Splash Mountain and the Strange Arcs of Corporate Intersectionality

Back in 2021, my family took a trip to Disney World, where we rode the soon-to-be-closed Splash Mountain.  It was as I remembered it, from years before.  A little more threadbare, perhaps.

It's been reconceptualized now, as the characters and stories were all removed and replaced with characters from the 2009 Disney film The Princess and the Frog.  Tiana's Bayou Adventure, it's now called.  

In that replacement, there's a peculiar irony.  

The Song of the South, the film on which Splash Mountain was based, is just the teensiest bit cringey.  Just the weensiest.  (Cough.)  Zip A Dee Doo Dah isn't...um...the actual feeling one would have gotten in the wildly racist Reconstruction-era South.  That's where the Uncle Remus stories were recorded by Joel Chandler Harris, a journalist and folklorist writing in the postwar period.  Remus is an amalgam character, one who gives voice to the actual narratives of enslaved peoples that were shared with Harris.  

Harris was white, of course, which means the tales were spun through his lens, although there's considerable murkiness about what that lens actually was.  He was understood by his contemporaries... such as Mark Twain... as being solicitous to Black folk, and Remus was read in much the same way that the wisdom fables of fellow-slave Aesop might be read.  Those stories were among those my grandfather would read to me in Georgia when I was a little boy, and that was the context in which they were presented.  

In the late twentieth and early twenty first century, that's been spun differently, as it's seen through the lenses of intersectionality and cultural appropriation, which the fluffy mid-20th century Disneyfication sho nuff exacerbated.  Oof.

But there's a peculiarity about reconceptualizing that ride.  

Again, the stories in Harrises writing were almost entirely the authentic narratives of enslaved African peoples.  That's a known known.  Brer Rabbit, Brer Bear, and Brer Fox derived their inspiration from West African trickster narratives, in which the weaker or the oppressed use their wits and wiles to overcome those who hold power.  As is so often the case with the disenfranchised, one has to dig through the narratives of their oppressors to find their truths and the tales they told.  For all of the flaws and clumsiness of the Uncle Remus stories, that's the purpose they served for the people who first told them.

The echoes of those stories have now been erased.

In their place, a story that is...different.  The Princess and the Frog isn't an African tale, nor is it a tale told by the African peoples who were brought enslaved to America.  It is also not a narrative with roots in the Black American experience.  It's rooted in a Germanic story, a classic European fairytale.  One that's been reframed to celebrate Creole and Bayou culture, certainly, but still. 

It feels...um...what's the word when you paint over a white thing with blackness to entertain an audience?  It's..uh...yeah.  I mean, how isn't it that?  

So to make amends, you replace the authentic stories of enslaved peoples with...a European fairy tale?  Capitalism is so weird.

If Disney wasn't run by lazy profit-driven execs happy to make bank off of commodified intersectionality, they'd have left the ride alone, and there'd have been a remake of Song of the South instead.  Lord have mercy, if there's ever been a Disney film that needed a hard reboot, it's that one.

It could have been something more...real.  Something that reframed those tales to surface the real and existential challenges facing Black folk in the Klan-dominated Reconstruction era South, and drilled down on the deep African roots of those now cancelled stories.

Maybe Barry Jenkins could have directed.  Ah well.  In another timeline, perhaps.

White Like Me

As I dig into the reading for the second of my upcoming doctoral classes, I find myself doing so with a tiny bit of trepidation.  The course I'll be taking is on Leadership and Diversity, and to be frank, I'm a tick concerned.  Not with the relevance or importance of diversity within the church.  Not at all.  Congregations that are monocultures tend to be drab and authoritarian, and poor reflections of Christ's command to really love those who aren't you.  I'm both tolerant of and can enjoy difference, in both form, organizational culture and theology, so long as that difference doesn't include fundamental violations of the Great Commandment.  That tends to trouble me.

What makes me a bit leery is my fear that this course will make me...once again...feel like a conservative.  I'm not, of course.  Open and inclusive?  Yup.  Affirming of women?  Eco-friendly?  Uh huh.  But there are strains of academic leftism that leave me gnashing my teeth.  Things can get so monomanaically focused on race and gender that the central message of the Gospel...and of theology itself...seems to fade away into nothing.  This bugs me, for some reason.

