infobong.com

I'm still not sure what to say about this Washingtom Post story about a new series of children's book that situates Barbie in historical moments of the late twentieth century. In one "Barbie Diary of the Decade" book about the 1960s, Barbie comes to grips with the civil rights struggle through her African-American friend Christie. However, racial difference is constructed in an interesting way in these books, on "one of the pages on which they appear together, hair equally long and straight, skins an identical shade of pink."

In my "Media/History/Collective Memory" class this semester, we're examining how media texts construct "collective memory," popular understanding of the past, and how differs from official history or academic history. It might be easy to dismiss a Barbie history of civil rights as an ephemeral children's book, but texts like these have as much influence as school history, further asserting progress narratives ("racism is over") or eliding racial difference ("we're all the same").

One of the scholarly pieces we read recently was Herman Gray's classic "Remembering Civil Rights," which examines representation of African-Americans in TV and other popular culture. Gray asserts that there is a "Civil Rights Subject," an idealized racial character like the ones in "The Cosby Show" or "Julia" who overcome social forces to lead normalized, middle class lives. The civil rights subject legitimates certain kinds of experiences - overcoming overt racism - while delegitimating other experiences or other social complaints.

I think we see the civil right subject play out in an interesting way in this piece, "Postmodern Protests" by Christina Larson, from The Washington Monthly. The author contends that with blogs and other forms of grassroots media, street protest today is obsolete and self-indulgent, and contrasts the anti-war and anti-Bush protests this year with Civil Rights protests of the 1960s, contending that the Civil Rights protests were legitimate actions, while the protests today are not. (she has little to say about Vietnam War protests, but, if I'm reading her right, she doesn't approve. I think this taps into what Gray says about how the Civil Rights subject constructs legitimate "subaltern" identitiies, de-legitimating others' experience of struggle.