Episode 89: Transcript
Episode: 89: Are you suffering from historical amnesia?
Transcription by Keffy
Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction, science and anything else we feel like. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm the author of a recent book about archaeology called Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:14] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm the author of a brand-new young adult space fantasy book called Victories Greater Than Death. And I'm also the author of an upcoming book called Never Say You Can't Survive: How to get through hard times by making up stories.
Annalee: [00:00:27] In this episode, we're going to be talking about something you might be experiencing right now. It's called historical amnesia, or the process by which your culture tries to cushion the blow of a major trauma by just forgetting it ever happened. We're going to talk about how storytelling is a major driver of historical amnesia in science fiction, but also in political rhetoric.
[00:00:50] And later in the episode, we're going to talk to Ayanna Thompson, a professor of English at ASU and the author of a new book called Blackface, which is about how modern-day people in the United States have forgotten the history of minstrelsy, and why that's a problem. Let's start our memory engines.
Both: [00:01:08] [Engine revving noises.]
[00:01:10] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:37] So I mean, historical amnesia kind of sounds like a contradiction in terms because history is all about remembering stuff. So what is historical amnesia? And why is it a problem? And how the heck do we actually forget huge major events that affect, you know, millions of people?
Annalee: [00:01:52] So let me start by giving an example. One of the really weird things that happened when we started to get deep into the COVID-19 pandemic was that people were looking back into history for precursors to it. And a lot of people were surprised to realize that just 100 years ago, we had a massive pandemic, which was called the Spanish Flu, even though it actually started in Kansas. And it killed what is now estimated to be 50 million people around the world.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:20] Wow.
Annalee: [00:02:21] And it was sort of a famously forgotten pandemic. And in the 1970s, a historian named Alfred Crosby published a book about it called America’s Forgotten Pandemic, because it had just been so quickly erased from history. And it's not really taught in schools. It's not really memorialized. And so, for Crosby, the historian, he just wasn't really sure why people were forgetting it, but he thought that maybe it was trauma. Maybe people were just so upset by it, that they didn't want to think about it anymore.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:54] I mean, trauma is so powerful, and part of how you deal with from is just repressing, right? You’re just pushing everything down and just being like, I'm not going to think about that, because it makes me really upset. And so I'm just gonna, like lalalalala. And we did an episode recently about nostalgia, a while back, and I feel like this is kind of a close cousin of nostalgia. Part of how we get to be nostalgic about the past is that we kind of bury the stuff that was really horrible and painful at the time.
Annalee: [00:03:17] Yeah, we look back on it with rose-colored glasses, as it were.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:22] When there's so much evidence that something happened, when it affected people profoundly, how do you just forget it? What's the mechanism that makes people just push something out of the collective consciousness?
Annalee: [00:03:31] Yeah, so this is the thing that I think is really interesting about historical amnesia, because it really is this collective process. And there's a really terrific lecture online by the historian Nancy Bristow, who has studied the history of the pandemic. And she gave this lecture a couple years ago at the National World War I Museum in Kansas City, where she talked about the fact that historical amnesia isn't like, we all just forgot it. People did remember the Spanish Flu in their personal lives. And she's really sifted through a lot of documents and memoirs from people at the time. And it was very common for people to say, this changed my life. This pandemic absolutely altered the course of my experiences. And at the same time, there was a very public act of forgetting it. So even as we remembered it privately, we were forgetting it in public, and that public forgetting was motivated entirely by politics.
[00:04:31] And the political historian Michael Rogen calls this a process of “motivated forgetting.” And just to give you an example, President Woodrow Wilson literally never mentioned the pandemic once. Not once. Imagine millions of people dying and your president doesn't ever even talked about it.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:49] I feel like one of these days I'm going to learn a positive fact about Woodrow Wilson and be like, oh, that's delightful. He had a pet skunk that he carried around on a leash or whatever—
Annalee: [00:04:59] Uh-huh, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:59] Or, you know, he grew prized orchids. I don't know, there's gotta be something good about Woodrow Wilson that I just haven't come across yet. But I feel like, I'm still waiting. I'm still waiting for there to be something not terrible about Woodrow Wilson.
