[Mark McDonnell]

Hmm. Maybe I did take being labelled a centrist and someone who would make many people you know spit on the floor a little personally.

[Julie Steiner]

Yes, it's pretty universal to not like being negatively stereotyped, Mark.

Chris Lilley's Jonah is not from Tonga, I am. It's time to dismantle racist brownface stereotypes

"Netflix was right to pull Lilley’s shows. We have no need for him to whitesplain Tongan people for entertainment"

[Mark McDonnell]

Ok, I have a few issues with this, Julie.

First of all, I’m not calling for Aaron to be removed from the Sphere and if he were, I wouldn’t write a Guardian article about how relieved I was. So there’s that. But yes, fair enough.

Mainly though, I don’t agree with the article. I haven’t seen any of Chris Lilley’s other shows (apparently three others have been pulled from Netflix) so I can really only talk about the one I have seen, “Summer Heights High”. I might watch his others and think he should be burned at the stake, but I haven’t.

I’ve been a teacher for over 20 years. I think the portrayal of the character Jonah is an incredibly realistic one. Such a skilled and nuanced acting performance for a performer in their 30s to so convincingly inhabit the skin of a 13 year old boy. The writer here says “Watching Summer Heights High more than a decade ago, I felt sick with disgust that a white man was commissioned to depict a specific diasporic Tongan identity of a young disadvantaged boy of low economic status and challenging circumstance”. She calls the character a “racist brownface stereotype” and say the performer is “whitesplain(ing) Tongan people for entertainment”. She also says, I think patronisingly, of the other actors "I was particularly mortified that the other Pacific diasporic actors who played alongside the Jonah character, were co-opted into the brownface act and became publicly complicit in aiding overt racism that ultimately damages their own personal identities. Being a performer, I understand that a gig is a gig. But, I worried about them. I worried that they might believe that the only way you can get actor work is if you betray your own identity or that working comes with relinquishing any dignity. They wouldn’t be the first performers to do this, but I hurt on their behalf."

It never once occurred to me, when I watched the show, to think “oh, so this is what people from Tonga are like”. I think that would be an extreme reaction for anyone to have to the show, and no good art can be created under the kind of self-censorship that worries what the most extreme reaction to it might be. Nor did I think that Jonah and his friends are presented in a way that forces them to "relinquish their dignity". The character is recognisable to anyone who has spent any length of time among teenage boys. He reminded me uncannily of some of the boys I’ve had to teach over the years. The fact he is from Tonga is secondary. He is exactly like some of the disadvantaged white and Asian boys from Stoke on Trent where I taught for 18 years. So why make his character from Tonga? Dramatically, in the show, it gives him a sense of separate identity. He is often encouraged to be proud of his culture but rails against this because he is obsessed with breakdancing and US rap music. He is disruptive in class and aggressive but ultimately a very sympathetic character, much more so than the privileged white exchange student that Lilley also plays in the show, who is monstrous. It is a portrayal of class disadvantage if anything.

This ultimately comes down to whether the actor, or any actor, should ever be allowed to play someone out of their own ethnicity, or whether this is automatically racist as the writer suggests. With a straight drama I agree it would be wrong and pretty ridiculous. There are black actors to play black people, Indian actors to play Indian people. But for a character-based comedian who invents and writes their own characters I might think differently. It could be done well or incredibly crassly. Here I think it’s done brilliantly, and is only offensive if you can’t see past the taboo of the fact that it is happening at all. I understand the legacy of minstrel shows and the history of blackface and how painful and disgusting that legacy is. But clearly the idea has expanded to mean any portrayal, performed or written, outside of your own ethnicity. I'm not sure how helpful this is to the grand human project as it marches forward. The performer here is accused of ‘brownface’ and so any argument about artistic merit has to stop. Why is ‘poorface’ not a thing? Because if it was, no Hollywod movie would be able to be set in a working class milieu again. Why has putting the suffix ‘splaining’ at the end of a word become accepted as a complete communication stopper, which seems to mean ‘you are not allowed to use your human empathy to imagine outside your own experience’?

It’s always uncomfortable arguing about this sort of thing with someone who is speaking from lived experience. I know that many people think it simply shouldn’t be done, that people should shut up and “know their own lane” as the expression goes. But lived experience doesn’t trump everything. It can be emotionally charged and being offended by something doesn’t automatically make the thing causing the offence invalid. I hope I’m not insensitive in ignoring the idea of 'staying in my lane'. I realise that I don’t know when to shut up. It’s a fault. I understand a little of what the writer is feeling when they describe their school experience. My name “McDonnell” set me apart in northern England as the only (half) Scottish kid in school, and I was continually regaled with “Hoots Mon!” and asked where my kilt was. Kids can be dicks, as this TV show so effectively depicts.