So diving into this class, I hit the book that I could tell would annoy me the most first.  Just to get it out the way, if you will.  The book is White Like Me, by antiracism activist Tim Wise.  As a Honkey-American, I could just smell how difficult it would be to read, and I wasn't mistaken.

The entire book is a screed against white privilege, by which Wise means the inherent advantage that individuals of European background have in the United States.  It's not an imaginary thing, of course.  Being "white" often means being materially advantaged, particularly in the American South.  It also means that you pretty much never need to work against the specter of racism in day-to-day life.  There is no such thing as Driving While White, for instance.    We are not yet a truly post-racial culture.

But for all of the ways in which race needs to be challenged as a way in which we value one another, I found Wise's critique off.

His tendency to see race as primarily black and white was understandable given his life in New Orleans...but that is no longer the reality of race in America.  Racial dynamics in this country now include growing Latino and Asian communities, as well as communities of African, Afro-Caribbean, and Middle Eastern immigrants.  He sorta kinda gets at the multivalent character of ethnicity in 21st century America, but only sorta kinda.  It feels dated.

Wise also seems so focused on race that he's oblivious to class.  "Privilege" in our culture is often mediated by race, but it is also profoundly mediated by socioeconomic status.  While my WASPiness has certainly conferred advantage, what's more significant is that 1) I come from a stable extended family unit, 2) both of my parents have graduate degrees, 3) both parents were engaged and interested in my education and upbringing, and 4) money was never a significant worry for my family when I was growing up.  For all of our proclamations about social mobility, class divisions are self-perpetuating, creating cultures that reinforce status and privilege.  There is often a magnifying interplay between ethnicity and socioeconomics...but Wise just doesn't seem to get it, or glosses over it.

But my biggest struggle reading Wise is that he comes across as profoundly graceless.  Maybe it was that the last book I read was Martin Luther King, Jr.'s reflections on the bus boycott in Montgomery.  Dr. King's measured, intelligent, gracious, and faith-centered tone was nowhere to be found in White Like Me.  Wise is all leftist truculence, snarky, personal, and bitter.  He's all rage, all the time.  The world is full of idiots, none of whom see how racist they all are.  Conservatives and moderates and liberals who don't share his rage are all equally useless.

As, frankly, are the ethical teachings of Christianity.  In one of the few sections where he overtly mentions faith, he describes a fight he's picked with some Christians over the depiction of Jesus as white.  When they try to say that color doesn't matter, he lays into them...and then lays into their assertion that faith leads people to try to transcend race.   "I mean, the Golden Rule has been around for like, forever, and hasn't done much of anything to get rid of racism," he snarks.

Having just read...from the source...how profoundly Dr. King's Christian faith and the faith of the African Americans in the Civil Rights Movement influenced their actions, and how that very ethic was the foundation of King's understanding of what he did, it's clear that Wise doesn't have a clue what he's talking about when it comes to Jesus and race.

It's good to have him out of the way, then.  The other books look considerably more relevant.

Rand Paul, Racism, and the Libertarian Conundrum

This morning, I read yet another piece on Rand Paul, the libertarian son of libertarian icon Ron Paul. Dr. Paul, an ophthalmologist, is currently a Tea Party favorite, having won the Republican primary for one of Kentucky's Senate seats. He's...well...interesting. Yeah, he's youngish, and photogenic, and his family is photogenic. But unlike other tea party folks, he speaks with what to me seems strangely flat affect.

Though the talking points coming out of his mouth are red meat to the Tea Party folks, they are delivered as a slow, deliberate, passionless mush. In terms of rhetorical style, he makes Al Gore sound like Benito Mussolini. Populist firebrand he ain't.

I can appreciate that.

Dr. Paul has been attacked vociferously on the left following comments he made about the Civil Rights Act, which enforced integration in the South. This has been taken, I think, as some form of tacit pandering to the racism that still weaves it's way through some corners of the American South. That may in some ways be true. When politicians speak of the rights of the states and localities and corporations and individuals and against the federal government, it's hard not to hear echoes of the Confederacy.

But when Dr. Paul was asked about the Civil Rights Act by progressive talking head Rachel Maddow, it was something of a loaded question. His response...which was to muse in the abstract about whether it was a good thing for government to mandate actions on the part of businesses (meaning, in the context of that law, you have to serve non-whites) was immediately attacked as coddling racism.

