“An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he's working on these days. 'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir
Fascinating. Like falling into Don Draper's time warp (and back to the year of my own nativity, btw). Apparently every social class back then placed great stock in formal wear.
The narration doesn't seem to betray approval or disapproval, just "the facts" of democracy in 50s America. Who produced it? Do you know if they had an agenda?
Yes, Don Draper AKA Richard Whitman found an interesting way of changing social class (such as it was).
This genre is a social guidance film and it was produced by McGraw-Hill who produced other films of a similar nature.
According to Flagg, "Among the most pervasive and pernicious forms of 1950s cultural indoctrination was the mental hygiene film, extolling proper behavior to captive audiences of schoolchildren. Blatantly and crudely .designed, the genre's products instilled proper dating practices and showed the consequences of failing to avoid drugs and of car wrecks. No social problem was too big for them, not even juvenile delinquency and the atom bomb. Mostly, as Smith shows, they aimed to maintain conformity. Evolved from World War II training films, they flourished from 1945 to the early 1960s, when the growing sophistication of their target audience rendered them ineffective. Smith synopsizes well more than a hundred leading examples, from Act Your Age (1949), which offered tips on emotional development, to the seminal Youth in Crisis (1944), which exposed "the grim story of what the war is doing to America's youth!" Most mental hygiene films have vanished, discarded when their message grew dated, but they live again through Smith's diligent research and witty write-ups, more fun to read than watching them ever was."
Flagg, Gordon. "Mental Hygiene: Better Living through Classroom Films, 1945-1970." Booklist, 1 Nov. 1999, p. 487. Gale Academic Onefile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A57893759/AONE?u=tel_middleten&sid=AONE&xid=a9d97487. Accessed 24 Sept. 2019.
What Does It Mean to ‘Look Like Me’? [Of particular interest to our summer MALA Identity classmates... What's up with Sammy Sosa?!]
Minorities can find it gratifying to see people who resemble them onscreen. But resemblance is a tricky thing. It’s a formula that we turn to again and again to affirm the value of inclusion, especially in the realm of popular culture: the importance of people who “look like me.”
The actor Eva Longoria, who appears in the film “Dora and the Lost City of Gold,” in which the principals are played by Latinx actors, has said she had to take the part because of what the film represented “for my community and for people who look like me.” The playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, explaining what drove him to create the new television drama series “David Makes Man,” which follows the life of a black boy in a public-housing project, observed: “John Hughes made several movies that depicted the rich interior lives of young white American men and women. I just want the same for people who look like me.” The comedian Ali Wong inspired the writer Nicole Clark to confess that she “didn’t think she liked stand-up until a few years ago, when I realized the problem was the lack of comedians who look like me and tell jokes that I ‘get.’”
The “look like me” formula appeals because it feels so simple and literal. We can think of a black or Asian toddler who gets to play with dolls that share her racial characteristics, in an era when Barbie, blessedly, is no longer exclusively white. The emotions it speaks to are real, and urgent. And yet the celebratory formula is trailed by jangling paradoxes, like tin cans tied to a newlywed’s car.
For one thing, nobody means it literally. Asians don’t imagine that all Asians look alike; blacks don’t think all blacks look alike. Among Latinx celebrities, Eva Mendes doesn’t look like Cameron Diaz; Sammy Sosa doesn’t look like … Sammy Sosa... (continues) - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/21/opinion/sunday/minorities-representation-culture.html?searchResultPosition=1)
I must admit the more I learn about Appiah, the more fascinating his story becomes. He definitely has a unique perspective.
I think that "looking like me" is our most obvious way of having a shared experience. Sometimes that can be good because public figures are often exemplars of a larger community. I think it can be psychologically damaging to see a single race, gender, or other group be a universal representative. For example, I think children need some role models that look like them. However, that comfort of sameness often gets us into big trouble. The world is still trying to correct the devastating effects segregation and apartheid that were based on the notion that a group of similar looking people should exist independently of people that do not. Social classes have often been predicated on the notion of sameness. For example, the WASPs or White Anglo-Saxon Protestants still maintain their exclusivity based partially on the idea that members of that group look like themselves.
In the case of Sammy Sosa, I can only speculate as to why he has chosen to lighten his skin artificially. Does he feel pressure to blend into a different social class by looking like them? Does he feel pressure to achieve a lighter skin tone because of a lifetime of being excluded from white privilege? What ever his reason, I hope that it is coming from a place of positivity rather than him feeling the need to ‘fix’ something about himself.
Fascinating. Like falling into Don Draper's time warp (and back to the year of my own nativity, btw). Apparently every social class back then placed great stock in formal wear.
ReplyDeleteThe narration doesn't seem to betray approval or disapproval, just "the facts" of democracy in 50s America. Who produced it? Do you know if they had an agenda?
