SOCIAL DRAMA / There's nothing funny in black and white

SOCIAL DRAMA / There's nothing funny in black and white

In the past year, more and more famous white men have gone berserk, spewing venom at the rest of American society. First, there was Mel Gibson mouthing off in a drunken anti-Semitic rage. Then there was Michael Richards' meltdown, in which he screamed a racial epithet at his comedy audience. Now Don Imus' comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team have resulted in his being pulled off the air. Before these incidents, we had the Michael Jackson and Kobe Bryant cases, but the most recent ones have been of white men gone wild.
Why?
Cultural anthropologist Victor Turner, who died in 1984, coined the term "social drama," which describes what's going on here. Turner defined a social drama as a process that has four stages: breach, crisis, redressive action and reintegration.
Let's walk through the stages.
First, there's the breach: a rupture between society and one of its participants. In each case -- Richards, Gibson and Imus -- the breach was triggered by an ethnic slur or ethnic joke, and decent people in the larger society became aware of the incident.
Next, the crisis. According to Turner's theories, the crisis cannot be ignored, lest society threaten to come undone. As Americans watched the coverage of the Imus incident, they had the feeling that something must be done.
The third stage is redressive action, "the culturally defined process that resolves the crisis," according to Brown University anthropologist William O. Beeman. Although he had already been fired, society didn't begin its collective sigh of relief until after Imus' apology to the Rutgers women was accepted.
Finally, there is reintegration, which, Beeman writes, "eliminates the original breach that precipitated the crisis. This can be done in two ways -- by creating a permanent split in society, or by healing."
The emotional gain for both the joke teller and those to whom he offers forbidden humor is the thrill of "getting away with it," a staple of white male humor, from plantation owners to Quentin Tarantino to Imus.
For generations, it has been known by the name of the location where men gathered: "locker room humor," "club house humor" or "frat house humor." Invariably, the vicious put-down of black men at the mercy of the "superior" white man is called the "n -- joke," whether it's at a golf course, a country club or in movies like "The Jerk'' or "Pulp Fiction.''
Next up, of course, is "the black woman joke," in which the woman is stripped naked and put into sexual situations with licentious white men, as seen in minstrelsy, literature and films.
Imus' calling the basketball team "nappy-headed hos" should be blamed, not on hip-hop, but on blackface white performers and the culture of white male humor.
In the first half of the 19th century, white men put on cork and acted out black behavior onstage. This became blackface minstrelsy.
In 1822, a white English actor visiting America observed an audience asking a black performer to sing "Pussum up a tree." When the black man didn't comply, the actor put on black cork and sang the song himself. The white public grew up around this form, which was intended to show blacks as small, inferior, despicable and comic.
"Minstrelsy was the first example of the way American popular culture would exploit and manipulate African Americans and their culture in order to please and benefit white Americans," observes Robert Toll, author of "Blackening Up: The Minstrel Show in 19th Century America.''
"Minstrel blacks did not have hair, they had 'wool'; their hair [had] to be filed, not cut," according to Toll.
African American hairstyles have been a subject of discussion since white slave owners took away slaves' African combs. Whore was what many black women were under slavery: If a white man desired her, she became a whore who didn't get paid.
Minstrelsy was a way of allowing whites to live with themselves by venting the pressures of being racist. After the emancipation of blacks, minstrels lost their power.
Minstrelsy served as a release, what the late UC Berkeley folklore Professor Alan Dundes called "the safety-valve function of oral humor."
Imus' show shared a similarity to minstrelsy in form and content. In minstrelsy, the interlocutor acted as the master of ceremony. "With a pompous command of the language, an extensive vocabulary, and a resonant voice, the interlocutor personified dignity, which made the raucous comedy of the endmen even funnier," Toll writes.
Imus' end man was Bernard McGuirk, who, Imus told a "60 Minutes" producer, was hired to tell racial jokes.
Just like Imus' format, minstrelsy mixed racist and obscene humor with commentary on the social issues of that day.
The most appalling result of the Imus' affair is how the literary establishment wilted under his redneck charm. New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus was a frequent visitor to the show, where Imus helped market his book on Whittaker Chambers.
"Of course, I was hearing the slurs against black athletes ... and Clarence Thomas ... and the almost continual soundtrack of leering sexual comments," Tanenhaus writes retrospectively. "But I also had been summoned into the exotic presence of mass, or mob, culture, with its populism and prejudices."
This concept of popular culture is what minstrelsy depended upon, a culture of white male humor that is not popular because most people like it but because it is about white men versus the rest of us.
Novelist and author Cecil Brown's most recent work, "Dude, Where's My Black Studies Department: The Disappearance of Black Americans From Our Universities'' (North Atlantic Books), will be available in May.
This article appeared on page F - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle