPTER THREE
LOOKING DOWN ON MEN: SEPARATE BUT UNEQUAL

After the civil rights movement in the United States and the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, few would declare, at least publicly, that racial segregation – under the heading, in the United States, of “separate but equal” – had been a good thing. Even if it could be argued that separation were morally acceptable, which is highly debatable, the fact remains that the ancien regime in both cases had failed to provide equality. In fact, though not in theory, the races had been separate but unequal. And many have argued that racial inequality is inherent in the whole notion of racial segregation because of its focus on the differences between whites and blacks.

Racial segregation: Possibly racist!