Django Unchained: House Slaves Like Stephan and the “Girls” of HBS

Tina and I watched Django Unchained over the weekend.

My take on it is that it is much closer to the reality of slavery in America than Gone With the Fucking Wind.

[pullquote]No matter how far up the bigots assholes you have your tongue in the end you are still a transsexual/transgender person.[/pullquote]The acting was brilliant. Samuel L. Jackson played the slimmest simmering stereotype of a house slave ever shown in a movie.  A Black person, a sycophant simmering ass kissing black man who hates other black people and has nothing positive to say about other black people.  Stephan in the movie bears a strong resemblance to Aaron McGruder’s character Uncle Ruckus, a self hating black man who first appeared in the comic strip, Boondocks.

Boondocks later became a somewhat controversial TV show of the same name.  There was a spin-off of Boondocks called The Uncle Ruckus Reality Show.

I’m not sure if it was actually shown here in the US.  I seem to recall having seen this character on SWIM.

Wikipedia describes the show as follows:

The episode begins inside of the BET headquarters with fictional president of Entertainment Wedgie Rudlin holding the Monday staff meeting on Thursday where he states he is the “new, super-duper smart, Harvard University-educated president of entertainment.” After asking staff members why he was hired, Rudlin says it’s time to take BET in a new direction. After firing a board member, Rudlin tells his staff to make “The Uncle Ruckus Reality Show” happen.

Following the opening credits, Uncle Ruckus is shown chronicling his life where his day typically starts at 4:45am and begins saying a prayer to “The White Man” & for blacks. Ruckus denies being black and states he suffers from “Re-vitiligo“, (the opposite of what Michael Jackson had), and applies an ointment composed of bleach and sulfur.

Ruckus then goes on talk about his shrines to his white heroes including John Wayne and George H W Bush. He also mentions he works 32 jobs, including bus driver (where he is ignored and insulted by the suburban kids. Uncle says that “these kids are pure human race”). Ruckus stops the Freeman brothers as they arrive to get on the bus, they’re the only kids that show him a shred of respect, from boarding and tells them, “This bus is for kids with a future!”

On arriving at J. Edgar Hoover Elementary, Ruckus is seen working as a janitor mopping the hall, bemoaning desegregation and ranting about black people in education and films. After school, Ruckus approaches Jazmine and asks if she is waiting for her father Tom, about whom Ruckus remarks to the camera, “He married to a white woman, lucky son of a bitch”. Tom arrives in a kilt and tells Ruckus of his Scottish heritage and how he took a test that revealed he was 32.5% Scottish.

Ruckus then visits a scientist and receives the results of his ethnic makeup. Midway through the scene, the action pans back to BET where Rudlin tells Deborah Leevil of his plan to start BET animation in order to destroy the minds of black kids at a younger age. A board member shows Leevil his creation: “Super Cyborg Mandigo Man”, with the script in flipbook form, showing a stick figure throwing a spear.

Leevil, unimpressed with the show not being evil enough, summons her associates, “Big Nigga” and “Crazy Bitch” to beat up the board member. The board member screams for Rudlin to save him, but his pleas fall on deaf ears. Leevil then asks about the Uncle Ruckus show and Rudlin tells her it is. Leevil issues a threat of killing, or at least serious injury.

On the show, Ruckus receives his DNA test results, which reveal that he is 102% African with a 2% margin of error. Following this, Ruckus retreats in a bed-bound depression and quits all his jobs and contemplates selling “crack” and doubts he has re-vitiligo and calls on the Freemans for advice on how to be black. Robert points out there’s nothing wrong with being black. In a sports store (probably Foot Locker), Ruckus complains about no shoes named after white men. Afterward, while getting his hair cut, Ruckus jumps to the defense of U.S. president George W. Bush.

I don’t know if self hating begins to describe this sort of pathology.

I do know I have a couple of people who make slamming me and a number of other TS/TG folks the main focus of their blogs.  Jennifer Usher and Ben Girl to name names.

I tend to view my being transsexual as sort of like having been born half Polish American, working class from a small rural town.  It’s part of my history more than my present.  For a while I got sucked into a variation on the game of self hating people who prefer the transgender label to the transsexual one.  Some of the Transgender Borg ideologues make that one really easy.

But then I realized that one was easy to ignore.  All I had to do was focus on equality and the right to dignity.

I put scare quotes on the word “Girls” in the title deliberately.  I’ve always found it a little strange to think of oneself as the creation or possession of a doctor who treated you.  It’s one thing to like a doctor, be grateful, have a rapport with a doctor and another sort of creepy Replicant like mode of thinking to describe yourself as the  one of X-Doctor’s “girls”.

It’s even more bizarre to have a history of describing yourself as “more than a transvestite and less than a transsexual” yet go on to claim a level of purity based on regurgitating every neo-Cazi, Christo-Fascist Rad Fem bit of anti-transsexual/anti-transgender filth one reads on the internet.

It is truly disconnected from the real world to think you aren’t part of the transsexual/transgender class that hated is directed at.

No matter how far up the bigots assholes you have your tongue in the end you are still a transsexual/transgender person.  You can play the role of an extermination camp Sonder Commando, but all it does is postpone the inevitable.

You may think you can hide behind aliases yet we are all visible now from before birth to long after death.  Particularly if we are on-line.

I’ve pissed off the HBS holes because I don’t buy their purity crap. I also don’t buy their hatred of every transsexual/transgender person who stands up for their rights and by extension for the rights of all.

Like Stephan in Django Unchained they are tools of the oppressor and when the shit comes down we know which side they are on.

[alert type=”info”]Cross-posted from Women Born Transsexual[/alert]