There's an interesting article on Slate today about the result of the latest round of ANTM. The article is essentially a critique of Tyra Banks, who spent a large portion of the show's final episodes imploring the eventual winner Danielle to change her hony-tonkin' way of talking. The jist is that Tyra (the first black woman to appear on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue) was practicing a sort fo indirect racism by demanding that Danielle alter her diction (which is essentially the way that a young black woman from Arkansas would talk) to a form that was more appealing (read: more white). When we were watching the last episode, Tara remarked that Tyra's comments were classist; I'm inclined to agree.
I think that Danielle's race wasn't really the basis of the criticism that Tyra was levelling at her. The issue was more to do with the difference between Banks (a multimillionaire with enormous social and economic clout) and Danielle's humble upbringing. I think that Danielle's comfort with her accent actually irked Banks because while Danielle has managed to achieve a measure of success while retaining her essential nature, Banks has effectively forfeited her claim to "sisterhood" with Danielle by affecting the behaviors and practices of the majority. She has been co-opted by the dominant paradigm, and she is encouraging Danielle to do the same. Danielle's inability to do so makes Tyra feel like an Uncle Tom. Maybe its more race that class after all. Then again, I ain't exactly black.
I've been thinkin about this issue with different generations of minorities a lot lately. The suddenly imprtant issue of border control in the United States is absolutely incomprehensible to me. I suppose its a bit silly for me to expect relatively sedentary populations with established roles to simply accept immigrants (illegal or not) as equals. After all, there's no question that people who speak a different language than you are undoubtedly out to steal your job and marry your daughter. I mean, the Polish, Irish, Italian, Chinese, Czech, Ukranian, Japanese, Turkish and French communities have systematically infiltated North America and totally debased the society therein. Oh, wait. No they haven't! They've pretty much just contributed to it to the point where predominantly English-descended populations have elected people with last names like Chin and Wazankowski and Hong to represent them in Congresses and Parliaments.
The only population that has really raised any sort of shit in the past 100 years have been the Quebecois. They have a pretty legitimate reason to whine; after all, they were there before the goddamn English, until they lost a war. Funny; its the same deal with the Hispanic population in the Southwestern United States. If the American Government keeps trying to exclude the Latino population from accessing the greater rungs of the societal ladder, they're going to end up with a situation far worse than what Canada experiences with the Parti Quebecois. It only took one Rene Levesque to mess up Canada's shit for 30 years. My guess is that there's about 65 Levesques in any square mile of Southern California, and if they weren't working 60-hour weeks for slave wages only to risk their lives crossing the border, they'd probably be burning about half of Los Angeles down right now. Speaking of which, I'm going to listen to Rage Against the Machine for a little while.
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