Author: shamsny@bgsu.edu

Warning: Please be warned that in the following blog post I describe in detail the early twentieth century lynching of Jessie Washington. Spike Lee's 2018 film BlacKkKlansman tells the true story of black Colorado Springs police officer Ron Stallworth's operation to infiltrate and expose a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). To fool them over the phone into believing he's white he performs their version of racism and gains the trust of Klan leader David Duke. For in-person meetings Stallworth enlists the help of Jewish officer Flip Zimmerman to be his white public face, a job which places him in harm's way when Klan members suspect his Jewish heritage. Vox's Alyssa Wilkinson closes her negative review of the film with a searing indictment of its racial politics. Rather than provoke white audiences' discomfort and critique their complacent brand of liberal color-consciousness, Wilkinson argues the film is "just so obvious that it leaves room for a ponderously predictable net effect. BlacKkKlansman reinforces what we’re already angry about. And it makes us feel glad that we, at least, see through the pathetic lies." Noel Ransome of Vice similarly excoriates the film for letting "white audiences in on a joke, while failing to demand reflections on that joke." Leaving the theater disappointed, Ransome heard "white guys laughing as we huddled through those double doors, with me, the black dude, feeling like I whiffed some bullshit." It must be frustrating to enter a theater, excited to bear witness to a blistering take down of the KKK--America's premier racist invention--only to interpret their real life cinematic counterparts as little more than comic foils to heroic police officers. I can see how Lee's film may seem problematic on the surface. It appears to hoist a version of respectability politics on its black audience members whenever a good cop enters the frame to counteract the overtly racist bad ones. In his three-page critique of BlacKkKlansman, Sorry To Bother You director Boots Riley famously argued that, in contrast to Lee's earlier work, the film has a deeply problematic pro-law enforcement bent, even inventing Jewish officer Zimmerman to manipulatively play off of the audience's sympathies. He additionally accuses Lee of revising history to suit a white supremacist agenda, pointing out that the real-life version of the film's police officer protagonist, Ron Stallworth, infiltrated and sought to destabilize black radical organizations that fought to undermine racist hate groups like the KKK. The critics above are also troubled by the film's post-production-added coda featuring a montage of carnage from the Charlottesville, Virginia protests stoked by non-KKK-affiliated racist agitator Richard Spencer when he sought to obtain permits to hold his Unite the Right rally on the University of Virginia campus. The nation stood bewildered later that day when president Donald Trump made his bizarre concession that protesters on both sides--anti-racist and racist alike--are equally to blame, despite white supremacist James Fields having rammed his car into a cluster of protesters and claimed the life of Heather Heyer. Given who the…

Last summer I led a six-week online course on Identity in Video Games and Online Gaming Communities. After I had my students play and discuss a game about two teenage girls falling in love and running away together, I observed some objections that deserve further reflection. For the first two weeks of the course we confronted the following fundamental but complicated questions: "what is a game?" and "what is the relationship between the game developer/author and the game player?" To guide my students' thinking I had them play two of game designer Davey Wreden's narrative experiments (or are they games?)--The Stanley Parable and The Beginner's Guide. In The Stanley Parable players embody the role of the titular character, a disaffected worker who experiences an existential crisis at his banal office job where he perfunctorily presses whatever buttons his 1990s-era office monitor tells him to. As players roam a depressingly familiar office building haunted by empty cubicles and the faint buzz of electricity in the walls, a comic narrator describes or anticipates Stanley's every decision. Occasionally the narrator will try to coax Stanley in one direction, but the player can guide him in the opposite while the narrator adapts to the unexpected (and totally programmed) detour. The object of the game, which takes up to two hours to complete, is to find as many of the seventeen endings--some very well-hidden--as the player can. Endings range from bleak and depressing to humorous and uplifting, yet because the sole object is to capture all the narrative threads the game resists giving the player any sense of closure. Instead, it acts both as a meditation on the existential implications of a player perfunctorily inputting commands so the game responds in kind (who is in control?), and a subversive commentary on all of what we've come to expect at the end of a story (resolution, contentment, a neat package). The second week students played Wreden's more thematically challenging follow up, The Beginner's Guide, which is a narrative experiment about the relationship between the game developer (or artist) and the player (or the person who consumes the art). Here, Wreden himself acts as both museum guide and unreliable narrator while the player, a nameless spectator, navigates a series of micro-games or interactive art pieces crafted by a man named Coda, an ostensibly troubled aspiring game designer who Wreden met at a game developer's conference in California. Wreden orders the games chronologically--progressing from amateurish experiments to depressive false starts--to create a narrative thread of his own design about an ambitious artist descending into madness. One soon gets the impression that Wreden has developed an unhealthy obsession with Coda's art. He maps his own desires onto each game in order to frame Coda as his romanticized ideal of a troubled and struggling artist. It backfires. At the end of The Beginner's Guide, Wreden subjects the player to "The Tower," a severe and imperially oppressive game world of low-polygon, boxy, and gray structures. Here, players find themselves trapped by prohibitive game mechanics that stop their progress at every turn--an invisible maze that…