Annalee: [00:05:11] Maybe it's been a process of motivated forgetting.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:14] Yeah. We've kind of experienced this in real time with some stuff that has happened, you know, like January 6th, people want to push that into the memory hole. But also, even while COVID was happening, even while we were in the middle of the COVID pandemic, and people were just dying all around us, there was this process of like denial and pushing it down and pretending that it wasn't real and—
Annalee: [00:05:35] Or just pretending that it just wasn't as bad as it as it really was turning out to be.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:40] Yeah. What else was happening to make people just not talk about this huge major event in their lives? Like, was there something else going on?
Annalee: [00:05:47] So, remember, the Spanish Flu takes place in 1918 and 1919. And it has many waves, just like COVID-19 did. And there was no overt censorship. But of course, it is taking place during World War I.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:01] Right.
Annalee: [00:06:01] And so what happens, according to Nancy Bristow, the historian who looked through all of those memoirs, and found all the people talking about how it affected their personal lives, but she finds that in public discourse, in the news media, what happens is that people start to think of the pandemic as being part of the war. It's basically like the World War I story absorbs the pandemic story. The pandemic becomes kind of like a lost subplot in this much bigger story about World War I. And here's a moment where Nancy Bristow talks about what that transition looked like.
Nancy: [00:06:40] Wilson worried that attention to the pandemic would draw away from attention to the war. And so, in a sense, the pandemic was sold as one part of the war, you didn't fight the pandemic because it was making people sick, but because it was Kaiser Wilhelm’s ally. And again, and again, and again, we see the conflation of the pandemic with the war. Doctors and nurses are heralded as soldiers as brave as the people at the front and deaths would often be described as deaths of martyrdom. And that's that the pandemic was just the wrong story for the United States at this historical moment.
Annalee: [00:07:14] Now, the key phrase for me in this bit, is when she says, the pandemic just wasn't the right story for the US at that historical moment.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:26] Wow.
Annalee: [00:07:26] Because this is all about public storytelling, what are the things that we're willing to say about ourselves in public, as opposed to writing in a letter to our cousins. And we wanted a story of triumphing over adversity, beating back our enemies. And so the story of winning the war became kind of a story of beating back the flu, which of course, we didn't want to talk about in the first place.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:54] You could almost say that the World War I narrative became entrenched in the public consciousness. Sorry, I couldn't resist. It was low hanging fruit. But I mean, this is just—
Annalee: [00:08:03] But you know what, it was infected secretly by the story of the pandemic.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:08] Right. I mean, yes, definitely. I think that this really gets to the heart of what's so kind of troubling about this is that it’s not just about personal trauma, or, oh, gosh, that's unpleasant, I don't want to think about it. It's about national mythologizing and us wanting to feel awesome about our country in this way that’s super false. And that is kind of the root of a lot of the problems that we're having now that we're just like, we've been doing this for so long that now we can't face the truth about ourselves in so many ways.
Annalee: [00:08:39] Yeah, we want to always tell a good story about us being the good guys and winning. And so anything that contradicts that, even if it's something like a pandemic, which is a natural disaster, we want to use politics to co-op that story and make it something that sounds good.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:54] And a lot of that national mythologizing does kind of tie in with science fiction, because a lot of our most popular science fiction franchises are about propping up our mythos of ourselves as Americans, as Westerners.
Annalee: [00:09:07] Sure.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:08] So, you know, how does science fiction feed into this process of historical amnesia?
Annalee: [00:09:12] So let's just cut right to the Star Wars. Alright, let's just go right there.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:18] What?
Annalee: [00:09:19] So the first Star Wars trilogy is a super great example. [Star Wars score starts playing in the background]. And that's partly because it started out as a commentary on real life historical events, and then it kind of morphed into, I want to call it like a science fiction version of the American anthem.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:35] Right.
