”Ag no man.” That was my initial response on reading Barry Ronge’s comment about the movie, The Secret Life of Bees, in last week’s Sunday Times magazine.
Not because the critic called the film the ”classiest weepie of the year”. But because of a racial reference in his summary of the plot of this movie set in the United States.
This is what Ronge, one of the country’s leading columnists, wrote: ”A young girl [Dakota Fanning] goes on the run from her abusive dad. With her is a defiant young black woman [Jennifer Hudson], who is brutally beaten because she tried to register as a voter.”
You get the gist. The ”girl” he writes about is presented as race-less; it is only her pal who merits racialisation — and because she is black.
The ”girl” in other words, is the norm, from which basis what’s seen as different gets signalled. Invisible in Ronge’s sentence is the race of the ”girl”, but even if you don’t know Dakota Fanning, the semantics suggest that she’s white.
The result therefore is a sentence that comes across as constituting unfair racial discrimination, otherwise known as racism.
Ok, it’s not nearly as bad as erstwhile columnist on the Sunday Times David Bullard, who wrote that black people don’t care about their children. Yet it still resonates with racial referencing attuned to old-school South African journalism.
But there is another, contrasting, view that you can take on this matter. First, Ronge is not a writer questing for notoriety a-la-Bullard. Second, nor is he known for racism, be it blatant or subtle.
In the writer’s defence, it is relevant to mention race in the case of Hudson’s character, because it’s the key to the second part of the sentence. Blackness is registered to explain why she gets ”brutally beaten because she tried to register as a voter”.
From this viewpoint, Ronge’s racialising is far from unfair discrimination. Instead, his reference accords with the Sunday Times editorial code that ”racial identifications should be used only when they are important to the readers’ understanding of what has happened and why it has happened”.
Similarly, he has not transgressed the press ombudsman’s code of conduct about avoiding discriminatory references to people’s race. In this reading, therefore, Ronge has merely assessed that race is germane to the story. He certainly has not been artificially non-racial by ignoring how race is a factor in regard to the character’s experiences.
On the other hand, Ronge’s wording could have been different. The way his sentence is formulated has the one-sided effect of setting up the woman as ”other” to the girl — as standing out in an exceptional way.
In such discourse, a writer does not need to say anything about whiteness, because Fanning’s girl character is simply assumed to not be implicated in any racial significance — in contrast to Hudson’s one being black. This imbalance seems questionable.
A further danger in Ronge’s wording is that the adjective ”defiant” is tagged to ”blackness”, reinforcing the racial stereotype of black equating anger. This may be the line of the movie, but it encourages the simple notion that people do, and should, behave in terms of scripts of race, and that deserves questioning by a critic.
Ronge notes that the two characters end up on a bee-farm run by a third person, who is acted by Queen Latifah. Most readers probably know that this particular Queen Bee is black, but Ronge leaves us none-the-wiser to whether this has any significance to the meanings in the movie.
We learn, instead, that the three actresses do female bonding. That suggests that gender trumps other identity dimensions — which leaves race precisely where? Does it just vanish?
Many readers, of whatever racial outlook, will probably have no problem with what Ronge wrote. But perhaps he should have been more even-handed in his treatment of racial identities, and followed through on their meanings.
And there is an alternative to him saying a black woman was assaulted because she tried to register to vote. You could reference the identity of white racists who assaulted her — the people who most made her colour count.
Race often has a role, but what’s to be avoided is compounding it in journalism. That means not representing it inconsistently and at the same time, being careful to pinpoint why and when it gains relevance.