(Original photographs from stock.xchng, illustration by Laura Elizabeth Pohl)

If MTV were your only source of news of the outside world, I’m betting you would think racism was dead and buried.

After all, here is a channel where nearly every time a black man appears, he is cruising down the street in a nice German import, wearing enough silver and gold to open his own Tiffany and Co.

And he’s dancing with black girls, with white girls, with Latino girls, and with Asian girls. Watching MTV it seems the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a land where his four children would not be judged by the color of their skin has come to pass — so long as his daughters, once grown up, are willing to flash that skin for the camera.

When the fact is a young black male in urban America is more likely to be arrested near a BMW than driving his own, I wonder what is the message of this particular brand of MTV Multiculturalism, this Dionysian image of all colors coming together and celebrating materialism and conspicuous consumption?

It’s not just MTV.  It’s Will Smith movies, it’s Tiger Woods golf, and it’s Jackie Chan movies. Through all these images runs a common message that says, “Hey, we’re not so different after all. We’re all dancing to Nelly, aren’t we?”

But phrased another way, it can also go like this: “Hey, shut up and stop talking about your own race, we’re all trying to dance to Nelly here!”

The particular brand of multiculturalism has an explicit motive. MTV – a corporation like any other – is selling advertising dollars. To get the viewers, it gears its product – that would be Nelly, N’Sync, and the rest – towards a target audience. But the herd of consumers are not the guys from Nelly’s neighborhood; they are, demographically speaking, the affluent suburban teenagers who blare Nelly and Jay-Z out the speakers of their parents’ SUVs on their way to schools and malls.

To hook this audience, MTV packages its “multiculturalism” with as little actual “culture” as it can possibly manage. It sells its “black culture” – or its Asian culture or its Latino culture – not as it actually is for the blacks, but as it is perceived by the suburban mob. Blacks are “gangstas” and “players”, Asians are kung-fu masters, and Latinos are Spanish-speaking homeboys or big-booty women.

Where are the real ethnics? Walk into the ethnic organization of any diverse campus, and you’ll see communities of young people trying to define more authentic identities for their group.

In the Harvard Asian American community, with which I am most familiar, the range of ethnic activities is astounding. Artistically, we have dance troupes that do everything from traditional ribbon and fan dances to contemporary J-Pop and break dancing. Academically, we have the prestigious Harvard China Review, run mostly, if not exclusively, by Asians. Socially, we have groups for Chinese, Taiwanese, Hong Kong-ese, Southeast Asian, half Asian students, and more. Together, they plan panels, Boba tea nights, or entire dance formals.

One of our students is planning a campus-wide Asian American magazine; another group is pushing for a new Asian American major to be added to the curriculum. Just a month ago I ran a panel on Chinese migration, where international students whose families had moved to everywhere from Thailand to Belgium to New Zealand came together and talked about what it meant to be Chinese.

These are the acts of self-expression that any ethnic group prides itself upon. Just don’t try to find it on MTV. For all its profanity, MTV content, along with the rest of mass media, is innocuous stuff. It has to be, for the advertisers’ sake.

Mass media is “race blind,” to borrow a term from college admissions, if by being blind it can avoid controversy. In the 1989 song “Fight the Power,” Public Enemy raps, “Our freedom of speech is freedom or death / We got to fight the powers that be” and, decrying Elvis, “Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps.”

In contrast, all Nelly seems to cry out for is a pair of Air Force One sneakers. “I like the all-whites high tops strapped wit a gum bottom / there somethin’ bout them dirty that’s why I got ’em,” he raps. It’s the same beats, with very different souls.

This is the general trend with MTV Multiculturalism: It does not seek to challenge its audience;  rather, it is aimed at delivering to them whatever they want, whether it’s rap or basketball, with no guilt attached. It’s not “racist”: it emphasizes stereotypes – gangster or athlete – only as far as it is able to use them as marketing tools. Unlike political conservatives, it doesn’t really believe that blacks are less intelligent or that Asians can’t speak English. Rather, it shows them that way because of its audiences’ expectations.

When Abercrombie & Fitch put out a T-shirt depicting a slant-eyed Asian laundromat owner, Mr. Wong, with the punch line “Two Wongs don’t make a White,” it genuinely wasn’t trying to offend Asians. It was trying to sell T-shirts. That the message itself was offensive to a whole race of people seemed only a minor inconvenience.

