Let me begin by saying that I am a fan of your publication. It is smart, savvy, and hilarious and on the right side (IMO) of the American political divide. Satire as a comic form is difficult to nail, especially in print. It must masquerade the truth a few layers under the mockery of something (or someone else) and yet those layers must be see through enough that we, the audience, ‘get’ what is being mocked – see the truth underneath. Mostly, you’ve nailed it in the past. I hardly ever pass your paper in a newsstand without checking in on the ‘headlines.’
I am also a black man, a poet, and a deeply politically motivated one – as poets must be, I believe, but I digress. Much of my work in the world an indeed in my poetry has been about the deconstructing of systems of power; in particular, those which have resulted in racism and sexism. In these my work has had to be approached from different angles. In the one, I’m coming absolutely from a historical position of powerlessness, and in the other from one of power. For now, we won’t get into the triangulating of the power dynamic which exists when we’re dealing with black man/white woman, but suffice to say that gets pretty complex when we get into it. In thinking about my role as a sexist man, and my attempt to deconstruct that, one of the things I’ve had to consider is the outside gaze. Put more plainly, ‘what do I look like when I interact with my own power, with women in different scenarios?’ What does it mean that I can take off my shirt in public, but a woman cannot? What does it mean that my sex life comes under way less scrutiny? What does it mean to see me coming and feel like your physical self might be under siege? What do I look like if I choose to tell a woman to smile in the street? Who am I to ask her to behave in a manner other than the manner in which she is currently behaving?
When you published the headline, which referred to young Ms. Wallis as a cunt, I get that you weren’t actually calling her that. I get that she is an absolutely adorable girl who had just nailed the lead role in an amazing movie, and that absolutely no-one would have had a bad thing to say about her, and that your headline, by saying this utterly vile thing was attempting to underscore how absolutely wonderful she is. Those are the layers through which the truth of her amazingness is seen. I get it. But your writer, your editors, your copy editors; indeed no one who saw that headline before it went to ‘press’ considered the gaze from without themselves. No one thought that the subject of the joke was a nine-year old girl, who might not understand how she came to be referred to in this vile way. Not one of you considered that maybe you’d come to a line that should not be crossed. Further, none of you thought of who you were and what you looked like in a country with a star-crossed (at best) racial history, when you referred to a black girl in this manner.
I’d like to launch into a critique of whiteness here – not white people mind you; but whiteness. I would like to ask you to consider what it means or what it might mean in a country that still imprisons its black citizens at three times the rate it does its white ones for the same crimes. I would like to ask you to consider what the headline looks like to black youth who are dying unceremoniously in record numbers on Chicago’s South Side, and then tell me if it doesn’t come off as the most callously indifferent, vile, expression of satiric comedy you’ve ever seen. I’m not going to get into all that sort of critique because I’m done with doing the race work for those with power, but I want you to ask yourselves honestly if you would have made the same risky joke about say… Dakota Fanning. I don’t know what your answer is. I hope you can live with it.
To Ms. Wallis – this, unfortunately, is not the last time I would bet, that you would have to face something in the world that feels like an attack on your sense of self-worth. You will have to deal with a world that tells you in myriad ways that you are not attractive, that your hair should be different, that you are too angry, that you aren’t lady enough, that your body is inadequate. I want you too to also believe that there are people who will ride on your behalf – good people belonging to all worlds, and for the purpose of today, most importantly, black men and women who won’t let an injustice against you go unreprimanded. Perhaps, as I’m expecting a little black girl of my own coming in to the world, this thing cuts me more sharply, to the quick. For right now, you should get to enjoy being a beautiful young woman who is already accomplishing amazing things in the world. Love made you and you are made of love. Keep this in your pocket. Fish it out when you need it. You’re going to need it again and again.
You are beautiful.
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An open letter to the Onion and Quvenzhane Wallis by Roger Bonair
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