Julie and Julia: an unlikely response

About ten years ago, in an article titled "Talking about Racism," noted psychoanalyst Paul Wachtel made a case for limiting use of the word racism. His rationale for decreasing usage was that the word had become overused and its meaning had become inflated. Although I do not disagree with Wachtel's observation, I absolutely reject his solution to the problem. Wachtel suggested that the word racism be reserved for only the most blatant and inhumane examples of it, for instance, lynching, or burning crosses on lawns. Again, I have to disagree, for, simply put, some of the most egregious examples of racism are not overt but rather so deeply ingrained in American culture that they pretty much go undetected most of the time.

However, this blog post is not simply about racism. Well, it is and it isn't. It is most directly a response to a movie I watched over the holiday weekend, "Julie and Julia." More to the point, I am writing about elements of white supremacy in the film. Now, there's a term that has gone out of use. It is much more caustic I think than the term racism, and both for that reason and because it points to some thinking and to some acts that have not disappeared from American culture it is appropriate that someone begin applying it to otherwise seemingly innocent thoughts and practices.

"Julie and Julia" was on its surface a darling of a film, and I have to admit that that was what first interested me in viewing it. I tried to get my daughter to see it with me, a nice mother-daughter outing I thought, and she agreed until we got to the cinema. There, she begged off and deserted me for "Zombieland." After my viewing of "Julie and Julia," I have to say that my daughter made the safer bet.

There are in this movie about a young woman (a southern girl if I'm not mistaken) who moves within one year from self-loathing to fame two underlying and interrelated themes--conflated time and recovery of the "lady persona." The first is necessary in order to complete the project of the second. To be clear, I am suggesting that with this film the idea of the white "lady"--a social, racial, and economic construct--is recovered. Before I go on to illustrate my point let me say a word about why such recovery is important at this time. We are living in an era when girls have "gone wild." (About an hour before going to see "Julie and Julia" I watched on a blog some video clips that are clear examples of video porn. And although all of the women in those clips were African American, romp shaking of the sort that we see as of late is not limited to this group. Needless to say, the phenomenon of the video vixen provided just the right contrast to the virtuousness of Julie Powell and Julia Child, a contrast that presented in bold relief a message concerning white womanhood.)

What is conflated time, and how does this movie utilize this tool for the project of recovery? Well, as one reviewer put it, the movie weaves the life of Julia into that of Julie (or vice versa). That is to say that the movie closes the gap between the 1940s and the new millennium. How so? First, Childs is not foreign to Julie (although I suspect she would be unfamiliar to most millennials), and since Childs is not alien to Julie but rather a subject of admiration, Childs can in this story serve as a prototype of virtuous white womanhood, or, better put, of the white "lady." Clearly, Childs is not meant as mere inspiration, however. No, Julie must become a simulation of Childs, which is to say that she must become a postmodern version of the earlier figure. Let's just say, Julie has a good start at this task at hand, since she in fact has an actual mother, a physically absent yet never spiritually absent force who responds to her daughter's every professional and personal decision. Like a good Southern matriarch, she intends to keep her protege on the right path, one that will keep the family name high.

There are in this film many other infusions both of the lady figure and of "the Southern," which not surprisingly work hand in hand. Some reviewers (a definite minority) were sickened by the syrupy sweetness of this movie, by a perfection and confection created by the loving husbands of both Childs and Julie. Both men were saints, the exact honorific description that Julie expressed at her husband's overall support of her work and the same idea expressed by Childs as she gleamed within the aura of her husband's near angelic devotion and pure love. This was no story of a single mom, fighting sexism and discrimination to beat the odds on a tough road to success. No. This film is a postmodern glance to "better" times. There is lots of sex in this movie, but it is clean, wholesome intimacy, the kind that takes place between legitimate partners, i.e., between wives and husbands. Again, both Julie and Childs have perfect marriages. (The problem the film invents between Julie and her husband, a spat that results in his leaving her for a day and a night, is totally unbelievable given how there for her he is the rest of the time. The problem of Julie's ambition is then simply an unsuccessful plot device.) As for Childs, her problem is more real. She has everything a woman could ask for but fertility, yet her life is nevertheless full. A spoiled Southern Belle, one might argue, she has the luxury of indulging at least a couple of whims before her husband pays for her to attend the famous Cordon Bleu. One could easily reason that Julie is Childs' spiritual daughter or granddaughter, and, if one were to look seriously at both women as figures or representatives of white women's virtue and its recovery, one could make a case that the white mother figure yearns to have her wayward daughter return home, to her rightful place and station. (A prodigal daughter, Julie has sinned against her forebears by both marrying below her station and moving off to the God forsaken North.) In making such a case, one might begin with Julie's unhappiness at the beginning of the movie, a existential angst if not depression caused by living in the unfamiliar and unglamorous Queens, New York and by confusion concerning her life's purpose. Would that we could all have such great problems. These false issues take viewers back to the days when ladies would tire and faint so easily.

