Year: 2013

This month, Megyn Kelly tested American tempers by commenting on the supposed race of Santa. Looking abroad to Holland, Sophie McBain reflects on this year’s debate over “Zwarte Piet,” or “Black Pete,” a companion to Saint Nicholas (aka Sinterklaas) usually depicted in blackface:

This year, Sinterklaas has sparked a debate so fierce that even the UN has become involved. At the root of the controversy are Sinterklaas’s helpers, called theZwarte Pieten, or Black Petes. “And do you know why Zwarte Piet is black?” I remember my grandma asking me. “It’s because he comes down the chimney to bring you your presents.” This is the story told to most children in Holland, but Zwarte Piet isn’t smeared with soot like Dick Van Dyke after a longday on set. His whole face is painted black and he has thick, painted-on lips, a black curly wig and thick gold hoop earrings. …

No one likes their festive traditions tampered with –imagine trying to implement a countrywide ban on Christmas trees in the UK – but emotions over Sinterklaas run deeper. Most Dutch people identify themselves as inherently liberal, yet attacks on Zwarte Piet have been construed as an attack on Dutch identity – which is political dynamite, given the rapid growth of the far-right in recent years. The deputy prime minister Lodewijk Asscher’s insistence that “You can’t say the whole of Holland is racist” has struck a chord with many who feel aggrieved that a beloved childhood tradition has attracted such condemnation.

The problem is that even if a practice isn’t intended to be racist, it can still be hurtful, discriminatory and, yes, racist. Underneath the popular insistence that Sinterklaas is just a cosy children’s event, some worrying and ugly sentiments have come to light. Organisers hoping to hold the first ever “Rainbow Piet” parade, featuring multicoloured Piets, had to cancel their event in October after receiving death threats.

Akim Reinhardt proposes a parallel between Zwarte Piet’s blackface and the “red face” encouraged by American pro sports teams with Native American mascots:

Americans such as myself can be quick to judge and condemn.

Living in a country that saw a protracted civil rights movement reach its apex half-a-century ago, the knee jerk reaction is to condescendingly nod our heads and mutter something about Europe’s backwards race relations.  We know our own state of race relations is far from perfect.  But black face in 21st America?  And directed at audiences of children no less?  Incomprehensible.

But what about red face? The Kansas City Chiefs football team. The Cleveland Indians baseball team. The Washington Redskins football team. The Atlanta Braves baseball team. The Chicago Blackhawks hockey team. And beyond professional sports teams garnering huge profits, there are also prestigious research universities like Florida State University and the University of Illinois that continue to field sports teams with Indian names and mascots, have many fans who dress up in red face, and even present sanctioned red face Indian performances for the crowd.

Black Pete is atrocious, and just about everyone outside of Holland gets that.  But America’s Indian mascotting is also disgusting.  Yet many Americans are as blind to their red face minstrelsy as the legion of Dutch supporters are to their beloved black face minstrel.

Recent Dish on race and Christmas conventions here, here, and here.

(Image of Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet via Wikimedia Commons)

About 36 days later, according to psychologists at the University of Colorado who used an online survey to gauge people’s reactions to jokes about Hurricane Sandy:

The researchers divided the surveys into “during crisis” and “after crisis.” The day before the storm made landfall, people thought the tweets were pretty funny—they didn’t yet know it would be a tragedy. Over the next nine days, as people learned the extent of the damage, perceived humor declined. Participants found the tweets least funny 15 days after Sandy’s landfall. Then, it slowly started to be “okay” to find humor in the situation again, leading to a high point of humor 36 days after landfall. Humor fell again after that, and researchers saw another low point 99 days after the disaster. The study also showed that during the first dip in perceived humor, participants found the tweets more offensive.

How the study informs our understanding of humor: 

[A. Peter] McGraw and his colleagues argue these results provide evidence supporting the “benign violation theory” of humor. It states that “humor arises when something that threatens a person’s well-being, identity, or normative belief structure simultaneously seems OK, safe, or acceptable.” Or to put it more simply: “Humor requires threat, but not too much, or too little.”