Annalee: [00:09:36] And there's a series of great books on the making of Star Wars by Jonathan Rinzler. And he talks in those books with George Lucas, about what the inspiration was for the trilogy. And one of the things that Lucas says over and over is that he was explicitly trying to comment on the Vietnam War, and that the Battle of Endor in Return of the Jedi was supposed to evoke some of the battles in Vietnam against the Vietcong, and that basically, the Ewoks are the Vietcong, straight up. And that was, you know, how he saw it. Lucas, in his early notes on the first film describes the Empire as being like America 10 years from now.
RotJ Clip: [00:10:29] Emperor Palpatine: Rise, my friend.
Darth Vader: The Death Star will be completed on schedule.
Emperor Palpatine: You've done well, Lord Vader. And now I sense you wish to continue your search for young Skywalker.
Annalee: [00:10:50] So this is a story that started out very explicitly political, very much about the problem of American power, about the misuse of power. And also, it was a story about how the Empire is beaten, right? So it's a story about if America is the Empire, it's about how America loses, right?
[00:11:10] So this is not the story that we want to hear.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:13] If you polled like 20 people coming out of the original Star Wars, none of them would have thought, like the first Star Wars movie in 1977, none of them would have thought it was about Vietnam. And of course, as everybody knows, George Lucas was originally going to direct Apocalypse Now. But because of studio foot dragging and various other things, he ended up dropping that project and it was directed by Francis Ford Coppola instead. And so he kind of directed Star Wars as like his version of Apocalypse Now. But you watch those two movies side by side, you won't feel like they're kind of in the same zip code at all. And how did Star Wars lose that Vietnam War message? How did it become just like rah rah rah America, USA, number one.
Annalee: [00:11:53] So remember how the historian Nancy Bristow talked about how the pandemic was described as if it were a war. And then suddenly, the national conversation was entirely about the war. So what happened with Star Wars, I think was kind of similar. You know, he's telling the story of Vietnam. But Lucas also mashes it up with these classic golden age science fiction tropes. But even more, he mashes it up with references to World War II, and the Revolutionary War. And he even throws in the Indian Wars of the 19th century. He says that he named the Ewoks after the Miwok tribes whose land the Lucas Ranch is on today in Northern California. And so he's really turned this into a film that is all about every war, and especially wars that happened in the United States or that involved the United States. And so it goes from being a clear criticism of US involvement in Vietnam, to being just a story about the American can do attitude, and how the little guy could beat the big guy the way the Americans beat the British. And also, and this is really important, the horrors of genocide are totally wiped away, because there's this weird mishmash retelling of American history, where the Ewoks win. So there's no need to grapple with the ongoing horror of white settler colonialism or the ravages of post-colonialism. It's just a happy story about how the good guys win the war.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:23] Yeah, and you know, I don't think Star Wars would have been as popular as it was if it had been kind of more of a downer or more of a clear critique of the United States. And of course, the Ewoks have all those noble savage things attached to them, like noble savage tropes.
Annalee: [00:13:37] Well, they’re straight-up based on Miwoks, of course, but then also mashed up with—
Charlie Jane: [00:13:40] But they’re also trying—
Annalee: [00:13:39] every, yeah. With the Vietcong—
Charlie Jane: [00:13:41] They try to cannibalize, they try to eat some of the main characters and they like—
Annalee: [00:13:47] I know, that’s how it starts.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:47] They tie people to poles, like—
RotJ Clip: [00:13:51] Han: I have a really bad feeling about this.
[Ewoks talking]
Han: What did he say?
C-3PO: I’m rather embarrassed, General Solo, but it appears you are to be the main course at a banquet in my honor.
[Ewok singing] Looka looka loolaaaa loolaloolaloo
Leia: 3PO, tell them, they must be set free.
Chewie: [Says something in Wookiee]
C-3PO: [Speaks in Ewok]
Charlie Jane: [00:14:21] It's just it's really… it’s got some issues.
Annalee: [00:14:23] It almost feels like the early 1930s King Kong.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:28] It really does. It feels like part of what happened there is that George Lucas was just seduced by his influences. And he was like, I just want to do all the movies that I've loved as a kid, a lot of which were very jingoistic. At this point, it feels like if you criticize Star Wars, you're almost criticizing America. Like it feels like Star Wars has become really politicized.
