Lovable Racists, Magical Negroes, and White Messiahs
by David Ikard, foreword by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Cloth: 978-0-226-49246-9 | Paper: 978-0-226-49263-6 | Electronic: 978-0-226-49277-3
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226492773.001.0001
ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS
ABOUT THIS BOOK
In this incredibly timely book, David Ikard dismantles popular white supremacist tropes, which effectively devalue black life and trivialize black oppression. Lovable Racists, Magical Negroes, and White Messiahs investigates the tenacity and cultural capital of white redemption narratives in literature and popular media from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Help.
In the book, Ikard explodes the fiction of a postracial society while awakening us to the sobering reality that we must continue to fight for racial equality or risk losing the hard-fought gains of the Civil Rights movement. Through his close reading of novels, films, journalism, and political campaigns, he analyzes willful white blindness and attendant master narratives of white redemption—arguing powerfully that he who controls the master narrative controls the perception of reality. The book sounds the alarm about seemingly innocuous tropes of white redemption that abound in our society and generate the notion that blacks are perpetually indebted to whites for liberating, civilizing, and enlightening them. In Lovable Racists, Magical Negroes, and White Messiahs, Ikard expertly and unflinchingly gives us a necessary critical historical intervention.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
David Ikard is professor and director of African American and diaspora studies at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Breaking the Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism and Blinded by the Whites: Why Race Still Matters in the 21st Century, as well as coauthor of Nation of Cowards: Black Activism in Barack Obama’s Post-Racial America.
REVIEWS
“Ikard delivers a blunt account of white supremacy in American culture, and a searing indictment of those who help to prop racism up. . . . The book is both timely and necessary, serving as an essential wake-up call to all white Americans who are not actively engaged in combating racism.”
— Foreword Reviews
“Ikard’s book is creative and interventive. With quite a bit of ease, he distills for the reader the ways of whiteness—to conjure tropes in the service of black inferiority and white superiority. For this journey, Ikard chooses the literary and everyday life as avenues through which we can best explore the pitfalls of the American landscape. His dealings with texts, in productive and rigorous ways, allow the reader to enter the worlds of literature and to gain richer knowledge of the ways we are ideologically manipulated by historic trends and tropes.”
— Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr., Washington University in St. Louis
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction - David Ikard
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226492773.003.0001
[Toni Morrison;Edward Said;Black Lives Matter;James Baldwin;lovable racists;magical negroes;white messiahs;hip hop;Ta-Nehisi Coates;Michelle Alexander]
The introduction lays out the larger argument of the book which includes defining the tropes lovable racists, white messiahs, and magical negroes. The chief argument is that these tropes have long pervaded our society, reinforcing white supremacist notions of self-determination, inclusivity, nationalism, freedom, equality, and fairness. Most profoundly, these tropes encourage even blacks and people of color to not only tolerate blatant racist behavior by whites but, in many cases, to misread such behavior as laudatory. This process of misreading is the result of blacks and people color having set the bar so low for expectations of white humanity; meaning that minimal acts of white civility and decency are experienced as magnanimous or even heroic. Because whites are routinely socially insulated from having to confront their white privilege and power (a phenomenon that is compounded by the unconscious complicity of blacks and people of color), they routinely experience their white oppression and privilege as natural and benign. (pages 1 - 20)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 1/ Good Slave Masters Don’t Exist: Lovable Racists and the Crisis of Authorship in Twelve Years a Slave - David Ikard
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226492773.003.0002
[Twelve Years a Slave;Adventures of Huckleberry Finn;W. E. B. DuBois;David Wilson;Uncle Tom's Cabin;Harriet Beacher Stowe;agency;violence;Frederick Douglass;cultural capital]
