Great conversation today with Eric and Doug about the recent Times article Pushing Their Luck, Sitcoms Are Playing With Race Cards, which seems to be a disturbingly uncomplicated reading of comedy. Alessandra Stanley does a nice job of noting a trend: "Jokes about race and racial tensions are suddenly all over television, or more precisely, all over comedies that pride themselves on tweaking convention and political correctness." But her observation, I think, misdiagnoses the object of criticism. It's not "political correctness" that 30 Rock, for instance, criticizes. (We should recall, of course, that political correctness is a fictional creation of conservatives--a kind of caricature of liberal attention to the marginalized which often functions as a straw person in conservative arguments. That some liberals have taken up the epithet of political correctness and worn it as a badge is lamentable, a way of allowing the opposition to define your own position.) If anything, shows like Arrested Development and 30 Rock analyze the lame assumption that political correctness or tolerance is an effectual form of political action.
For instance, there was last season's hilarious comment by Pete: "Look, we can all agree that Liz is—generally pretty racist." It occurs in the Jack-tor episode where Liz thinks Tracy is illiterate because he won’t read the cue cards. Pete's comment is both not true and true (hence, funny and quite serious at the same time). That is, in her very effort to be nonracist she was incredibly racist. Like much of liberalism. (Earlier in the episode, Liz remarks, "Tracy took advantage of my white guilt, which is supposed to be used only for good--like over-tipping and supporting Barack Obama.") And that's the genius of it.
But last week's episode was especially smart on race. After “My motorcycle hit a police horse,” Tracy does community service to the tune of coaching the “Knuckle Beach” (“the worst neighborhood in New York,” Tracy says, “They are poor as hell”) little league baseball team. When he introduces the team to Jack, Jack says baseball taught him how to dream. So he puts the question to the team:
Jack: …What are your dreams?
Boy 1: When I grow up, I’m gonna do vending machine maintenance.
Boy 2: I’m gonna get shot by a cop and sue the city.
Boy 3: I’m gonna be a talkative doorman, with a drinking problem.
Tracy: That’s right. You shoot for the stars.
Jack: No, no, no, no, no. Those are not the dreams of winners.
Tracy: These aren’t winners. They’re 0-17. Damn, we supposed to be at the game right now. 0-18! That one’s on Coach Tracy.
What's genius about Tracy's reaction to Jack isn't just his pun on what it means to be a winner. Rather, it's an observation about the identity in fact of categories like poor and nonwhite. These kids don’t have big dreams, and they don’t really have a reason to: the first boy, surveying Jack’s office (another kid later refers to Jack as “that king we met”), happily says, “Some day, I’ll have an office like this. To clean.”
Turns out this would have been a useful moment to have available in class a couple of weeks ago. My students were reading Michael Eric Dyson’s chapter from Come Hell or High Water, “Does George W. Bush Care About Black People?” Dyson parses the question (actually, of course, Kanye West’s brave accusation) by distinguishing the president’s persona (private v. public), his identity or role (individual v. institutional and social), and what we mean by care (personal v. moral v. political). If we look at Bush’s public persona, his institutional and social identity and his care as demonstrated politically not personally, it seems quite clear that George Bush didn’t care, not enough to do anything about quite obvious problems for poor black people both in New Orleans after Katrina and throughout the country long before.
That Dyson effectively conflates the terms poor and black (even associatively—any time he uses the former the latter isn’t far away) is a potential problem with his argument, but it’s one he anticipates and partially solves by differentiating between intention and effect. Of course, many of us are familiar with a move such as this, but my students weren’t. And they had a hard time seeing that even if Bush personally cares for black people and even if he has good intentions toward black people as a group, since the effects of his policies have disproportionately disadvantaged black people, there’s a very important sense in which Kanye was right.
Of course, the problem of black poverty and the effects of Republican policy starts with a historical and structural alignment of on the one hand blackness and on the other privation, dispossession, disenfranchisement, and narrowness of opportunities (conditions Dyson analyzes somewhat differently as “condensed poverty”). So what it would mean to actually care about black people, in effect not just intention, is doing something to disrupt that historical, structural alignment. And it’s not just Republicans or conservatives who don’t care enough on this level…
But back to 30 Rock: calling attention to this historical, structural alignment is what’s so smart about Tracy Jordan’s humor. In one sense, Tracy misunderstands what Jack means by “loser,” but insofar as things like race and poverty and opportunity overlap, Tracy’s quite right to generalize Jack’s specific comment about dreams of losers.
(Incidentally, one could also discuss the quite funny parody of the US Iraqi invasion that is Jack’s paternalist adoption of the Knuckle Beach baseball team. Jack says, “I don’t have to understand their world to help them. It’s like this great country of ours. We can go into any nation, impose our values, and make things better. It’s what Bush is doing all over the globe…. So I suppose the next step would be to bring our superior resources to bear.” Jack rebuilds the Knuckle Beach field, enabling the players to pull down the statue of Jefferson Davis [the field is located in Jefferson Davis Park], and there’s even a “surge” when the mission looks hopeless. Not unlike Arrested Development’s commentary on George W. Bush throughout the series.)