Annalee: [00:14:44] Yeah, totally. I think that now when we argue over Star Wars, it hits such a deep nerve politically because of the fact that so many people see it as this triumphant narrative about how great America is. And it really it triggers people politically as well as scratching their itch for a fun adventure story.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:04] Yeah, so hit me with another one. Give me another one.
Annalee: [00:15:08] Totally. Alright, so you can see a really similar form of historical amnesia happening in the steampunk genre. And remember, steampunk is sort of about reimagining the 19th century. But with more modern technologies. And often, especially in the past 10 or 15 years, this means retelling like really horrific stories of European imperialism in Africa or Asia or the Americas, as a grand adventure where nobody gets hurt and it's all just in good fun.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:40] The British Empire was just jolly and they had lovely outfits and they drank tea and ate crumpets and it was just—
Annalee: [00:15:46] And they went to exotic foreign lands and kind of hung out with people in those exotic places and ate weird food, but there's no kind of occupying them or taking over their government or stealing their resources or murdering them en mass or just straight up genociding them all.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:05] Putting all their culture into museums, and then you know.
Annalee: [00:16:07] Oh yeah, stealing their culture, but also turning their culture into pop culture for the consumption of Westerners.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:15] Woohoo!
[00:16:16] I feel like the last 10 years or so there's been this move to a really reclaimed steampunk among BIPOC authors like Nisi Shawl and a bunch of others. And we had Jayme Goh on the podcast about a year ago for our appropriation episode. And she talked a lot about steampunk and how she's part of a new movement that's trying to reshape the genre into something that's anti-colonialist.
Annalee: [00:16:37] Yeah, I really recommend that folks go back and listen to that episode, because Jayme’s dissertation is all about steampunk. And so she has a lot of really in depth and nuanced thinking about that.
[00:16:48] There was a really influential blog post about steampunk back in 2009, from person named Ay-leen the Peacemaker. And she identifies as Asian, and I want to just read what she wrote because it was really influential for a lot of people who were thinking about steampunk. She says, “The steampunk movement romanticizes a time period where imperialist and racist attitudes prevailed and many people were oppressed as a result of them. When Queen Victoria sat upon her throne, a lot of other Western powers were doing not nice things to people in Asia, in the Middle East, in Africa, and the western US. And now, over 100 years later, people want to live in that time period again, or at least use it as creative inspiration.”
[00:17:31] So she says that, and then she talks about, obviously, why that's a problem. And she ends the essay with this amazing call to arms to her fellow BIPOC writers and allies to explore things like the Boxer Rebellion or fighting the British Raj. And she says, I want to see techno Aztecs or steampunk in Liberia or Sitting Bull with an arm cannon.
[00:17:53] Jayme Goh took a ton of inspiration from this essay, but other people were thinking along the same lines.
[00:18:00] Balogun Ojetade is a game designer and an author who calls himself an afro-retroist. And in 2012, he did this great interview with Maurice Broaddus about the dawning of Black steampunk. And they talked a lot about Maurice Broaddus’s story, Pimp My Airship, which became really popular. Since then a lot of other African American writers have kind of taken up this idea. You mentioned Nisi Shawl. There's also K. Tempest Bradford, who we've had on the podcast and P. Djeli Clark, who we also had on the podcast, actually. But the point is that these are people who are trying to push back against historical amnesia by telling stories that really reflect the realities of life during imperialism.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:49] Yeah, and I really want to shout out Nisi Shawl’s novel, Everfair, which is just, it's such a beautiful work of alternate history, which, it’s a nicer version of what really happened. It's a kind of a more hopeful version. But by doing that, it kind of really throws into relief, how terrible and how abusive the reality of colonialism really was.
Annalee: [00:19:11] Yeah, and I think that, of course, steampunk is always alternate history.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:14] Yes.