Of course, it seems cultural critics have been screaming about the dumbing-down of mass media since the beginning of time. This essay is not the first and certainly won’t be the last to lambaste MTV. What is significant though is that ethnic groups are especially vulnerable to MTV. From the angle of discrimination, the more that MTV sells the slant-eyed Asian or the ghetto gansta, the harder it becomes, on the part of ethnic groups, to overcome those perceptions.

We are what MTV tells people we are, whether we like it or not. To illustrate the extent to which these stereotypes still float around the popular consciousness, one only has to look at the April issue of the popular men’s magazine Details. Within its pages, a piece entitled “Gay or Asian” explores the similarities between gay men and Asian men with such observations as, “One cruises for chicken; the other takes it General Tso-style.”

The magazine called it “satire,” yet I’ve not talked to anyone either gay or Asian who gets the joke. It is inescapable that as of yet, ethnic groups are still being defined in the popular consciousness primarily by their MTV depictions. That has to change.

From the angle of the ethnic communities themselves, the temptation of MTV’s money and fame begins to weaken those avenues of self-expression. All artists, regardless of their ethnicities, begin to converge towards the MTV ideal. Talented rappers in the future will write songs about their favorite sneakers; talented minority actors will give their greatest performances in pretending to be non-ethnic, that is, to be “white.” Stereotypes will be milked for their comedic value, but won’t be challenged by thoughtful films. And oh, forget Spike Lee.

We will see a culture where cheap media depictions obscure the difficulties in all race relations. Ignore for a moment the negative role models: the celebrities who play stereotypes or live them out in real life; those make dialogue about race hard enough as is.

There are still the ostensibly positive ones, the Tiger Wood’s and the Michelle Kwan’s, the people who we do look up and cheer for. But they too cover themselves in Nike swooshes and advertising dollars.

Michael Jordan, in the 1992 Olympics, covered himself during the medal presentation with an American flag. Why? Because he had a contract with Nike, and his U.S. Olympic outfit had the Reebok logo on it. The consistent message is this: “We, your heroes, have accepted the status-quo. We have prospered because of Nike and MTV, why don’t you do the same.”

The end result is a multiculturalism devoid of all value. The America of 2004 is in many ways in much better shape than any other period in its history. Legalized discrimination has waned, institutionalized racism is weaker, and race relations have improved significantly from the days when whites were setting dogs after their black slaves and burning houses in Chinatowns.

But as we emerge into a new era, will we be able to hold onto what is unique and different about ourselves? Can we preserve the shared understandings and values that come with being the members of marginalized communities, or will we sell out and pretend that we are not who we are? Given that race will always exist, and that racism will always be a problem, how can we define ourselves as “communities” – as groups with the solidarity to fight that racism – if our group identity becomes lost in the flood of MTV music videos?

The greatest accomplishment of American culture, it must be remembered, did not come from mainstream whites. Jazz came from a black culture that drew back on its long-standing and uniquely African traditions. It was a movement that came from a marginalized, but cohesive community, one that supported jazz during its nascent years and from which it drew its inspirations. The same could be said for Motown, for rock and roll, for hip hop. The white mainstream only came later on, to appropriate it and to market it, so that today, we have former N’Sync member Justin Timberlake donning bandanas and doing his best to look, well, black.

If we, the “ethnics” of America, are too quick to embrace MTV Multiculturalism, if we trade in our individual identities for one we saw in a Nike commercial, then we’ve bought a lot more than we’ve ever bargained for.

As Nelly would put it, “Oh why do I live this way / Hey! Must be the money!”

STORY INDEX

MUSIC >

Lyrics to Nelly’s “AirForce Ones”
URL: http://www.metrolyrics.com/lyrics/42069/Nelly/Air_Force_Ones

Lyrics to Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power”
URL: http://www.lyricsdepot.com/public-enemy/fight-the-power.html

MTV website
URL: http://www.mtv.com

PUBLICATIONS >

“It’s all in the details”
URL: http://www.harvardindependent.com/news/2004/04/22/News/Its-All.In.The.Details-670114.shtml

In The Fray Contributor