I’m glad someone finally pointed out the racial upfuckédness of R. Crumb’s “Patton”. Most of the time Crumb’s blues material is presented as an antidote to his earlier embarrassing blackface material. Instead I see the blues stuff as a more subtle continuation of it. The thrust of Crumb’s late-60s “Whiteman” pieces was that whites are uptight, joyless, and neurotic while blacks are uninhibited and happy. (Whiteman can solve his personality problems by (1) completely giving himself over to primitive (that is, black) culture and/or (2) LSD.) In stories like “Patton”, Crumb depicts black people as more earthy and real than whites; but because he abandons the blackface caricature, critics don’t seem to notice the inherent racism in this fetishization of black authenticity.

The racist caricatures of Crumb’s late-60s work were often deployed in the service of satire. (That link is so not safe for work (unless you work for the Klan).) It was about laying bare all the ooky stuff buried in the psyches of white folks. It rubs our noses in the offensive imagery we’d prefer to sweep under the rug. Shocking us into confronting our racism is good and necessary, but the whole thing is still a little dodgy because it treats black people as objects. What’s important is not actual black experience but how white people feel about it. Furthermore, the intent does not negate the inherently damaging nature of that type of image.

Sad to say, even when satire was not involved, racist caricature was at that time simply his default mode of drawing black people, as it was for so many of the cartoonists who influenced him. (That link probably isn’t safe either, in case you didn’t guess.) I was honestly shocked to discover, looking at the bits of reportage he did for Help!, that in the mid 60s Crumb was capable of drawing black people as if they were human beings.

Incidentally, I find “That’s Life” (from Arcade #3; collected in R. Crumb Draws the Blues) more galling than “Patton”, and “That’s Life” is a clearer example of Crumb’s notion that it is only enlightened white folks who can appreciate authentic black music.

webjunk | comix | cartooning | ∞
2012-01-23 (Mon)