Annalee: [00:19:14] And so, the question is, whose alternate history is it? And when you have European inflected steampunk, oftentimes, you see that kind of apologist view where it's like, oh, but the British were just dancing around having a nice time. And when you see the alternate history that is centering the experiences of colonized people, suddenly you start to get really great stories about amazing technologies coming out of Africa. Or, P. Djeli Clark writes about incredible technologies coming out of the Caribbean. And suddenly, that changes the whole geopolitics of the genre. But the key thing is, it doesn't take away from the fun.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:54] No, far from it.
Annalee: [00:19:55] And I think that there's a kind of idea that if we remove historical amnesia, that somehow our pop culture won't be as fun because we have to deal with weighty stuff like colonials, and like genocide and all that kind of thing. And it's like, you can still have an adventure where you acknowledge all of those difficult things. In fact, adventures work best when they're set in a difficult environment.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:19] And all of this stuff is kind of escapist, and kind of fun. And like you said, steampunk is always alternate history, it's always got an element of the counterfactual or whatever. And there is an element of a little bit of wish fulfillment in it. But why not have wish fulfillment for everybody. And now we're seeing new genres of kind of alternate history coming up. Ken Liu, has coined the term silkpunk, which Neon Yang and a bunch of other writers are starting to fit into.
Annalee: [00:20:44] Yes, I love silkpunk. And that's another example of centering a non-European civilization in history and telling cool fantasy stories about it. These are stories that are incredibly fun, swashbuckling tales. But they don't pretend that imperialism didn't happen. Or that if it did happen, that it wasn't a violent process that killed people and left their civilization struggling to survive. The point is, you can have an awesome fantasy that isn't historical amnesia.
[00:21:14] And I think another really great example of this is Lovecraft Country, which is a historical fantasy that might even educate viewers about the history of Jim Crow laws in the US. I mean, that scene where the main characters are being terrorized by this cop, who's trying to arrest them for driving through a sundown town after dark.
Lovecraft Country: [00:21:33] How far, Uncle George?
We got two and a half kilometers to the county line.
Can we make that?
Wait, wait, I'm sorry. It’s three. We got to pass the train tracks.
What time is it?
It’s, uh, it’s 7:05.
Can we make it in four minutes?
We have to.
He’s speeding up.
What's he doing?
I don't know.
There’s the tracks.
Atticus, watch your speed.
How much time left?
30 seconds.
Oh!
Hell. Hell.
Annalee: [00:22:17] That's a pure thrill ride scene. It's incredibly scary, like white-knuckle adventure. But at the same time, it depends entirely on our understanding that these characters, because they're Black, are in this incredibly precarious position. Because this cop has the power to arrest them if they haven't crossed the county line by sundown.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:39] Man, that's such an amazing scene. And it's so harrowing, and it's just so intense.
Annalee: [00:22:44] Yeah. And it's great historical fantasy that doesn't forget the realities of how history has been cruel to African Americans and how that's part of the actual magic of the story itself.
[00:22:59] All right. So after the break, we're going to talk to Ayanna Thompson about her book, Blackface.
[00:23:06] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:09] Hey, everybody, doesn't it suck that many stories about queer and trans folks aren't told to by or for queer and trans people?
Annalee: [00:23:17] Yeah, it pretty much does suck. And that's why we want to tell you about a podcast called Queersplaining. Each week host Callie Wright shares a story that adds to the tapestry of queer and trans life.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:29] Sometimes they tell a story about their own life, such as taking meds for mental health for the first time or finding queer vocabulary for the Klingon language.
Annalee: [00:23:37] Oh my god, I love, that queer Klingons are us. Callie also shares other people's stories about things like using a D&D game to get ready for life after incarceration and about transitioning during a pandemic.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:50] If you want to hear queer stories being told by and for queer people, we think you'll love Queersplaining. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.
Annalee: [00:24:03] Welcome, Ayanna. Thanks so much for joining us.
Ayanna: [00:24:06] Thanks for having me. You guys are amazing.
Annalee: [00:24:09] Thank you so much.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:10] Thank you.
