Many excellent perspectives<\/a> have emerged among the media pandemonium following Miley Cyrus\u2019 performance at the VMAs this week. Before I get to the main point of this blog, I just want to say Robin Thicke is gross. In the world I want to live in, an artist 16 years Cyrus\u2019 senior would have wanted to mentor her, not just attend rehearsals where she grinds on him (an apparent fetishizer of black women) and a foam finger in preparation for an international stage. I also find the \u201cIs Miley racist or not?\u201d debate ridiculous. Of course she is. Cyrus is descended from a long line of European American celebrities from a range of artistic disciplines\u2014Gwen Stefani, Elvis, Alan Ginsberg and other beat poets, Madonna, The Eagles, The Beatles, to name a few\u2014whose careers are built on the backs of people of color and the third world and the use of black women as sexual and racial props.<\/p>\n

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Going beyond the holding of one young racist female (albeit filthy rich, privileged, and powerful) accountable, and beyond the notion that racism is simply individual acts of stupidity, poor taste, appropriation, or hate, I deeply appreciated the commentary<\/a> coming from women, particularly women of color. Some bloggers have commented on the precedent to Cyrus\u2019 literal use of leopard-print dressed black women\u2014the \u201chomegirls with the big butts\u201d\u2014of Saartjie Baartman<\/a>, a.k.a Sarah Baartman, a.k.a. Hottentot Venus (who lived from \u00a0around 1790 to 1815).<\/p>\n

Ms. Baartman was enslaved by a Dutch farmer after she was orphaned, and later sold to British enslavers, after which time she was paraded as a spectacle for the White European world by \u201ckeepers\u201d including an animal trainer, and upon her death her genitalia and brain were exhibited at Paris\u2019 Musee de l\u2019Homme<\/em> until as recently as 1974. Whether or not she was a \u201cwilling\u201d participant in her own exhibition is contested, and given the context of a global capitalist trade in the bodies of African people from which profiteers from institutions like Wachovia, JP Morgan Chase, and Barclays Bank (which sponsors the annual NYC AIDS walk, by the way) continue to make bank, the concept of consent is complex, to say the least. It\u2019s painful to read about Ms. Baartman\u2019s life and the utter horror of\u00a0what is deemed harmless entertainment in a White supremacist patriarchy.<\/p>\n

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Cyrus\u2019 show also followed the centuries-old White tradition of using imagined symbols of the \u201cexotic\u201d or \u201cOriental” to enhance White and European sexuality. One of my students noted the disconnect between the early 1900s White American obsession with Japanese culture\u2014But White people had to have liked the Japanese if they were putting on kimonos and decorating their houses with fans, right?<\/em>\u2014and the simultaneous dehumanization of actual Asian people through Alien Land Laws, dual wage systems, lynchings, arson and exclusion policies. A good analogy for this kind of appropriation might be:\u00a0Hi, I like your watch, and I think it looks better on me, so I\u2019m gonna steal it from you and rock it, and I\u2019m going to burn your house down in the meantime.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n

Miley Cyrus\u2019 appropriation of twerking and other emblems of \u201cratchet culture\u201d (e.g. NYC public school in the nineties…good times) was made possible by the historical and social context from which it arises. It\u2019s completely in line with not only recent White pop culture<\/a> but also the spectacalizing of non-white women\u2019s bodies as early as Ms. Baartman and that of Ah Fong Moy, a young Chinese woman who performed \u201cChineseness\u201d and was exhibited along with \u201cOriental\u201d furniture just a few decades later in the U.S. as a teenager.<\/p>\n

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Today, we have the appropriation-cum-bastardization of kama sutra, ginseng, \u201cgeisha\u201d lingerie, grills, colloquialisms, moccasins, and so much. We have Sports Illustrated photo shoots<\/a>\u00a0of exemplars of \u201cwestern\u201d beauty with backdrops of parts of Asia that look very much like places where, during the Vietnam War,\u00a0the U.S. buried thousands of mines \u00a0that blow up little kids to this day. We have Katy Perry rocking grills while over a million black men are locked up. We have White suburban youth wearing scanty Pocahontas costumes while over 30 percent of Native women are raped in their lifetime. We have foodies and hip fusion eateries proliferating right next door to food deserts in the U.S., while Montsanto<\/a> appropriates seeds in Asia and devastates the ecosystems, economies, and lives of millions in Asia. We have the myth of Western democracy (read: capitalism) as a catalyst for gender equality in the third world while the meme \u201clittle brown fucking machines\u201d, coined by U.S. military personnel in southeast Asia, continues to generate over 111,000 Google search hits for the use and pleasure of the \u201cWestern\u201d male to \u201c[d]iscover what only Asian girls can do with their pussy: Extracting flowers, needles, razor blades, bananas…writing a letter, playing trumpet\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

I just want to say no. I really, really just want to say no.<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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