Now, my reading of this film most would agree is perfectly rational. Just one thing: the movie is based on two "real" lives. Ironic. Art imitating life; life imitating art. It is incredibly hard to know these days where reality ends and fantasy begins, and "Julie and Julia" demonstrates in so many ways this postmodern problem, beginning even with its title and the fact that a real person actually came up with the idea to marry herself to this lady of the past whose name so closely resembles her own. The critical question for those viewers willing to be critical of an otherwise adorable movie is whether the social construct of the lady has any real relevance in real life? In asking this question I will probably be accused of taking art too seriously, advice which I have gotten used to and which I recognize for what it is--censorship of mind and spirit. And, I suppose I can also be accused of conflating time myself, for truly I am not that removed from a culture in which the white "lady" construct served some definite purposes, set against and of course above the Mammy construct, the servant black woman. If I am correct that Julie is a postmodern lady, then we might expect to see a Mammy figure somewhere in the movie. She exists in a largely muzzled black coworker, Julie's neighbor in cubicle-land. With barely three full lines, one wonders why this somewhat naturalistic character is in the film. Is it because the real life Julie had such an acquaintance? Reading things the way I do, the black coworker is there only to support Julie's dream; we hear few words from the quiet one, just a quick offering of a gesture of approval and support and, later, a statement of loyalty when Julie gets in trouble (fake trouble) at work for taking a day off to cook and to blog. Though there is in this movie a smart reference to "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" the answer to that obviously still discomforting question is I'm afraid another white couple and, if things go as planned, some other white women intrigued by Julie's project. Who's not coming to dinner? The black coworker.

If the white "lady" construct served in the past to keep black and other women of color subservient and invisible, why would the result of its recovery serve different purposes today? Short answer: it doesn't. White supremacy always serves the same purposes: to hold up images of white beauty, grace, and virtue, characteristics that anything but innocently justify social inequity. But how does this insidious feature of American society play itself out? Julie Powell writes about her otherwise uninspired life, gets an article in the New York Times, which immediately catapults her to fame. Why? Why? Why? And how? Was it because her writing was just that good? Better than that of countless other bloggers, who write on much more serious topics and who will never have a road to publication so nicely paved? Was it because she struck a chord with an audience tantalized by the commingling of white female purity with delicious food? Early in Julie's project, her friends convince her to ask her audience for money. "They like you," they assured her; "they will fund your work." And indeed, they and we did.

Finally, I am reminded of one of my own spiritual giants, Sojourner Truth, who it is said took her blouse off before a crowd of onlookers who had doubted her womanhood. She is now famous for having had the nerve not only to do such an unladylike act but to ask, "Ain't I a Woman?" After all of this time, women of color, faced with the ever-present ideal of the white lady, held up in such high esteem, must still take their clothes off, both to be recognized as women, and to be (de)valued. This is the cost of white supremacy, and it continues unabated.

Henry Louis Gates Controversy

This is a blog post in the truest sense of this new genre of online writing. Usually, I write in hopes of connecting with other people in the blogosphere. Today, I am writing to get some thoughts off of my chest.

Let me be clear at the outset. I am not a fan of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. I am not really a critic either although I have tended to agree with the way that Professor Adolph Reed has sized up Gates, Cornel West, and Michael Eric Dyson. Like Reed, my responses have been more to the phenomenon of academic stardom (and money made from it) than of these academics themselves.

So really, it is in the context of a hyper-consumer society that has not missed the opportunity to commoditize even American intellectuals that I respond to Gates' unfortunate and ironic arrest. When I first heard of the arrest, on Facebook, a "friend's" remark--so much for a color blind society--elicited this from me: I feel a new book on the horizon for Gates. Only one friend responded to my veiled criticism, saying that she had tried to read several of Gates' books and found them inaccessible. "Verbose" was the exact word she used.

I myself have read three of the professor's books and skimmed some others. I am not, again, a critic of the man. I simply have not read him closely enough to level serious criticism. The one book that I did read closely several years ago is Colored People. When I read closely, I really read closely. I read with my body, with all of my psychic energy and my soul. Colored People bothered me greatly. It made me ill. What I read in that book was what I saw as the forwarding of stereotypes of black sexuality. Was it my imagination or were the black women described in that book Jezebel-like, that is, over-sexed, and lacking intellectual interests? The women that Gates meets early in life in his West Virginia hometown seem a stark contrast to the people in general he will meet later at Harvard. These seem, in Gates' perspective, cultures foreign to each other.