Ayanna: [00:24:10] Since I have nothing to say about science fiction. I'm like, Okay.
Annalee: [00:24:15] Well, don't worry, because in this episode, we're talking about historical amnesia and, Blackface, your new book, which is so fantastic, deals with this incredible forgetting that we've had really in Western culture about blackface and what it means. And I wondered if you could start by telling us about the history of blackface. In your book, you kind of take it all the way back to the Renaissance era. So, could you just kind of give us a little taste of that long 500-year history?
Ayanna: [00:24:47] Yeah, I'll try and give you the potted version. But basically, since at least the medieval period, but there might be earlier examples from ancient Greece and Rome, that there were characters who were nonwhite, and were played by white actors in racial prosthetics. And the types of prosthetics ranged from fake wigs, noses, bitumen, which is a type of oil that could darken one’s skin. And we know in the medieval period, for example, that there were religious plays, in which the fallen angels were depicted as becoming Black once they fell.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:30] Oh, wow.
Ayanna: [00:25:31] And then once we jump slightly ahead into the Renaissance, we have lots of plays depicting characters who are Moorish or African or just something other than white, and again, they were played by white men in racial prosthetics. So, while a lot of scholars who deal with American blackface tend to start in the 19th century, it is hundreds of years older than that.
Annalee: [00:25:59] Yeah, it's so interesting, because one of the things that's so sticky about this issue that you deal with in your book is that, it's not so much that we forget that there's this history of blackface, but it's a specific part of that history. Like, as you point out, there's plenty of white people who are still doing blackface on TV now.
Ayanna: [00:26:20] Yes.
Annalee: [00:26:20] So no one's forgotten it, but we have forgotten something about it. So, what is it that we're forgetting that's making it possible for white people to continue thinking that blackface is okay.
Ayanna: [00:26:31] Well, I think one of my central arguments is that playing Black characters seems to be a white property, right? Because if we think from Shakespeare's time on, all of these characters of color, including Othello and the Prince of Morocco in Merchant of Venice, these were played by white men, sometimes for comic effects, sometimes for a full on tragedy. But that's a white property.
[00:27:01] If you jump ahead to the first performances that were done in the US in the late 18th century. Once again, we get lots of characters of color performed by white people. So there's the sense that people of color can't represent themselves and that this is something that gets to be a white property. And I think that's what's forgotten. That's where the historical amnesia comes in. Because that's a really hard history to face head on.
Annalee: [00:27:32] Yeah, it's really true. And one of the things you talk about in your book is that it's not a two-way street. It's not like there were people of color who put on white face and got away with it, right?
Ayanna: [00:27:42] There's actually a great book by Marvin McCallister about the history of whiteface. But there's not a lot of examples. I mean, we have there's like, scattered throughout history, you'll get one or two every century, but it's also just not a regular thing. And I think you know, White Chicks, for example, was weird.
Annalee: [00:28:02] We're kind of lowkey obsessed with that movie, so.
Ayanna: [00:28:03] Me, too. Me, too.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:08] Oh my God. I could talk about that movie for hours. I feel like it’s a really important, like, disturbing, but really important moment in pop culture.
Ayanna: [00:28:16] Buffy the white girl Slayer?
Charlie Jane: [00:28:18] Oh my God, yeah, it’s…
Ayanna: [00:28:20] I can quote that film.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:22] Oh, my God.
Ayanna: [00:28:23] But even though, right, I think that's an incredibly smart film about why two Black men in white face as white women is so absurdly funny, right? Because that kind of racial passing doesn't happen, right? And that's part of baked into the humor of that movie. So that's just not… Black people and other people of color don't have a long history of playing white characters. And so, it is never reciprocal, between instances of blackface and instances of whiteface.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:58] So right now we're in the middle of this very unreal debate around critical race theory, in which a lot of people are misrepresenting what critical race theory is and how its taught. And the kind of subtext to that or not even the subtext, the text of that seems to be that we don't want to confront, our past abuses and our past racism and exploitation of African American people specifically. How does like forgetting the history of blackface fit into that larger debate over what we're allowed to remember about our racial past.
