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I've made it an annual tradition to break down the top trends in race and pop culture. As you'll see, I had plenty to write about for the year 2006.
10. Race-swapping undercover experiments
9. Hipster racism
8. The continuing obsession with interracial relationships
7. The new minstrel show
6. Racism on college campuses
5. Fear of a Latino takeover
4. The return of the white man's burden
3. Colorface everywhere!
2. Celebrity racial slurs
1. Race baiting
10. Race-swapping undercover experiments
TV during the first quarter of 2006 was all about undercover experiments, so much so that I actually wrote a post about it in late February. (And the queen of undercover experiments was undoubtedly Miss Tyra Banks.)
Not all of these experiments had to with race:
- Tyra Banks goes undercover in a fatsuit to examine prejudice against overweight people
- Journalist Norah Vincent goes undercover as a man and writes the book Self-Made Man : One Woman’s Journey into Manhood and Back
- Tyra Banks dons “trashy clothes, a latex nose and a wig to disguise herself as a sexy dancer and took a secret film crew into a strip club†to expose the “sleazy world of strippers and pole dancers.â€
But a great many of them were all about race:
- The most notorious example was the reality series Black.White. on FX, in which a white family put on blackface and a black family put on whiteface to see what it was like living as a different "race." As you can imagine, it was festival of racial stereotypes in which nobody learned anything constructive about anything.
- Tyra Banks sends a black woman (who on a previous show declared she hated black women) out in whiteface to try and get at "the root of her hate." She also sent the black/white mixed writer Angela Nissel on dates "both as a black woman and as a white women to see if they treat her differently."
- Even Oprah got in on the race-swapping fun when she entered "The Human Race Machine" to see "what she looks like white? Asian? Hispanic?" Ugh!
Sometimes the race-swapping wasn't done in an undercover fashion, but simply by putting a black person in a white community or a white person in a black community (because you know, those are the only two races that count on TV).
- Dr. Phil did a god-awful episode about race in which he forced a white racist to spend two whole days with a black family in an effort to "cure" him of his racism.
- Trading Spouses did an episode in which the Josephs (a black family from Harlem, NYC) and the Gibbons (a white family from Mendon, Massachusetts) swapped spouses.
9. Hipster racism
This is a trend I noticed back in 2005, at the height of the Kill Whitey parties and Blackface Jesus . It was still going strong in 2006 and unfortunately, began spilling over into non-hipster demographics (as you'll see later on in the list).
- The hipster label of choice, American Apparel, continues to showcase exploit biracial and multiracial models in its quasi-pornographic ads, often explicitly spelling out their mixedness by listing out their ethnicities (e.g., “Meet Carrie, Chinese/British/Canadianâ€). The New York Times picked up on this in April, writing that founder "Charney embraced the notion of “real†advertising, photographing young ethnic and mixed-race men and women with asymmetrical features, imperfect bodies, blemished skin and visible sweat stains on the clothes they are modeling."
- Sandra Bernhard appeared on The View in June and claimed responsibility for the success of Mariah Carey's Emancipation of Mimi album. "Bernhard said it was her jokes eight years ago about Carey “being black only when it’s convenient†that led to the singer’s nervous breakdown, which eventually resulted in this current emancipation."
- John Mayer, some of whose best friends are black (Kanye) if you didn't know, for some inexplicable reason tried his hand at stand-up comedy in June and supposedly used the n-word multiple times on stage. There were conflicting accounts of what exactly went down though, see here for a different take.
- Gwen Stefani has been criticized by many thinking people, including Margaret Cho, for her using Asian women as living props who are contractually obligated to only speak Japanese even though they’re all American. In November she told Entertainment Weekly that Cho had it all wrong:"She didn’t do her research! The truth is that I basically was saying how great that