Here’s Jonah again. A compilation of some of his scenes. Have you actually watched it? My lived experience as a secondary school teacher tells me that the creator of this show knew these characters very well and had nothing but affection and respect for them, students and teachers alike.

https://youtu.be/iW_r_C7nNPw

Edit: It's also interesting to read the YouTube comments underneath. A lot of them (I'm guessing here, I suppose) seem to be from teenagers. They all seem to be along these lines: "OMG this is exactly what my school was like/this series portrays Australian schools when I was growing up perfectly haha/did you see how the jonah character reacted so positively to the remedial teachers empathy kindness and patience? This is true in real life for many troublesome teenagers/this was me haha lol"
Not one of them says anything like "Yeah, typical Tongans". Not one of them mentions the character's race.

But I'm probably saying all this because I'm a typical type 2 liberal "or some shit".

[Aaron Novick]

Originally Posted by Mark McDonnell

Hmm. Maybe I did take being labelled a centrist and someone who would make many people you know spit on the floor a little personally.

There's no political view that's going to save you from floor-spitting. For instance, I would spit on the floor regarding half the people who'd call you a "liberal", because a good chunk of them are tankies, who are useful for critiquing US policy but wholeheartedly embrace atrocities if nominal communists are doing it. I wish I had been clearer that I was mapping a landscape (and placing you within it), not passing judgment on you. Sorry, Mark.

[Mark McDonnell]

No worries Aaron. It was late and I was semi-delirious haha.

[Julie Steiner]

Mark, I know that we agree on most of everything, and also are going to be pretty entrenched in different opinions on this particular issue. I think the Jonah character is obviously racist, and you think it is not. We may have to agree to disagree on that, but I'll blather on anyway.

I've watched both compilations, although not any of the whole episodes. And I realize that they are cherry-picked to show Jonah's worst behavior, so it isn't giving me a sense of the full development of the character.

However, I still get the impression from these clips that the show invariably presents members of the white majority--kids and teachers alike--as saintly victims of situation in which problematic minority boys use the privilege of their special protected status to terrorize them with impunity.

Jonah accuses his white teachers of being racist even when they bend over backwards not to be. These teachers make every effort to be kind and and thoughtful and empathetic, only to have those rotten, unappreciative minority kids take advantage of their goodness and walk all over them.

Worse still, the authority figures in the show fail to protect obvious victims, such as the little red-haried boy who is tormented with homophobic slurs and the female teachers who are tormented with misogynistic slurs but seem powerless to put an end to this harassment. The system seems to require the authorities to treat all minority boys as victims, even in situations in which those minority boys are clearly the aggressors.

The obvious solution is to get rid of the school's inclusionary and alternative-discipline (really no-discipline) policies, which are shown to be ineffective bullshit. (A lot of the humor comes from the giant gulf between how we observe things to be going and how the earnest, jargon-spewing teachers cling to the delusion that their patient, passive approach is making progress toward improving the situation.)

The overall message of the show is that minority boys ruin school for everyone else because they are incorrigible. They can't or won't be helped. If a lot of them end up in jail, as one of the white adults predicts, it will be their own damn fault--certainly not the fault of any systemic racism or white privilege.

The audience is left to draw their own conclusions about more common-sense solutions, such as instituting harsher punishment (perhaps of the corporal variety), or just expelling these boys as soon as possible, so that the angelic white majority can get back to focusing on education. Alas, misguided political correctness and sensitivity keeps either of those things from happening.

The show portrays empathy and good intentions as not merely useless, but actively harmful to the white majority. And it does so by via a white man's caricature of a non-white boy. The other minority boys cast in the show are there only to reinforce and endorse the apparent truth of the white guy's exaggeratedly negative portrayal, by implying that the white actor's fake minority kid is really not so far from the real thing.

To me, the show seems to be all about reinforcing things that white audiences believe to be true about themselves--We are not racist, far from it, and we do not enjoy a privileged position, non-whites do! The minority characters are just the canvas on which that portrait of the white majority's innocence and public service and victimhood is painted. Antisocial brown kids exist, but white privilege and white racism don't.

Basically, a white guy creates a very unflattering portrait of a minority kid in order to create a very flattering selfie of whites. And when minorities object to that portrayal, saying that it misrepresents them, once again whites are portrayed as the real victims here, having their right to create and access art infringed by someone else.