Ayanna: [00:29:28] Structural racism?
Charlie Jane: [00:29:31] Right. Yeah, that was the phrase I was reaching for, thank you.
Ayanna: [00:29:35] I was like, it does exist, whether or not you want to acknowledge it. Right. Well, what's interesting for me in the current moment, is that we have had these exact debates in the 1980s. Like, talk about historical amnesia. That's only 40 years ago. We’ve already been at this exact place where the conservatives in the ‘80s were saying what if you just ignore It then there's no racism. And if you talk about it that makes you racist. And I think I've heard similar logic about critical race studies. Like if you talk about it, that means you're disadvantaging white people somehow.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:15] Yeah, for sure. And it's divisive. It's encouraging divisiveness.
Ayanna: [00:30:20] Yeah. And I, so I think blackface in miniature represents the way that our society has such a hard time doing truth and reconciliation around race and structural racism. So, I mean, I feel like you can dive into the history of blackface, how it happens, when it happens, why it keeps happening, why people keep saying it's offensive. Everyone's like, oh, right. It's offensive. We're done with that. And then it happens again, and again, and again. I think that exactly kind of shows in miniature the way that American society is not equipped yet to address structural racism and the history of the transatlantic slave trade.
Annalee: [00:31:01] Yeah, one of the things that you talk about a lot in your book is this idea of white innocence, which I think is a direct result of historical amnesia. And I'm wondering, how do you think we get out of this feedback loop of like, okay, we're forgetting and now we're innocent. And now we're forgetting. And it's just this constant, vicious cycle.
Ayanna: [00:31:24] You know, I think Ibram Kendi did a great job in that book, How to be an Anti-Racist, to say, it's not actually about you an individual. It's about the way you work in this structure. But I don't think that message came across. I think that's the issue at hand is that if you can't address the structure at all, ever. If people claim on the on the conservative end, that addressing the structure of our American society is a racist endeavor, I don't know how we get out of it. Then we're just constantly in that feedback loop.
[00:32:00] But I want to say it's actually not about individuals. Like you can be innocent in your heart and the structure’s still bad.
Annalee: [00:32:08] Although, I feel like there's a lot of false innocence that goes into white innocence. There might be people who are like innocent in their heart because they mean well, but then there's also kind of the innocence that’s ignorance, right?
Ayanna: [00:32:20] It's governor Ralph Northam of Virginia.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:22] Right.
Annalee: [00:32:22] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:23] Talk about amnesia, nobody talks about that anymore.
Ayanna: [00:32:26] Well, because the democrats don't want to, but right, I think this is where you have to say, in his acknowledgement of performing in blackface and the ‘80s said, “Well, I did it because I loved Michael Jackson. And I had practiced the moonwalk and I was really good at it. And I had one glove. And then I realized that putting on too much shoe polish was impossible to get off. So I just put on a little bit of shoe polish.” Like he went through all of this. And, the subtext was, and it's, I'm telling you all of this detail, because I am innocent in my heart. And I didn't know how harmful this was. But that is just insane. How did you not know in the 1980s? It wasn't the 1580s that this was offensive. I mean, again, we're not talking ancient history here.
Annalee: [00:33:15] Yeah, I think it's even helpful just to teach history, right, just to say, so you've heard of Jim Crow? Well, you know, that name comes from a minstrel show. Right? Like, it’s not…
Ayanna: [00:33:25] Yes, yes.
Annalee: [00:33:26] There’s a direct connection between this horrific set of laws and the practice of blackface. It’s not…
Ayanna: [00:33:33] Yep, that and T.D. Rice invented that name, because he says that he was watching an enslaved man in a barn. And the enslaved man's enslaver was named Crow. And so all of the enslaved had the last name Crow. And he called this older man, Daddy Crow. And then then it morphed into Jim Crow. So that's precisely—I mean, we're talking the literal birth of modern day, blackface in the US is tied to the phrase Jim Crow.