Yes, Don Draper AKA Richard Whitman found an interesting way of changing social class (such as it was).
DeleteThis genre is a social guidance film and it was produced by McGraw-Hill who produced other films of a similar nature.
According to Flagg, "Among the most pervasive and pernicious forms of 1950s cultural indoctrination was the mental hygiene film, extolling proper behavior to captive audiences of schoolchildren. Blatantly and crudely .designed, the genre's products instilled proper dating practices and showed the consequences of failing to avoid drugs and of car wrecks. No social problem was too big for them, not even juvenile delinquency and the atom bomb. Mostly, as Smith shows, they aimed to maintain conformity. Evolved from World War II training films, they flourished from 1945 to the early 1960s, when the growing sophistication of their target audience rendered them ineffective. Smith synopsizes well more than a hundred leading examples, from Act Your Age (1949), which offered tips on emotional development, to the seminal Youth in Crisis (1944), which exposed "the grim story of what the war is doing to America's youth!" Most mental hygiene films have vanished, discarded when their message grew dated, but they live again through Smith's diligent research and witty write-ups, more fun to read than watching them ever was."
Flagg, Gordon. "Mental Hygiene: Better Living through Classroom Films, 1945-1970." Booklist, 1 Nov. 1999, p. 487. Gale Academic Onefile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A57893759/AONE?u=tel_middleten&sid=AONE&xid=a9d97487. Accessed 24 Sept. 2019.
Did you see Appiah's op-ed yesterday?
ReplyDeleteWhat Does It Mean to ‘Look Like Me’?
[Of particular interest to our summer MALA Identity classmates... What's up with Sammy Sosa?!]
Minorities can find it gratifying to see people who resemble them onscreen. But resemblance is a tricky thing.
It’s a formula that we turn to again and again to affirm the value of inclusion, especially in the realm of popular culture: the importance of people who “look like me.”
The actor Eva Longoria, who appears in the film “Dora and the Lost City of Gold,” in which the principals are played by Latinx actors, has said she had to take the part because of what the film represented “for my community and for people who look like me.” The playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, explaining what drove him to create the new television drama series “David Makes Man,” which follows the life of a black boy in a public-housing project, observed: “John Hughes made several movies that depicted the rich interior lives of young white American men and women. I just want the same for people who look like me.” The comedian Ali Wong inspired the writer Nicole Clark to confess that she “didn’t think she liked stand-up until a few years ago, when I realized the problem was the lack of comedians who look like me and tell jokes that I ‘get.’”
The “look like me” formula appeals because it feels so simple and literal. We can think of a black or Asian toddler who gets to play with dolls that share her racial characteristics, in an era when Barbie, blessedly, is no longer exclusively white. The emotions it speaks to are real, and urgent. And yet the celebratory formula is trailed by jangling paradoxes, like tin cans tied to a newlywed’s car.
For one thing, nobody means it literally. Asians don’t imagine that all Asians look alike; blacks don’t think all blacks look alike. Among Latinx celebrities, Eva Mendes doesn’t look like Cameron Diaz; Sammy Sosa doesn’t look like … Sammy Sosa... (continues) - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/21/opinion/sunday/minorities-representation-culture.html?searchResultPosition=1)
I must admit the more I learn about Appiah, the more fascinating his story becomes. He definitely has a unique perspective.
DeleteI think that "looking like me" is our most obvious way of having a shared experience. Sometimes that can be good because public figures are often exemplars of a larger community. I think it can be psychologically damaging to see a single race, gender, or other group be a universal representative. For example, I think children need some role models that look like them. However, that comfort of sameness often gets us into big trouble. The world is still trying to correct the devastating effects segregation and apartheid that were based on the notion that a group of similar looking people should exist independently of people that do not. Social classes have often been predicated on the notion of sameness. For example, the WASPs or White Anglo-Saxon Protestants still maintain their exclusivity based partially on the idea that members of that group look like themselves.
In the case of Sammy Sosa, I can only speculate as to why he has chosen to lighten his skin artificially. Does he feel pressure to blend into a different social class by looking like them? Does he feel pressure to achieve a lighter skin tone because of a lifetime of being excluded from white privilege? What ever his reason, I hope that it is coming from a place of positivity rather than him feeling the need to ‘fix’ something about himself.
You may want to check out Alain de Botton's book Status Anxiety*...
ReplyDelete& the School of Life's companion video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iipn6yM43sM
* https://books.google.com/books?id=83ZCBa9hXLQC&lpg=PP1&dq=status%20anxiety&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=status%20anxiety&f=false
And:
"On Consumption & Status Anxiety" - https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/200mph-ferrari-california-launched-buyers-not-greedy-show-offs-just-vulnerable-fragile-big-infants-in-need-of-affection/