Honestly, though, it wasn't. I don't for a moment think that Rand Paul is a racist. He's just articulating a consistently libertarian position. Government is bad. Period. Unfortunately, that philosophical resistance to all things federal works under the assumption that localities and groups of individuals will always act in ways that respect the liberties of others.

They...um...don't, you know. That, I think, is the biggest challenge for anarchists and libertarians. If every human being acted in accordance with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, living a life filled with compassion for strangers and the Other, then we could be anarcho-libertarian and all would be well. That's the character of the Basilea Tou Theou, way I see it.

But we are not now in that place, or rather, we are only there in part. Which means that in the here and now, there are individuals and groups of individuals who actively work to impinge the liberties of others. Government...particularly if it is by the people, for the people, and of the people...exists to protect the liberties of those who are oppressed. The exercise of the power of the state in defense of those liberties is not monstrous or oppressive.

It is, as both Paul of Tarsus and St. Augustine recognized, necessary.

Gaming, Evil, and the Virtual World

Having recently read a blogosphere exchange about whether or not gaming can be art, several recent moments of online unpleasantness cause me to wonder if gaming can be actively evil.

As a pastor and a gamer, I try to steer away from games that are overtly negative. Meaning, I don't like games that require me to steal, or games that require me to harm innocents, or games that so deeply revel in horror that you can't play 'em without indulging in a fantasy of darkness. True, I do indulge in plenty of..err...aggressive games, and now and again wonder if my diet of simulated violence is entirely healthy.

Lately, though, I've been struggling with how to deal with my encounters with rather more concrete forms of gaming evil, namely, human beings. When you play online, you encounter all manner of blighted souls, and filtered through the medium of a game, it's a bit difficult to know how to respond to them.

I've played a little bit of a free online game called UMAG (follow the link, and you'll lose a few hours. You've been warned). It's a turn-based artillery game, in which folks fire shells at one another whilst texting comments that appear in little thought bubbles above your tank. It's simple. It's goofy. It's fun. Or it usually is.

Two nights ago, as I dropped into a game, the guy in position to strike at me texted the following to those around him:

[sumbuddy help me kill this Jew]

Suddenly, the game wasn't fun at all. With two Jewish boys and a Jewish wife and an extended Jewish family that I love more than I love myself, that kind of hatred tends to evoke a blind rage response. I took the guy out, of course, digging him into a hole and then dropping a MIRV on him. But that wasn't satisfactory. That sort of thing goes far beyond smacktalk, and into a dark place where play is no longer possible.

That was not the end of this week's online encounters with antisemitism. Last night, as I played through the delightfully frenetic FPS Battlefield: Bad Company 2, I found myself face to face with an opposing player whose avatar was named JEWSLAYER14.

Again, I took him out, with a fusillade of well placed rounds from the main gun of my BMD3 light tank. But again, that wasn't enough. Things were no longer fun. Someone who would choose that for their online identity is a person with whom I can't play, or have conversation. They are the Enemy, in a very spiritual way.

Electronic Arts, which publishes the Bad Company series, makes a point of booting such folks from their servers. Their Terms Of Service explicitly state that hate speech will get you thrown out...but folks like that still pop up. My hope is that my second encounter doesn't have 13 friends, but is number 14 because they've been kicked 13 times.

It does raise several conundrums about confronting virtual evil. First, it's very easy for evil to hide and reform and resurface on the interwebs. Removing a user for TOS violations is no more effective than deleting a spam email. They'll be back, with a different and equally offensive name, spitting out the same hatred they were before. There, I think folks in the gaming community are responsible for enforcing a community ethic. If someone goes beyond mocking you for your pathetic noobness and is expressing racial hatred, they're ruining the game for those around them. Gamers need not to tolerate that in their online friends, and if you're hosting a server and encounter someone who is eager to engage in pointless hatred, ban or block or kick them.

The difficulty comes with point number two. The "gaming community" is a pretty wildly diverse place. I've been on servers in the online game Warhawk, for instance, where everyone is screaming in Arabic, and the gamertags are things like jihad4ever1972. My suspicion is that a gamer with a tag like JEWSLAYER14 might not be booted from such a server.

Here, the question becomes how deeply a for-profit entity is willing to stand by the values of the culture from which it springs. The deep hatreds that have lead to such horrors in the meatspace world should be resisted wherever we encounter them.

If Electronic Arts and Microsoft and Sony and Nintendo put serious effort into keeping their games...you know...games...then gaming will remain a playground on which we can have all kinds of fun.