Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

378 // PATRICIA J. WILLIAMS
lem—over and over and over again—I mean there were a lot of jokes flashed on
the screen, and lots of precious TV time was given over to Donahue's long litany,
while the audience tittered and giggled its way through this opening volley. It
was significant, I think, this tittering: after each joke, the cameras focused intently
as a dentist's drill upon the stunned-rabbit faces of the audience, an audience
caught in this not-quite-sure-how-to-respond mode that implicated them as they
struggled to be good sports while being broadcast live to millions of people. It
was a marvelously assimilative moment, like children trying to decide how to be
seen at their best. Smile? Frown? Which is the posture of belonging? So they tittered.
Nervously.
There is a real risk of destructive impact caught in the power of jokes that
make fun of the supposed characteristics of historically oppressed or shunned people.
Of course all humor depends on context, but, if it is possible to speak generally,
1 think that such jokes too frequently are the enactment of a kind of "marking"
process, in which communities are described, kinship delimited, the enemy
imagined.
The rest of the Phil Donahue show on Jewish American Princesses was a
panoply of squirmy ways of dealing with being marked. Donahue's guests included
not only a Real Live Jewish Princess, but a Black American Princess, an Italian
American Princess, and a WASP Princess as well. While they were all willing to
be called princesses of a certain flavor, they all denied that they were the bad kind
of princess. They negotiated this good princess/evil witch divide by at least four
different maneuvers:
first, there was the "role model" response: "Yeah well I'm proud to be pushy,
and I've made it into a positive attribute, look at how creative I am with the
lemons life has handed me. Doesn't bother me a bit" (even though an unfortunate
cost of this survival mechanism would seem to be a rather defensive, cynical
edge).
Second, there was the "But I really am a princess!" response, along with an
attempt to remove the sarcasm from the statement and be taken as literal, real.
The Real WASP Princess proclaimed herself as the inheritor of society's privilege
and all the other ethnic princesses as mere wanna-be imitations of herself; the
Black princess claimed to have been the real princess of a considerably smaller if
warmer realm, in having been the apple of her protective family's eye; and the
Italian American Princess claimed that her real name was "princess," at least that's
what daddy always said.
Third, there was the move to concede that, although some women may be like
that awful thing at the butt of all those jokes, "all Jewish women are not JAPs."
There was, in other words, a concession of the category as validly descriptive, and
then the attempt to exclude oneself from it. This is a powerfully defeatist move
because it concedes the category as given, and thereby allows the stereotype legitimacy.
The response to racist labeling is thus locked into the logic of merely