#BlackNamesMatter: Why Neil Patrick Harris can have several seats after tonight.
I chose not to watch the Oscars this evening because I’d heard about a Black boycott and I didn’t have much interest anyway. But I did make the mistake of scrolling through my social media feed as they transpired, and saw both exclamations of love for Neil Patrick Harris and passing mention of news that he had mispronounced the names of a few actors. And then I saw red.
I’m getting acquainted with rage now that I’m allowing myself to feel how I feel more often instead of dismissing myself as irrelevant, but I am still at the point of trying to make these things make sense, and so that I can post about it and hopefully find that I am not the only one. I’m the first to admit my ideas may be rudimentary to those who have had access for years to education about the politics of oppression; I feel like I finally have the words to describe feelings as old as I am and now I can hardly stop myself, like the feeling I get from learning a new word or phrase in another language, only in this case I’m not saying “I don’t know” in French or Hebrew, I’m saying “I KNEW there was a reason I was mad when that happened!” and I get to do it in the language I’ve already learned.
And yes, it’s mass entertainment, what could I have been expecting? Honestly as a Black person trying to live in this country, and a queer person who spent most of life identifying as a woman, it’s gonna be real hard (unnnnnderstatement) to come up with any medium or institution that just gives me space, naturally, like I belong, and specifically a non-denigrating (intentional use yes, want to thank the formal English language education for that canonized word) space to inhabit. I know I’m not even their target for an audience, which again is part of why in this case I didn’t even bother watching.
But let’s get back to what happened on the show. Here are the names of the people Neil Patrick Harris (whom we know by name including his middle name, ironically) couldn’t be bothered with learning to say right tonight: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Chris Pratt, Margot Robbie, and David Oyelowo. There seeeeeems to be a pattern here, and since I’m already mad I’m gonna dig in futher.
Let’s focus on Chiwetel Ejiofor first. He lands a major role in a movie about slavery (yes slavery, again, 17 years after he was in Amistad, because y’all still don’t want to see us in movies that aren’t about racism far in the past, and some of y’all don’t even believe it was bad then). Then he gets nominated for an Oscar in 2015, when supposedly #blacklivesmatter, and at the event this white person who is hosting doesn’t bother to pronounce his name right, several times, then later pulls out a card like Georgie’s proverbial thumb, “what a good guy am I! It was a joke the entire time!” Adorable self-deprecation gets points, actual racist actions WHAT NO WAY, NPH DOESN’T EVEN SEE COLOR. Harris apparently wanted some kind of ally cookie for using a Black person as the subject of his anti-racism joke, and I shall give him none. And then David Oyelowo, who played the beloved (in twisted narratives of social change through niceness, anyway) Martin Luther King Jr., not only was his name not important enough for Harris to learn, but his presence itself was used as a set up for yet another self-congratulatory joke. Surely the irony could not completely escape you as you subjected him to more of your grandstanding about your awareness of and slight frowning over the white supremacy of the Oscars?
And let’s talk about your treatment of three women in particular: Margot Robbie, Marion Cotillard, and Dana Perry. All there because of their work, all subject to you tenacious grasp on Doing Privilege Wrong. Margot Robbie didn’t deserve a correctly pronounced name from you when it was time for her to announce a category (and the news just wants to talk about her haircut). Marion Cotillard had to deal with a joke about how foreign-y she is and how she must eat snails and not mind if people joke about how foreign-y all that is and how they can’t even pronounce the name of the dish (and she has won an Oscar, and was nominated for one tonight, but yes let’s do talk about how she can teach us French instead). Dana Perry won an Oscar for her short film about people who work at crisis lines helping veterans with mental health concerns, and gave a speech referencing her own personal grief. The music stopped when she talked about it. And you saw only what she wore, and a chance to lighten the mood with a joke about her clothing that not-at-all subtly also threw trans and gender non-conforming people under the bus. Do you want another cookie, do you want us to forget this because you were in Hedwig and that show is supposedly as good as we can expect to get? Again I shall give you none. Again you miss the point. People are suffering to the point where they feel like death has got to be better than this life and you take that moment to step on what a woman has said and kick down people in your own community that face much higher rates of suicide than most. But it’s all in good fun, right?
The press largely seems to think so. Some people reading this may have thought so, or still think so. But I hope to change your minds, on days when I do have hope. That is why I write. I cannot be the only one so tired of these institutions continually rewarding callousness and false humility from the “best” (yes, whitest, most male, most cisgender, most hetero-assimilated, most market-ably attractive) while refusing to acknowledge the importance of the work of those who are giving their efforts toward giving a good goddamn in spite of it all. People on the “fringe,” people who “don’t count,” minorities and even pretty-much-equal proportion-ities (by this I mean women, we are half of the world so let’s stop with the “greater good” pretense), people who are legally murdered daily in this country (talking about Black people, and when I say daily I’m ONLY talking about from police and security guards and such, not even including citizens), people who are constantly stolen from, mined for our resources and our stories and then betrayed for a dime or a dollar while you tell us to wait our turn, we are still out here trying.
And you, you remind us that even when we are allowed some part of a platform, our voices are just a little less important, even when what we are trying to say is something that would make their world better too—because it does now and will continue to make that world uncomfortable for those accustomed to every comfort. And perhaps the world of glitz and glamour is not yet ready for that to end and the Oscars cannot be something it is not. Perhaps they are unable to do so: and certainly I am typing this on my own personal computer in my comfortable apartment, because I too have found ways to make myself comfortable by ignoring the reality of just what all goes into producing the comfort and ease that I enjoy.