Once again, minorities are the aggressors, and white privilege and white racism don't exist. Instead, whites are being oppressed by brown people who are mischaracterizing them as racist.

I find this view problematical.

[Mark McDonnell]

Yeah, we'll have to agree to disagree, Julie.
I'll only repeat that as a teacher of many years, I recognise the portrayal as a realistic one. I work in quite a nice school now, but for many years I worked in a school where the scenes depicted here were common. The Jonah character is a realistic depiction, as is the bending over backwards because there's no other option. You saw a lot of stuff in here, detailed in your last few paragraphs that seems a real stretch to me, like the show's message being to reinforce for a white audience "We are not racist, far from it, and we do not enjoy a privileged position, non-whites do!" The kid in the show happens to be from Tonga. The main point is that he is disadvantaged and disruptive, but he is still supposed to be sympathetic. He certainly isn't privileged. As I said he reminded me uncannily of a lot of the poor, mainly white and occasionally Asian boys I've taught. I don't think race is the point and I think you're making it the whole point. The point is that in any school there will be a disruptive element whose disruption often stems from disadvantage, usually economic, which can sometimes go hand in hand with coming from a minority background, as is the case here, though not necessarily. I think perhaps British (and maybe Australian) comedy has more of a tradition than the US of having less than pleasant characters at the centre, while still expecting the audience to kind of root for them. I think, rather than seeing Jonah as a symbol of all that's wrong with the education system, we root for him and just accept that the show portrays an imperfect world. His sexism and homophobic insults are horrible, but he's thirteen. They are bravado that we hope he grows out of. In any given episode of the show he gets about a third of the screen time. The other two characters played by Lilley are both white and are far less sympathetic. One is a delusional gay drama teacher and the other is a teenage girl, a privileged private school exchange student. Something to offend everyone I suppose, if you want to be, since Lilley is not gay or female anymore than he is Tongan. It's fairly extreme comedy. It isn't sweetness and light. Jonah is all id and rawness. He gets expelled at the end of the series and it's pretty heartbreaking.

The fact that we are arguing about this at all shows that the issue isn't clear. My argument isn't that aspects of the show aren't 'problematic', it's that I find the tendency toward erasing or making a scapegoat of problematic art, rather than allowing individuals to come to their own conclusions, slightly disturbing.

The Guardian, who published the
condemnatory article supporting the Netflix decision, had previously been entirely positive about the show in its review sections.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.the...box-set-review

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.the...elastepisodeof

I'm not making any claims for these TV shows as great art (though I think The League of Gentleman comes close and all of them are creative) and I know there are more pressing concerns around this issue. I suppose I just thought a discussion of where artistic freedom and political concerns meet might be of interest on a literary forum.

Anyway Julie, I always appreciate your blather. At least you indulge me.

[Aaron Novick]

The Absolutist Case for Problematic Pop Culture

I haven't read this, but it's pertinent to the thread

[Julie Steiner]

Sorry for the tangent above, if you really wanted to talk mainly about access, Mark.

Personally, I would prefer for most artwork denounced as objectionable to remain publicly accessible, so that people can judge it for themselves.

However, artwork is hardly ever universally accessible for free, anyway. Artists tend to make a living by selling the rights to their material to various intermediaries: publishers, distributors, impresarios, etc.

Do artists have the right to make art deemed offensive? Yes. But those who purchase control over that intellectual property also have the right to flipflop on business decisions about access. These flipflops might be deemed either commendably sensitive or contemptibly spineless, depending on one's point of view. And members of the public from all perspectives have the right to express their opinions, and to try to exert pressure on the gatekeepers, perhaps resulting in subsequent flipflops.

Basically, there's a whole lot of freedom going on. It just (counterintuitively) results in some access restrictions sometimes.

[Jim Moonan]

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I think it's ridiculous to identify oneself as any one thing — left, left-leaning, progressive, extreme left, socialist, centrist, right, far right, extreme right, etc. One's position varies depending on the issue, no? If only we adopted that paradigm we would finally see that we all are deeply connected. Expansion of our collective imagination is what we need. We need dialog, patience, hopefulness and finally understanding. Then cultures can blend. Or maybe I'm a dreamer.

The vast majority of social media discussions quickly become polarized and closed-minded. In fact they are not discussions at all. They are virtual soapboxes. The Speaker's Corner of the techno age. (This discussion not so much so, but it veers from time to time.)
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