Salon.com > Kartina Richardson

How can white Americans be free?

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

"No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it." -- James Baldwin

Measure, measure, measure.
We learn to measure first.
We spend our days measuring. And when we count we start at one.

Every number after is in relation to one.
Two is one after one.
Three is two after one. And so on.
Every child knows that one is the beginning from which all other numbers arise.

And every child knows that one is Whiteness.

The beginning.

In the beginning there was Whiteness. This is the glittering starting point. This is The Default. This is what we measure everything else against.

It’s clear that we as Black and Brown Americans, are still recovering from the racist indoctrinations of the past 500 years. Though laughable it sounds, white Americans, too, have suffered from this crime. As our country began and brown races were systematically denied the right to be human and so internalized the role of the savage, white consciousness bullied its way into objectivity. The white mind became the unbiased mind that objectively observed all the rest. This is called The Default: The belief that the white experience is a neutral and objective experience and white consciousness is the standard consciousness unless otherwise specified. White culture, and American culture as a whole, suffers from the tragedy of whiteness as the default setting.

“Key & Peele’s” edge-less, post-racial lie

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:30:00 +0000

Comedy Central's new sketch show "Key & Peele" (Tuesday, 10:30 p.m. Eastern) is neither funny nor daring. And since these are the show's two goals, it has failed miserably.

"Key & Peele's" deep flaws have gone unnoticed by the majority of reviewers, and I suspect this is due to the attractiveness of the package: Comics Keegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele are black folk who, like most white critics, want to move past race. In our sincere but hasty desire to actualize this mythical post-racist world, Key and Peele are the jackpot. Two light-skinned black men, middle-class in mannerism, who, like our black president, have white mothers. (It's also been popular with viewers; the show was Comedy Central's most-watched premiere since 2009, and was just picked up for a second season.)

Tim and Eric’s comedy of repulsion

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 18:25:00 +0000

"Repulsion" is an emotional response that darts past the smug butterfly nets of intellect and rationale to expose my true and shameful feelings: Nothing turns my stomach like a stranger’s display of vulnerability. This reaction sickens me, in turn, and begins a cycle of nausea and self-loathing. I am repulsed, revulsed and repulsed again.

I say a stranger’s vulnerability and not a friend’s, because a loved one’s vulnerability is less of a risk to them, and so less of a burden to me, the witness. In the split moment that a person is vulnerable, or when we project a vulnerability onto them, we become responsible for their existence in the world. In seventh grade, the year-supreme of vulnerability, I overheard a girl in my class talking about her excitement over the year's first dance. Her mother was taking her to get her hair done, she said, and to buy her a new dress. My skin prickled with discomfort. Didn’t she know the dance wasn’t a “get your hair done” kind of big deal? On the night of the dance, everyone was in a casual dress or jeans. She showed up with an elaborate updo and a ball gown. That moment has forever seared itself in my mind. I wanted to throw up and cry.

The great sitcom divide

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 00:30:00 +0000

On a recent episode of "2 Broke Girls," the following writing somehow made it onto television:

(Waitress to dissatisfied customer)

Waitress: Would you like to see the menu again?

Customer: This is crap, I wanted Muenster.

Waitress: Well, I wanted to be running a Fortune 500 company instead of waiting on a toxic man-child like yourself. But we can't always get what we want, so order something else, put it in your pie hole and get on with your damn life.

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I hadn’t realized my taste in comedy was so elitist until I watched some of the new multi-camera sitcoms and observed what I had assumed was an already long-dead form of comedy. When I say “new,” I’m referring to multi-camera shows that have persisted after the advent/rise of the single-camera sitcom. If, like me, you've spent recent years watching "30 Rock," "Arrested Development," "Louie" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm," it's a completely different experience to tune into talked-about shows like "Whitney," "2 Broke Girls" and "Are You There, Chelsea?"

TV’s eerie new race-less world

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000

NBC's "Parenthood" is a trick show that people tuckered out by life are eager to believe in. I am one of these tired people. Its bustling mornings, carefully disheveled interiors, and impromptu kitchen dance-parties create the illusion of safe chaos. "Parenthood" knows that for the modern television viewer, controlled disorder is better than none, for safe chaos tricks you into believing that what you’re watching isn’t totally sanitized. Strategically placed ad-libbing, background chatter and overlapping dialogue combine to slyly convince you of its authenticity -- that not only does "Parenthood" belong to an age of realism and daring and diversity, but it’s helping create it.

It reminds me very much of my eighth-grade teacher who so desperately hoped to be the mythic sage who made a difference, but failed to realize his well-meaning musings about why “black families can’t stay together these days” did little to raise our awareness of anything other than his own desire to seem good. And this is what "Parenthood" does in its broad-stroke coverage of everything that could happen in the life of a modern American family. Since we're all terrified of being different, there is some point in airing things we might still regard with shame: infidelity, moving back with your parents, not going to college, raising an autistic child, and, finally, interracial dating. As the end product of an interracial date, I find this last theme most interesting. On the show, it’s explored in two story lines.