I begin my Introduction to Ethnic Studies class with the following simple questions: "What is race?" and "what is racism?" Students spend five minutes composing their definitions, during which I enjoy the awkward silence in the room that's punctuated by the sounds of pencils or pens scratching binder paper. I can see some students squinting their eyes (which I fear signals resentment that this be their first challenge), heads turned toward the desk, one or both palms pressed against their wrinkled foreheads. As with previous semesters, most of my white students had never asked themselves these questions, and I can tell this is so by their body language and the audible silence that settles over the cramped classroom. Those silences speak volumes. There is apprehension in those silences. There is uncertainty in those silences. And why shouldn't there be? Race is a moving goalpost. Its definition has never remained static because it's a structure built on shaky foundations, and it can only remain stable if society reinforces it. Some students don't always accept this logic. Most eventually admit that race is biologically fictional and culturally real, but a small fraction of them argue that it's white people, not people of color, who are unfairly maligned as racist actors, and as a result are the true victims of racism. The objections aren't always so explicit, however. Occasionally they come in the form of questions, or appeals to class struggle, or subtle reversals of misfortune. These objections are challenging to confront without unfairly exposing resistant students to scrutiny from the rest of the class. Below is a short list of anecdotes describing some challenges I've faced teaching Ethnic Studies to groups of mostly white students. In the stories that follow I make a number of mistakes. After covering those examples, I'll discuss what I think I could have done differently. On the first week of the semester we define race, racism, colorblindness, and ethnicity as a class. The definitions aren't straightforward and at first this feels counter-intuitive to them. I explain that racism, the belief that certain phenotypic traits reveal something about a person's inborn and unchanging character, worth, and ability, is an effective way to illegitimately distribute social power along racial lines, and that white people benefit from that unfair distribution. A white student raises his hand to object to my definition of racism. I call on him but don't yet know his name (I will learn it within a week). "I'm going to play devil's advocate," he begins. He sounds nervous: "there's one thing I don't understand. Why can black people be proud of their race but white people can't?" He radiates the same energy and anger that I feel from students a few times every semester when I teach this class. I tell everybody, including those who have disapproving looks on their faces, that this is a fair question, and secretly I am thankful the student was brave enough to ask it. I pose his question to the rest…

In late 2013 I packed a small fraction of my belongings into a Toyota RAV4 and drove across the country from my hometown of Sacramento, California to Bowling Green, Ohio to begin graduate school. For four days I gazed through a rearview mirror reflecting a half-foot space between cardboard boxes and the road intervening between me and home. By the time I passed through Utah into the sprawling emptiness of Wyoming I had already been using the time to think about what I'd left behind, and I couldn't reflect on those objects or people with any equanimity. I felt little about the trivial comforts--Tempur-Pedic bed, books, video games, the recliner I sat in every day. The twenty-eight years of accrued sentiment was more difficult--the bedroom door covered with badly-drawn caricatures of my friends, old recorded VHS tapes of the films I loved and hated, the gaming magazines I collected over a five year span during my teens, friends who I feared would forget about me, animals that would die while I'm away, my lonely dad who never took care of himself. The house was built on short tempers and constant criticism. A black cloud moved in from the east and settled over the verdant Wyoming hills. Rain smeared it like gray paint running down a canvas. Some of that blackness swirled and despite the windless calm I imagined a tornado touching down on the land around me and sucking me up into it. My family and friends wouldn't find out until days later when my body would be discovered miles away in the mangled car my dad gifted me alongside shredded books and the gnarled innards of what used to be a hand-me-down television. My friends, my family, my animals, my home, the personal possessions I mistook for memories--I would never see them again. It was only by day three, halfway through Nebraska on what turned out to be an ill-advised eleven hour drive, when city lights polluted the skies and offered a comforting sense of familiarity. For a little while I let go of my anxieties. I reached Bowling Green by mid-afternoon on day four, collected my key from the landlord, and set my belongings on the tattered carpet of the small living room. The nearby Goodwill sold me a crusty green couch with a floral pattern for just shy of forty dollars. Small amount, yet the spending dipped into my savings accrued over a year of working at a used bookstore in Sacramento. Seats still down, the RAV4 swallowed most of the couch while a bungee cord held the back door shut. I remember pulling the couch out of the back by myself, dragging it down the stairs, and pivoting it into the basement dungeon while my back sent fire down the nerves in my legs. I inexplicably set the ugly green abomination in the center of the living room and let my legs dangle over the edge. The dim orange Halloween lights I brought from Sacramento and pinned…