One other of his books that I read somewhat closely though that reading also was many years ago is Future of the Race, written with then fellow Harvard professor Cornel West. No apologies. I was disturbed as well by this book. I cannot recall any specifics, and I have to admit that when a book affects me this way I try not to read it again. I don't want reading taking years off of my life. Anyway, as I recall the problem that I had with this second book was that Gates and West were reading black life inside of an American capitalist, democratic paradigm, which is to say that West and Gates were reading black life inside of a box or the box. Black life so analyzed, one would expect successful blacks (those who have adjusted to the paradigm) to be praised while those who haven't to be maligned or treated as a problem or the problem. When Future of the Race came out, West and Gates were interviewed on "Good Morning America" by Charlie Gibson. Gibson may have recently taken Sarah Palin to task, but he was ill prepared several years ago to offer a serious critique of this book by two famed Harvard professors. And this is just fine since West and Gates were not brought onto the morning news and entertainment show to be criticized anyway. Now, that in and of itself is a problem (objective journalism?), but the network's agenda was to me painfully clear. West and Gates--media-appointed spokespersons for "Black America"--were in fact asked how they saw the black condition today, and one of them stated that we were living in the best of times and the worst of times. The other, as I recall, nodded in agreement. Asked to explain the description, one of them gave examples of black success set against black failure. "That's right! You heard it here folks. Blacks themselves see other blacks as the problem. More news in a moment..."

For the record, I have always been skeptical of anyone who claims to be an intellectual but who is unwilling to question the broad framework of our society. Why not question capitalism? Why not question even our sacred democracy? Do these systems not have their flaws? Maybe there are fundamental problems both with the economic system and the political system that we have been so pushing on others around the globe. Intellectuals must, as far as I'm concerned, remain open to this possibility. If these systems were in fact divinely inspired and are therefore beyond criticism, then I expect all the more that they can withstand criticism and come out on top still. So, I have a problem when black intellectuals analyze social and economic conditions of blacks without a thorough look at these systems and the ways in which these may contribute to problems blacks face. I certainly have a problem when blacks who have not thrived under these systems are seen as misfits. To make myself really clear, let me say that inside of a capitalist-democratic framework, West and Gates' analysis is dead on. What I am saying is that these men--anointed as our leaders by the media--do not step outside of this framework.

Well, these are the underlying themes that speak to me from the pages of Gates' memoir and of the book co-authored with West. Now, if I am right, if Gates thinks that the system is just fine and dandy and that it is people of the black underclass who need to do all the changing, then I would have to ask if Gates is indeed a friend to blacks. And this question brings me finally to my real point. I am concerned about our tendency to rush to the defense of Gates. Why do we do so?

Okay, it doesn't take a Ph.D. to answer that question. When we see the image of a manacled Gates--once the picture of esteem--with his mouth agape, we cannot help but to pull up from our psyche deep-seated images of brothers and fathers, uncles and cousins, who have many times found themselves in similar situations. So, Gates is our brother then. He is our blood. He is us. There is simply no separation. I get this, and it is compelling. This is in fact the same reason that, once Michael Jackson's life reached its sad end, black people in general refused to judge him. Instead, we felt his pain. So, not only am I for coming to the aid of Gates and of describing what happened to him as an outrage, I agree with a comment made by Jesse Jackson that racial profiling denies blacks equal protection under the law. We cannot and should not then sweep under the rug what happened to Gates.

At the same time, however, blacks have to look closely at Gates himself and his politics, maybe not right now, but after this whole thing dies down. We cannot be so naive as to trust that every black person has black people's best interests at heart. Receiving the support or endorsement of Oprah Winfrey, of Tom Joyner, or even of Barack Obama does not a real advocate of blacks make. Celebrities--Obama for the moment excluded--usually are not capable of offering the kind of serious critique that, in my opinion, needs to happen when we elevate people to genius status and pay them according to the accolade. Who will help us to read such people closely and critically. And will such critics receive equal air time?

For instance, here's an example of appropriate criticism. As Gates went to defend his indignation at the whole fiasco, he stated that he was not a rabble rouser. Aside from the fact that that phrase has a really problematic history, who exactly was Gates using the term to separate himself from? Who is a rabble rouser? Who is belligerent? Why did Gates feel the need to defend himself in exactly this way? Might it be because he is super-literate unlike (the perception of) those of the underclass that continue to be a problem in America? What was even more troubling with his defense was when he offered that he was more white than black, that his father was even whiter than he, and that his wife was white. What was Gates' point with this exaggerated claim to white identity? Was he arguing that he should not be seen as black, that race falls apart because those who look black may have more white inheritance than skin color would suggest, or that whites are less known for losing their cool and since he is more white his outrage should be respected? Gates' own defense is so shot through with troubling ideas that it doesn't become too hard to believe that he may have in fact talked about Officer Crowley's mama, which brings Gates back full-circle and once again qualifies him to be seen by us as, you got it, pathologically black, having inherited all of the contradictions and insecurities that go along with the history and identity.

Gates' arrest I described as ironic. It is so not because I buy into the idea that his power and position should allow him to transcend profiling. It is ironic because the aftermath of the initial incident has revealed that this super-civilized Negro suffers the same double-consciousness that led to the demise of a man who died just a couple of weeks ago, a man who sang that it didn't matter if you were black or white.

If blacks were to come to Gates' defense based on this truth of shared pathology, that our esteemed professor is doubly conscious, paranoid, and as insecure as all of us are who wear the mask, I could almost stand up for him myself. But, I am pretty doubtful that Gates would ever so belittle himself, saying, "Alas, I am human and black!" Until he does so, I will let others mount his defense. I will watch quietly and try not to be physically bothered.