To: GPS Info who wrote (102055 ) 7/25/2013 10:08:18 PM From: Cogito Ergo Sum Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 217830 Somethings are slow to change eh ? modelminority.com Exposing Historic Musical Racism
KRON 4 News (San Francisco) June 4, 2003 Darren Brown was a young master's candidate at San Francisco State when he stumbled onto a collection of sheet music in which he would find his thesis. He called it The Heathen Chinee, from the earliest piece in the collection, a Bret Harte poem from 1871. "What first hit me," Brown says, "[is that] I saw how a lot of these songs offered a kind of social commentary on what was happening at the time. For example, Bret Harte's Heathen Chinee , I knew it was a poem, I never knew it was set to music." As Brown began digging deeper, he found a river of racism embedded in the sheet music bought primarily by well-to-do whites. "They purchased these songs as a result of seeing them performed in vaudeville theater," Brown explains. "And at the time - vaudeville is before TV and mainstream movies - it was the way how you get your ideas across. " The ideas in this collection were stereotypes at best, ugly racism at worst. Take the song, Since Ma is Playing Mah Jong . On the surface, it's a decorative cover that features a picture of Eddie Cantor, one of the most popular entertainers of the time. "It's about a non-Chinese family that's corrupted by mah jong," Brown explains, "and it turns the wife into a Chinese, and she wears a kimono - which is not Chinese - plays mah jong, starts cooking Chinese food and it drives the husband so crazy that he wants to kill 'chinks.'" In these pieces of music, Chinese are seldom referred to with respect. In addition to the title piece, there is The Artful Chinee, which appears to show a man stealing a pig. There is Chinky Chinee Bogie Man , in which a peaceful hamlet is threatened by the caricature of a Chinese man. There is Ching, Ching Chinaman with Lon Chaney made up to look Chinese. It is a recurring American theme, that those who were already here claimed the right to discriminate against those who came later. So people wrote the songs in this collection on Tin Pan Alley with names like Billy Rose and Con Conrad, Eve Unsell and Louis Gottschalk, all playing the same tune. "That Chinese are not American," Brown explains, " that they don't contribute to society in positive ways." This, although the people being portrayed had built the railroads, grown the produce, mined the gold. But by the mid-1870s, with more than 50,000 Chinese workers in California, sentiment turned against them. And that social current is reflected here, in the music. "In Bret Harte's Heathen Chinee , there's a line that says the country's ruined by Chinese labor. So right there, it's obviously political." It would be nice to think that all of this is a songbook nobody sings from anymore. But Darren Brown says that's not true. In fact, he is finding some of the same stereotypical images of Chinese-Americans in music being written today. "You see videos on MTV," Brown says, "that utilize a lot of stereotypes of Chinese or Asians in general that have been around for years." How ingrained the attitudes are was highlighted not long ago when superstar basketball player Shaquille O'Neal uttered a racial slur against newcomer Yao Ming of China. Or when trendy retailer Abercrombie and Fitch marketed t-shirts that outraged Asian-Americans. It's that kind of casual, thoughtless racial attitude that Darren Brown hopes might become the topic of conversation because of his exhibit. "It's a sad situation," Brown says, "but hopefully shows like this can begin a dialogue on the process of how stereotypes arise and how they are used."ebay.com Weren't no better in Canada... I wonder why we are so smug up here sometimes...