this tweet is such a perfect encapsulation of what the brain trust on twitter considers activism at this point, i swear to god
- she was a child
- she was a child trapped in a legendarily abusive studio contract where she was being pumped full of drugs and sexually abused by producers
- what is the point? “think about this the next time you watch the wizard of oz”? and do what? this tweet is so pointless
- not for nothing but she was also a lifelong advocate of the civil rights movement and held a whole press conference to denounce white supremacist terrorism after the 16th street baptist church bombing
- there are politicians who did blackface in office right now
- judy garland has been dead for 50
slutty, sluttyyears
If you want to use this information to actually learn about minstrelsy I would recommend the chapter “Past Imperfect: Performance, Power, and Politics on the Minstrel Stage” from Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts by Brenda Dixon Gottschild. Gottschild covers the Africanist dance influence in minstrelsy, the re-appropriation of and resistance in minstrelsy by Black performers, the legacy of minstrelsy, and much more.
In a similar vein I would also recommend the Marlon Riggs documentaries Ethnic Notions, which covers anti-Black stereotypes in popular culture from the antebellum period through the Civil Rights movement, and Color Adjustment, which covers the representation of African Americans on television from its advent through the 1990s.
You’re not going to raise your consciousness by watching The Wizard of Oz and feeling bad that Judy Garland did blackface (in not just Everybody Sing, but also Babes in Arms and Babes on Broadway, for the record) because she was a minor under the thumb of her abusive stage mother and legally obligated to perform in these films because of her contract with MGM. Engage with the work of Black activists on the subject instead and think about or criticize how the stereotypes from minstrel performances still manifest in popular culture today in different forms.
this isn’t showing up in my replies because of the links so i’m boosting it, tumblr user thehours2002 is smart and thoughtful as always
part of activism is that the process of learning can be uncomfortable, because changing the world requires questioning things you take for granted and grappling with your role in an unjust system.
performative activism doesn’t understand that discomfort is a side effect, not the end goal, so it’s all about guilt. if you don’t reblog this you’re a bad person, this thing that’s popular as ~problematic~ and you should feel bad for liking it, etc.
doing that is way easier than doing activism, and telling people they’re Bad makes you feel morally superior and establishes you as Good, and so you get to have the performance of activism and wokeness without actually doing anything but making people unhappy.
this tweet (“think about this the next time you watch the wizard of oz”) pretty much states straight up that this performative activism is only about making you feel bad. like op says, it’s pointless. but that’s the point.