Chapter One challenges the conventional reading of the slave narrative, Twelve Years a Slave, as a subversive text that strategically avoids condemning all white slave masters as evil so as not to alienate Northern whites who, because of deep investments in white supremacist thinking, might be offended and, by extension, less inclined to condemn slavery. Calling attention to the fact that TYAS was ghostwritten by a white author, David Wilson, who idealized Harriet Beacher Stowe and her blockbuster novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, the chapter argues that the portraits of good white slave masters in the narrative reflect what I call lovable racist thinking and reveals more about the mechanisms of willful white blindness and black complicity therein than it does about the complexity of black humanity and self-determination. The chapter argues that the movie "12 Years A Slave" is hyper-aware of this phenomenon and strategically challenges this lovable racist thinking by exposing the willful and nefarious blindness of the white slavers and rescripting the black women characters--who Solomon Northup and David Wilson uniformly characterize as weak and pitiful in the narrative--as fierce and insightful interrogators of white patriarchal capitalist patriarchy, Victorian white womanhood, and black patriarchy. (pages 21 - 45)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 2/ Constituting the Crime: White Innocence as an Apparatus of Oppression - David Ikard
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226492773.003.0003
[Myrlie Evers-Williams;myth of white innocence;David Sirota;Mae Mobley;The Association of Black Women Historians;segregation;Washington Redskins;The Help;The Green Mile;primitivism]
With an eye toward understanding the current utility and tenacity of the myth of white innocence, this chapter will examine several mediums, including news media, politics, and entertainment, that invoke or appropriate the myth with high frequency and, in many instances, with lethal consequence. I argue that the extant myth of white innocence functions on many levels to obscure the systemic ways in which white privilege and power are passed down from one generation to the next. As a direct result of this socially constructed myth of white innocence, white children (especially among the middle and upper classes) emerge as emotionally pure, ethically blameless and even angelic. To this end, the myth of white innocence functions like most discourses of dominant white power—namely, its sociopolitical viability depends on the absence-presence of othered black/brown childhood. (pages 46 - 68)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 3/ “We Have More to Fear than Racism that Announces Itself”: Distraction as a Strategy to Oppress - David Ikard
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226492773.003.0004
[disenfranchisement;Trayvon Martin;institutional racism;structural inequalities;Frederick Douglass;Ferguson;Barack Obama;Michael Brown;War on Drugs;Dylann Roof]
In this chapter I will engage a long-standing pattern of victim blaming and the challenges it poses in the twenty-first century for asserting black humanity and acquiring justice and equal treatment under the law. I will refer to this pattern of victim blaming and related forms of displacing blame for white supremacist oppression onto blacks as the “discourse of racial distraction.” Further, I will consider the ways that blacks have (unwittingly) dignified or reinforced this discourse and, conversely, the ways that blacks have successfully exposed and exploded it. (pages 69 - 90)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 4/ “Only Tired I Was, Was Tired of Giving In”: Rosa Parks, Magical Negroes, and the Whitewashing of Black Struggle - David Ikard
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226492773.003.0005
[Rosa Parks;Martin Luther King Jr.;slavery;Civil Rights movement;Birmingham;rugged individualism;meritocracy;counterhegemonic narratives;double consciousness;Abraham Lincoln]
Focusing on Rosa Parks's attempt to set the record straight about her iconic act of civil disobedience on a Birmingham bus, this chapter engages how the magical negro trope operates to whitewash black human rights struggles and elevate white redemption narratives. Moreover, this chapter historicizes this pattern of whitewashing to show how it encourages our society to see racial progress as a natural and inevitable rather than the stuff of black organizing, strategising, protesting, resisting and even taking up arms. What becomes clear is that the magical negro trope facilitates willful white blindness and frustrates critical engagement with the sophistication, shrewdness, and brilliance of black activism and social transformation. (pages 91 - 108)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 5/ Santa Claus Is White and Jesus Is Too: Era(c)ing White Myths for the Health and Well-Being of Our Children - David Ikard
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226492773.003.0006
[Santa Claus;Christmas;Disney movies;Jon Stewart;Jesus;Michaelangelo;Leonardo da Vinci;racial intimidation;meritocracy;white supremacy]
This chapter investigates the effect that whitewashed religious figures, fairy tales, cartoons, and children's literature have on African American children. The chief goal is to explode the conventional notion that such images are harmless and apolitical. What I expose are the ways in which these images reproduce and reinforce white supremacist thinking. More specifically, I delineate how white supremacist ideology allows religious and mythical figures like the Christian messiah Jesus Christ and Santa Claus to emerge culturally as universal and transcendent even as they are rendered white in the public domain. I further discuss why African American parents must buck cultural norms and teach their children to reject religious figures, myths, and fairy tales that reify whiteness and white supremacy. (pages 109 - 126)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