So if you fear an approaching hurricane could actually hurt you, your interests, or someone you love, there’s nothing funny about it. If the threat has safely passed, its potential to generate humor rapidly retreats. But the moment when you feel you have dodged a bullet: That’s ripe for laughs. Humor, McGraw and his colleagues write, is a great example of “the human capacity for taking a source of pain and transforming it into a source of pleasure.” (In that way, it’s like the blues.) This ability, they add, “is a critical feature of the psychological immune system.”

The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism released new data on Thursday showing that the majority of the terrorist attacks and fatalities in 2012 happened in just three countries: Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan:

The next five most frequently targeted countries were India, Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen and Thailand. “While terrorist attacks have in large part moved away from Western Europe and North America to Asia, the Middle East and Africa, worldwide terrorism is reaching new levels of destructiveness,” said Gary LaFree, START director and professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Maryland. In addition to illustrating a continued shift in location of attacks, the new data — with more than 8,400 terrorist attacks killing more than 15,400 people in 2012 — also show an increase in attacks and fatalities over the past decade. The previous record for attacks was set in 2011 with more than 5,000 incidents; for fatalities, the previous high was 2007 with more than 12,500 deaths.

These record numbers are partly due to a change in START’s data collection methodology, however, so the report cautions against a direct year-to-year comparison. Zach Rausnitz looks at who committed the deadliest attacks, and where:

Three of the five deadliest attacks from the year took place in Yemen. One perpetrated by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula killed 210 people. Al Qaeda central did not itself carry out any attacks in 2012, but the six groups responsible for the most deaths worldwide had some affiliation with al Qaeda, START says. They include the Taliban, Boko Haram and AQAP. Along with Yemen, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria and Iraq each suffered individual attacks that killed more than 50 people. The only fatal attack listed in the database that took place in the United States in 2012 was the killing of six people at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisc., by a member of a white supremacist organization.

Benjamin H. Freidman points out that in the longer term, terrorism is really on the decline:

We should … be skeptical that the recent increase in terrorism means more danger for Americans. The cause of terrorism’s recent increase is civil wars and political unrest in Africa, the Middle-East and South Asia, where the vast majority of recent terrorist attacks have occurred. Meanwhile, terrorists killed fifteen, seventeen, and ten private U.S. citizens (that is, non-military) in 2010, 2011, 2012, respectively. That means the danger to Americans either did not grow or that they mostly avoided it. The real problem then is not al Qaeda, but the fractured political order in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Nigeria and the like.

Richard Lea contributes to the debate spurred by Tom Scocca’s essay:

Not even Scocca is really arguing for snark. Instead he’s arguing for the licence to adopt a negative tone when you confront “smarm”, which he defines as a “kind of performance” that takes on “the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance”. Scocca assembles examples from literature and politics of smarmy doublespeak – and who could possibly be in favour of that? – where practitioners short-circuit dispute about real issues by claiming any criticism is merely personal attack and suggests that those who argue against snark are really concerned about preserving their own status.

But he’s not really arguing about snark at all, as becomes clear when he admits that “the complaints against snark are not entirely without merit”.

Some snark is harmful and rotten and stupid. Just as, to various degrees, some poems and page-one newspaper stories and sermons and football gambling advice columns are harmful and rotten and stupid. Like every other mode, snark can sometimes be done badly or to bad purposes. …

Instead we need to steer a course between snark and smarm, to remember that it is enormously hard to write a good book, and to engage with the book, which has eventually been written on its own terms. Those terms are, of course, subject to criticism themselves, but we have to remember that we’re not in Hollywood. In a world where US publishers produce more than 300,000 titles a year – not to mention the 390,000 US titles published directly by their authors – the duty to “review books negatively” that Dowd upholds is constrained by limits of time and space. Confronted with a bad book, we should say it’s bad, of course, and how and why, but unless it is important or dangerous, why bother to confront it at all? Why not find something better to review? If we renounce snark, then the negativity we permit ourselves must have a point, and must be balanced with generous explorations of those few books that aspire to something interesting and manage to match those aspirations with at least a little success. Otherwise we’re not really talking about literature at all.