But it has to stop somewhere. We have to face the evil of our own nature, and the ways in which we participate in the institutions that we built to maintain this evil. We can’t just keep putting on clothes and taking pictures and telling jokes. We have to fight in small ways, and constantly. We need to speak up. We need to start practicing compassion instead of prioritizing fun.
Because if we can do that it will be, you know? At least I can imagine it would be fun, to be able to enjoy some art without having to first discard expectations that I will be in any way represented therein, or that if I am represented it will be something true and not cruel caricature. It would be nice to feel like I belong in this life, like I have space to work and not work and get sick and get better and live with chronic illnesses and all that regular life stuff. I don’t want something so different from what y’all get to do on the screens: live your lives, have problems, work them out, fail, learn, love some people and conflict with some people, say the things you want to say, be admired and loved and at least not afraid of being gunned down and having your name or pronouns put wrong in the papers, and all this just because you are you, and this is EVERYWHERE YOU GO. You are represented, in all your complexity, and you are recognized where we are denied recognition. What would be so wrong with everyone being able to just be? What is it you just can’t stand about that dream of ours? I cannot allow myself to imagine that you are so lost in your own fiction about those pictures of white Jesus that you really do believe if there were a god behind all this that such an entity who knows everything there is to know would actually be on board with certain customs and cultures and ways of being human, and would authorize force and torture to control social order. I do not want to let myself believe that you really mean it when you reverence whiteness, and that you will never change. I can’t.
And since we’re talking about whiteness, and specifically hetero-normative, cis-normative, as normative as we can get normative, let’s move on to why Harris saying “Chris Pratts" is not the same issue as the other names. The goal of talking about race and gender identity and gender politics and so on is not to ignore that people without as many systematic disadvantages can suffer too, and we can never ignore class and ability tropes in all of this, and the kinds of parts offered to people who by virtue of appearance are not deemed “romantic lead” or even “super smart funny science person.” There is something to be said for the difficulty of going into a field in which the craft involves becoming someone else for a time, and yet knowing that you have a look or manner that is not valued in the same way as, say, a Neil Patrick Harris, knowing that you will be limited to certain types of roles. And like I said, we all deserve to have our identities recognized, so debates about their relative privilege as two people who share some privileges and lack some that that other has, should not take away from that point.
Everyone should have their names represented correctly because we often put a lot of stock in our names as markers of our individuality. But if we leave it at that, if we put this white man on the same level as these Black men and these women from various backgrounds, we are ignoring the fact that the world we live in deals out these attacks on identity with much greater frequency and intensity to those who do not share his privileges. And denial does not move us forward. We cannot make actual progress by pretending we don’t have far to go. “But I’m making fun of everyone!” is essentially saying “I’ve fixed the problem with my thought experiment in which these problems do not exist: here’s yet another homage to a world in which I can make fun of ‘everyone’ which really means I get to put down people who already get it everywhere else they go and nobody can call me on it. Better name drop some more Black folks so nobody can get mad!”
So, Neil Patrick Harris, I doubt you will ever read this personally and it really isn’t just you doing so wildly failing to use your voice to counter the overwhelming evil in this world, but damn if you didn’t do it with gusto tonight, and have the press giving you all props for your “best and whitest—sorry, brightest” line. I’m beside myself that you are earning points for saying something about the Oscars (while keeping your job of course) that we have been saying about this country for hundreds of years, and you are saying it, but of course, AS A JOKE. A joke!!!! When we joke about racism amongst ourselves, we do it to keep ourselves going; when you joke about racism you are not subject to, we know you do not at all understand. We still are out here dying; you can’t be bothered to learn our damn names.
And, I hate to say it, but it does sting just a little more for me coming from you, a public face of legalizing queerness, or some forms anyway. It does sting for me, personally, to see your “balls” joke reposted by someone who I know from work I did with a national LGBT organization that bills itself as trans-inclusive. It hurts me a little more when I think someone understands something about who I am, when I figure they know something about queerness so maybe they will have some idea about oppression and maybe do simple stuff that doesn’t get you glory like learning someone’s name because you know what it’s like to have your identity rejected. It hurts when they reveal themselves to be so cold.
And I do not say this without consideration, as I imagine it may be a bad position you’re in, with the pressures and demands for performing “fun gay,” you know, the kind who will make them all feel more comfortable with us. And, further, we have all done things that hurt someone else, even at times intentionally, so I also don’t say any of this from a moral high ground far above cruelty and even specifically making jokes about others, and letting jokes slide past me without comment even though I knew they had hurt someone. I’ve done it, and I know it takes sacrifice to stop.
But we can’t go on being the ones feeding the beast. At some point we have to stop with the supply, to stop denying the challenge that we “different” folks pose to the idea that we are different in ways that are negative, and the threats, violent and non-violent, that we face from the status quo. Take as your example for the future Common and John Legend, and what they did with the opportunity they had to speak tonight. I am not putting any particular individuals forward as a solution, because honestly Ava DuVernay should have been up there herself but The Academy would not allow that. But look at what they have done with what they have been given, look at what you have done, and let the uncomfortable comparison get to you. Do the real work of fighting racism, sexism, queer- and transphobia, classism and so on, not with jokes, not with unearned accolades and clever turn of phrase, but with heart-deep hard work and a pause before you speak.
And in the meantime, when you know you ain’t right, then please just pass the mic.
