Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Sassy black men. You Tube auto-tuned. Laughing at? Laughing with?


This was written in response to a short article on NPR (appended below) about the “instant celebrity” surrounding Charles Ramsey. You may recall he was the gentleman who helped free three young Cleveland women who were being held captive in a house owned by three bloated, sweaty older gentlemen who probably shouldn’t have been let out into the world unsupervised. 

The point of the article was to highlight this and other cases where “sassy black men” from poor areas have gained accidental notoriety by being articulate and outspoken on camera. The article asks an an important question, namely, is there an element of condescension in our reaction to these people? Are we “laughing with them, or at them?” One of the other examples of this phenomenon cited in the article was Antoine Dodson (of “hide your kids, hide your wife” You Tube fame). Having actually met Mr. Dodson, in passing, and therefore feeling confident in my ability to speak authoritatively on this matter (this being the Internet and all) I had just a couple thoughts to contribute.


I met Antoine Dodson at an Internet Meme convention (ROFLcon) at MIT last summer. He was a funny guy. I do remember wondering at the time about the same questions raised in this piece.


When Mr. Dodson was "discovered" on line, auto-tuned, and eventually feted by tech-startup Ivy League grads, was there a measure of patronization in his notoriety as "that sassy outspoken black guy from the projects?" It seems a valid concern given the obvious disparities in wealth, race and social class between the parties involved. But we shouldn't discount the fact that he was also an articulate and funny story-teller with genuine appeal--a bit of a natural stand-up comic.
At any rate, he seems to have turned this unexpected windfall to his own advantage. So perhaps it's too simplistic to see his relationship with internet fame as a matter of pure "exploitation", or at least as exploitation flowing in only one direction.


I think many Americans from all walks of life are pretty savvy about how this aspect of the media works, whether or not they've ever taken a class on Internet Studies. I hope that, instead of just being relegated to the role of unsophisticated "victim", he can use his unexpected celebrity to improve his and his family's situation while avoiding the pitfalls of instant fame. This is more or less what most of the other "Internet Meme" folks were happily doing, it seemed to me. Who knows, maybe Charles Ramsey will be able to do the same thing, in his own way. As George Herbert, author of the science fiction classic Dune, said in his 17th century classic Jacula Internetum,

"living well is the best revenge".


Find the original NPR piece below:

Are We Laughing With Charles Ramsey?

Gene Demby May 7, 2013
Charles Ramsey talks to media Tuesday as people congratulate him for having helped some women get out of a Cleveland home. Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight and a 6-year-old girl were rescued from the house. (The Plain Dealer/Landov)
It's hard out here for a black man the Internet accidentally thrusts into the limelight. Those 15 minutes ain't no joke.
Charles Ramsey, the Cleveland man who helped Amanda Berry escape from her captor and free her fellow captives, is already a full-fledged Thing On The Internet, primarily owing to a live local television news interview. During that interview, Ramsey proved himself a fantastic storyteller, and he kept it extra-extra-real.
What made Ramsey really blow up on the Internet was his observation at the end of the interview.
"Bro, I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man's arms," Ramsey told a local TV reporter. The local reporter quickly pivoted away.
(He's not lying: Cleveland is one of the 10 most segregated cities in the U.S., according to a study from two researchers.)
Like Ted Williams, the homeless "man with the golden voice," Antoine Dodson of "Hide Your Kids, Hide Your Wife!" fame, and Sweet Brown of "Oh, Lordy, there's a fire!" — three other poor black folks who became unlikely Internet celebrities in recent years — Ramsey seemed at ease in front of the camera. And of course, he's already been Auto-Tuned.
Very quickly, they went from individuals who lived on America's margins to embodying a weird, new kind of fame. Williams ended up being offered work doing voiceovers for radio. Dodson leveraged his newfound notoriety to get his family out of the projects. (Our colleagues at Tell Me More sat down with Dodson a little while back to talk about blowing up and moving out of the 'hood.)
This new notoriety mimics the old, familiar trajectory of celebrity. We start to learn all sorts of things about these regular people that "complicates" them. Their foibles become part of the story. Williams' history of drug abuse and petty crime quickly came to the fore; he would go on to appear on Dr. Phil to talk about his estrangement from his family. Dodson would later land in the news for run-ins with the law for drug possession. (Just this week, Dodson announced that he was joining a nationalist religious order called the Black Hebrew Israelites and renouncing his homosexuality.)
But race and class seemed to be central to the celebrity of all these people. They were poor. They were black. Their hair was kind of a mess. And they were unashamed. That's still weird and chuckle-worthy.
On the face of it, the memes, the Auto-Tune remixes and the laughing seem purely celebratory. But what feels like celebration can also carry with it the undertone of condescension. Amid the hood backdrop — the gnarled teeth, the dirty white tee, the slang, the shout-out to McDonald's — we miss the fact that Charles Ramsey is perfectly lucid and intelligent.
"I have a feeling half the ppl who say 'Oooh I love watching him on the internet!' would turn away if they saw him on the street," the writer Sarah Kendzior tweeted.
Dodson and Brown and Ramsey are all up in our GIFs and all over the blogosphere because they're not the type of people we're used to seeing or hearing on our TVs. They're actually not the type of people we're used to seeing or hearing at all, which might explain why we get so silly when they make one of their infrequent forays into our national consciousness.
Copyright 2013 National Public Radio (Source).



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