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[If something is "pure," you think] that it’s one hundred percent pure. Like pure granulated sugar, pure white bread. Meaning unsoiled, unsullied, undamaged, unconnected with dirt. So white people are “pure” and clean. And black people are “dirt.” If you want to get into the psychoanalysis of this, I think there is a very rich and interesting set of connections here dealing with anality and excrement. These associations echo in a frightening way in our cities. Some parts of cities are considered attractive and other parts are waste. It’s a bodily metaphor: you eat one part and you shit the other part. It’s not an accident, for example, that the environmental justice movement is focused on both toxic waste and race. If you throw people away and you throw material away, it is no accident that they are not separated: you just throw them away together. When I talk about purity, what I’m really saying is that there’s been an obsession with this question of white people not getting soiled.
Carl Anthony, from “Ecopsychology and Deconstructing Whiteness” in Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind
I’m sure who ever came up with the illegal (space) alien Halloween costume will fail to see the irony that the culture which views “illegals” (namely Mexicans) as dirty and contaminated has become alien itself (apparently the costume makers had a different kind of irony in mind). Carl Anthony, whose work bridges social justice with environmental issues, links “whiteness” with ecologically destructive attitudes. The abstract idea of a unified white culture in the US goes back to a time when European immigrants needed a way to solidify their identity against Native and African people. In doing so they took on terms like “purity” and “clean” to separate themselves from those that were perceived as “dirty,” “impure” and “diseased.” Anthony notes how these terms have also been associated with the difference between scientific cleanliness and nature.
So imagine my surprise when I clicked to the item captured above at MSNBC.com and found a “Germ Wipeout” banner ad for Clorox on the same page as an article about an illegal alien controversy. Remember that contextual ads are placed in relationship to article subjects and keywords (I just went back and got an HP ad instead. Hmmm). Oh the media gods can be so cruel, yet at times deliver the perfect “dialectic image” for us to explode. Coincidence or spooky? You be the judge.
Happy Halloween!!!
