An All Christmas Story
The holiday season is in swing, full of hustle and bustle. We rush to get presents wrapped with great care and play the role of Saint Nicholas to all children, everywhere. The commercial side of our celebration dovetails nicely with the religious observance it has come to be known as (although, in all fairness, certainly not as it originated centuries ago).
It is a season that serves to remind us of our dutiful obligation as Americans to observe that which is holy and honor that which is sacred. I will let you decide which sentiment — holy and sacred — is ascribed to what.
Children see themselves in those mediated images that signify the coming of Santa Claus, a white Christmas, presents and elves, reindeer, and the magic of the holiday season. Recently, a six year old girl wanted to find pictures that she could relate to of people engaged in a snowball fight, her favorite holiday activity. It was to her dismay that there did not exist one image of a snowball fight, online, with blacks in them.
A London-based advertising executive by the name of Nadya Powell was heartbroken to hear that the little girl, Sara, simply chose instead an image where the faces of the snowball fight participants was obscured, so as not to denote any race. Teaming up with several colleagues, Ms. Powell set about capturing new images, available online, of blacks engaged in the same celebration of the holidays as everyone else.
This attempt to normalize the holiday experience for blacks, is called the #ChristmasSowhite campaign. It is in keeping with the #OscarsSowhite movement launched a year ago, a movement that brought attention and focus to the issue of diversity in the movie-making industry and the lack of substantive, award winning roles for black, Latino, Asian, and other performers who are not mainstream white.
The labors of the campaign have yet to bear true fruit, although for those playing at home, actress Ruth Negga appears to be a strong contender for her portrayal of Mildred Loving in this year’s release, “Loving,” a retelling of the Loving v. Virginia 1967 Supreme Court decision that outlawed miscegenation laws that prevented interracial couples from marrying.
Do efforts like #Christmassowhite and #Oscarssowhite raise important social issues relative to the diverse nature of our culture and the lack of representation, in many aspects of society, of darker faces in media, advertising, and entertainment images?
Do these efforts further the divide between the races in America, with the right leaning “alt-racist” movement (to refer to this movement as being anything but dishonors the memory of 6 million Jews and others who were systematically murdered in World War II by a racial purist and madman, Adolph Hitler, or the 4,743 mainly African-American men, women, and children who were lynched in the United States between 1882–1968, all under the banner of heaven, Christianity, and racial purity) pursuing an agenda of exclusion and white power, to the exclusion of all others who refuse to lean toward their worst imagining of what we are as a people.
We have failed as a nation to fulfil the prophesy of the words so eloquently spoken by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in front of hundreds of thousands on the National Mall in 1963, “I have a dream that one day…little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”
We have failed to properly weave all of the elements of our citizenry, all of the hues, the browns, the blacks, the whites, the reds, the yellows, together into a multi-color tapestry that eschews race and no longer needs to fixate on such matters as to whether an image of children playing in the snow represent all of the races that make up the American landscape.
Because in a time where the seams of our country are tattered and our collective will to simply get along with one another is being tested beyond its limit, is it too much to simply let a child, any child, see themselves imagined in the hope and promise of the holiday season?