Annalee: [00:34:10] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:12] So how do we start to educate people better and spread more understanding of the real history of some of these things that aren't just a white person 20 years ago, decided to put some shoe polish on and that was a brand-new thing that they invented that was… And they were just, they were just messing around.
Annalee: [00:34:29] Innocently messing around.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:29] How do you how do we, how do we connect people to the larger history and how do we make people understand that there are deep roots to some of these things?
Ayanna: [00:34:37] Well I mean, a first step is to think about how our American history is taught in our secondary schools. I mean, I think there's been changes since the ‘80s. That, at least slavery and the transatlantic slave trade is mentioned, but I don't think the ties between centuries have been thoroughly explored in that kind of curricula.
[00:35:07] I also think… I mean, the point of me writing Blackface was that it's supposed to be a little short book that you can give to people, if there's an instance of blackface in your school or your community, so that you're not responsible for having to take on the labor of teaching history in a two-minute conversation to your interlocutor, right? So that you have this as a resource for people that they can give to their community.
[00:35:36] I mean, I also think that there's lots of resources online. It's just whether or not we're ready to avail ourselves of the fullness of our history. I'm very proud to be an American. I love being an American. I love the privileges that I have gotten from being luckily born in this country. But that doesn't mean that I can't be critical of the way our country is structured. I think being proud means that you should be critical as well.
Annalee: [00:36:08] Yeah, just to finish up, I wanted to know if there are any ways of using storytelling to kind of help people understand this history. I know there's been recently a move to, on television, to tell historical stories where we see BIPOC in history, in Europe, instead of just having the all-white London of 1600. Is there anything like that that you're excited about, any historical stories that you feel like are finally starting to acknowledge that history?
Ayanna: [00:36:36] Yeah, I think there is a lot going on. And I'm particularly interested in shows like Lovecraft Country, which is really trying to get you to some of this past history, but through kind of a science fiction lens. I think storytelling and television is probably the most powerful tool we have to grab young people, for them to think about what our history is. That said, there's a lot of kind of colorblind casting still on television that I think does not do us any good. And frequently kind of works to erase some of the structural problems that we still have. So, I'm definitely on the record saying that I'm against colorblind casting, and I'm for intentional or conscious casting.
Annalee: [00:37:26] So, are you subtweeting Bridgerton right now?
Ayanna: [00:37:29] I am.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:33] Oh, we were actually talking about Bridgerton the other day and like wondering, like…
Annalee: [00:37:35] Yeah, how… Because it’s sort of like Hamilton and Bridgerton and a lot of these other things with “ton” at the end, I guess, where you're seeing this kind of, yeah, colorblind casting. And I've heard it called brown-washing.
Ayanna: [00:37:47] Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and I, of course, I don't want to hate on any BIPOC artists who are who are finally getting a seat at the table to create some art. I just would love it to be more intentional.
Annalee: [00:38:01] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:02] And more historically, more rooted in real history, basically.
Ayanna: [00:38:05] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:38:06] Yeah.
Ayanna: [00:38:06] There's so many stories out there. So, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:08] There are.
Annalee: [00:38:09] Well, Ayanna, thank you so much for joining us. Is there anywhere online that people can find more of your work?
Ayanna: [00:38:14] Oh, absolutely. You can find links to talks and my publications on AyannaThompson.com.
Annalee: [00:38:23] Awesome.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:23] Awesome.
Annalee: [00:38:23] Thanks so much.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:25] Thank you. Have a great day. Take care.
Ayanna: [00:38:26] You too, bye.
[00:38:28] Outro music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.
Annalee: [00:38:32] You've been listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, and you can find us on Twitter at @OOACpod. You can find us on Patreon and please do support us on Patreon at Our Opinions Are Correct on Patreon. You can get some cool audio extras and essays and our thoughts about stuff. And we have an amazing producer who makes everything happen. Her name is Veronica Simonetti, and we're recording here at Women's Audio Mission. Our music comes from the amazing Chris Palmer.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:07] Superstar.
Annalee: [00:39:07] Superstar. And we will talk to you in two weeks. Bye.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:12] Bye!