Wear Clean Draws  (’coz there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

“My community has a problem with homophobia, but we aren’t the only ones. African Americans are but 12 percent of the population. We have neither the numbers nor the power, given our history in this country, to disenfranchise another group. Blaming us for what is an American ill–as prevalent in, say, white Tripoli, Iowa, as it is in black Englewood, Chicago, Illinois–will not solve the injustice.”

*yawn*

somebody wake me up when identitarian epistemologies have lost their hold on poc feminists, too, kthanxby

Reading up on the debates over prop 8 this weekend, I noticed how the deployment of a wounded identity constantly played itself on all sides. Dan Savage was hurt. A host of posters and commenters I read expressed hurt that blacks in California and FL voted in such overwhelming majorities for prop 8 in CA and prop 2 in FL.

Currently, I happen to be reading Linda Williams’ _Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson_. I’d picked it up at a benefit for the library a few weeks ago and have been flipping through it on and off.

Williams is a prof of film studies, more well-known for her work on porn films in _Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible_. In _Playing the Race Card_, Williams examines the centrality of melodramatic storytelling in novels, plays, films, and television. A contemporary example of melodrama can be found everywhere, but the one she uses to illustrate is _Titanic_ an American melodrama that

“deploys the paradoxical location of strength in weakness — the process by which suffering subjects take what Nietzsche calls ‘ressentiment.’ a moralizing revenge upon the powerful achieved through a tirumph of the weak in their very weakness. In contemporary political terms this is what feminist political theorist Wendy Brown has called the overvaluation of the ‘wound’ in the political rhetoric of liberal identity politics. As we have already seen, Lauren Berlant has further investigated the process by which pain and suffering confers moral power on ‘wounded’ subjects. Ever since the abolitionist and suffrage movement, Berlant argues, individual citizens have been most compellingly identified with the national collectivity not through a universalist rhetoric of citizenship but through a “capacity for suffering and trauma” viewed as the core of citizenship.”

As Berlant writes:

“It would not be exaggerating to say that sentimentality has long been the more popular rhetorical means by which pain is advanced, in the United States, as the true core of personhood and political collectivity. It operates when relatively privileged national subjects are exposed to the suffering of their intimate Others, so that to be virtuous requires feeling the pain of flawed or denied citizenship as their own paint.”

Williams argues that it is through melodrama that the narrative of wounded identity has been forged, that we rely on it to express claims to citizenship. Specifically, Williams argues that melodrama is central to the way whites and blacks have played the race card: a melodramatic wounded identity where virtue is seen in the mistreated slave’s existence or located in the threatened virtuousness of the white female virgin threatened by black masculinity.

Elaborating on Berlant’s work on expressions of citizenship among suffrage and abolitionist movements, she says that

“this model, pioneered by abolitionists and feminists of the nineteenth century, and continued in contemporary identity politics, citizenship is paradoxically established not through reason, nor the acquisition of wealth and power, but through ‘the trumping power fo suffering’. Manifestation of pain — or what Brown calls ’states of injury’ — become evidence of a subjectivity worthy of recognition.”

As Berlant points out, however, the problem with constructing the right to recognition on a wounded identity, on expressions of pain and suffering is that the eradication of pain and suffering does not necessarily mean that justice has been achieved.

Williams goes on to talk about how melodramas are locations where tensions about past and future play out. Where the drama suggests that it is both “too late” and “not too late, that there may still be an original locus of virtue and truth can be achieved in private individuals and individual heroic acts rather than … in revolution and change.”

Describing the racial melodrama in Buffalo Bill Wide West Shows, Williams writes:

The white settlers are not just victims in this scenario; they are racially beset victims who acquire moral legitimacy through the public spectacle their suffering. Racial melodrama takes on enormous importance as the engine for the generation of legitimacy for racially constituted groups whose very claim to citizenship lies in these spectacles of pathos and action. Racial melodrama is the popular form that gives permission to these racially constituted groups to carry out actions that they could not carry out in the name of bald self-interest. In terms of our third feature of melodrama, the pathos of the suffering of white settlers victimized by marauding Indians… ultimately authorizes the action of the conquest of the West…. As Ric Burns’s commentator puts it, it gives the impression of a conquest won without any intentional quest: ‘They attacked us and when we ended up, we had the whole continent.’”

As Williams writes, though, it would be a mistake to carry out the melodramatic spectacle of victimized, powerless virtue winning the day by concluding that whites racialize victimhood in a bad, villainous way and people of color do so in virtuous ways.