The subject of the first sentence in the first chapter of Who We Be: The Colorization of America is the last person you’d expect to be featured in a book about race in America—Family Circus cartoonist Bil Keane. In that first sentence, the whitest cartoonist in America (with the possible exception of Garfield creator Jim Davis) responds to the election of Barack Obama in 2008 by picking up a phone and calling his friend, cartoonist Morrie Turner. With his multicultural strip Wee Pals, Turner became in 1960 the first African American cartoonist to publish a strip nationally. Turner couldn’t bring himself to watch the election results because he was positive Obama would lose, but together, the octogenarian cartoonists watched what they believed to be the dawn of a new day in American history.
Chang is deeply interested in visual representation; he uses the Keane anecdote to launch into a history of the racism, “caricature, and ridicule” of the funny pages:
For Blacks in the late nineteenth century, and most of the twentieth, that meant the antic humiliation of slaves, mammies and Sambos; for Chinese, the exploitation of alienness. Cartoon Blacks and Chinese were not representations of blackness and yellowness. They were representations of whiteness—the laughs were found in what whites were not.
In the first chapter, Chang uses the funny pages to illustrate the evolution of race in America, from Turner’s early days as the sole black voice in some newspapers to his mentorship of Boondocks cartoonist Aaron McGruder. The rest of the book deals with the different ways the American people have illustrated race, from advertisements to sitcoms to the conservative meme-ification of President Obama as the menacing, disfigured Joker from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. Who We Be documents both the imagery and the reality it’s mirroring, bouncing between Nixon’s Southern strategy of openly courting racist white Southern Democrats who were outraged by the civil-rights movement and Pepsi’s mid-1960s framing of the youth movement as a “Pepsi generation” to combat Coke’s stodgy public image. (Nixon won in the short term, but Pepsi’s willingness to advertise in magazines like Ebony proved to be a better long-term strategy.)
Advertising proves to be a fertile source of information on the ideological differences between races in America. Chang focuses on Henry Allen Bullock’s marketing study from 1961 that asked Southern whites and blacks to complete the sentence “If I could change the world, I would…” Can you guess which of the following frequent responses belong to the black respondents, and which belong to the whites?
Here’s one set:
“Make it so that people would not park in front of my driveway.”
“Stop the neighbor’s children from cutting across my lawn.”
“Destroy the United Nations.”
“Change the Supreme Court.”
And here’s the other:
“Make all people the same.”
“Establish brotherhood.”
“Do away with war.”
“Break down segregation.”
Bullock’s conclusion was that African Americans “want to be identified with the general American society and all its peoples, while whites want to remain generally acceptable but particularly exclusive.” Chang reports Bullock’s answer to bridging the gap between those very different responses was that “consumption was key in helping Blacks overcome a sense of inferiority and attain a sense of security.” This theory took hold among marketers in the 1970s, and Who We Be documents its mixed legacy, which still reverberates in the media today.
Like Chang’s excellent history of hiphop, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, Who We Be is a frank and conversational exploration of a facet of history that deserves more attention. But the events of the past month make it feel like a chapter or two have been torn out of the end of the book. Who We Be‘s climactic chapter focuses on the Trayvon Martin case and the nation’s frustrated reaction to President Obama’s response to George Zimmerman’s not guilty verdict—conservative whites were offended by their perception that Obama made the story all about race, while African Americans were sad that he didn’t mount a stronger defense against the inexcusable institutional racism of Florida’s Stand Your Ground laws.
Chang is such a talented cultural critic that you somehow expect Who We Be to soak in current events and synthesize them as they happen. Even though it’s physically impossible for a title published in late October to contain a chapter about the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of Ferguson’s unrest or the aftermath of Eric Garner’s choking death, Who We Be ultimately feels unfinished. 