#398: Topher Florence, "Some of My Best Friends are Black" (2010)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUc0vbSlanM

I warned y'all up front that I, unlike a real rock critic, will periodically declare -- not just declare, defend -- the greatness I perceive in some goofy novelty song or other. I haven't done that to you until now, but we might as well dive in at the deep end. "Some of My Best Friends are Black" is a hip-hop song by nobody I've ever heard of; or as portrayed, a hip-hop song by an argumentative computer refuting the nobody-I've-ever-heard-of's offhand dismissal of a TV show. The computer briefly describes, in rhyme, each of the two dozen black characters to have a speaking part in the 10-season run of the sitcom Friends. For extra topicality, the song came out six years after Friends was canceled.

I will talk about the lyrics -- and, it turns out, about the entire culture of gender- and race-based criticism, the nature of human memory, and two of my favorite non-sitcom TV shows, whee! -- but the beginning of my case is simple. I think "Some of My Best Friends are Black" is ridiculously catchy.
This is subjective and unimpressive, but it matters, since otherwise I'd've listened to it once, smiled, and never thought of it again. You won't need too long to decide whether you agree,since it's old school hip-hop, with one looping sample under the verses, like Doug E. Fresh or Will Smith or Grandmaster Flash used to do it. The over-cheery melody behind the chorus is put through little production tricks for dramatic pacing, and there's whooshing/ burbling noises early as the computer is "formulating rhyme scheme", but basically you'll like it or you won't. The "computer" is, I think, an excellent rapper: its distorted mechanical voice clips or draws out words to convey many subtly different shades of pedantry, feigned wonder, sarcasm, indignation, and wry resignation. Topher's spoken interjections are integrated as carefully as any vocal harmony. These aren't arguments for greatness, but they're starting points.

Which leaves the choice of subject. We probably all agree -- not everyone in the U.S., but the few dozen of you who read my blog anyway -- that black Americans have good reasons to write songs about race. Experience tells me, however, that 

1. we don't all agree that songs should be about canceled TV shows, and 
2. we certainly don't all agree that TV shows or movies or novels should be analyzed for race or gender implications

The first point, in brief: of course some songs should be about canceled TV shows! Watching canceled TV shows is a sizable part of the active memory of most American lives. If you're an exception, marvelous, but then again, not everybody falls in love, not everyone goes through longing and/or resentful breakups, not everyone likes sex, and not everyone wants to dance and party and get down. Enough of us do that everyone accepts them as valid emotional touchpoints for songs.

But most of the things we experience don't involve deep passion or wild release, and we still manage to have strong feelings about them. Or, hell, weak feelings that still matter to us. So there's ample room for songs about pretty shoes, irritating co-workers, broken dishwashers, drywall installation, subways, and Subways. And, even moreso, about movies and books and TV -- which, among other things, help us share vicariously all that true love and lust and longing that we're supposed to be singing about to begin with.

The second point is more controversial. Where looking for race or gender implications gets troubling for people is that (a) "racism" and to a less-unanimous extent "sexism" are agreed to be negative words, but (b) passively racist and sexist assumptions permeate our society, so that they can be found almost anywhere. The immediate, arched-back-and-growling response to such analyses, then, is often to feel under attack: like one is being scolded, condemned as a terrible person, for liking the things one likes. As an extra bonus, some people who do these analyses *are* scolding and condemning, which is not surprising, since in any large group of people, some will be abrasive assholes. If you're feeling attacked, you will probably not stand there and say "You know, your sword is making some valid and interesting points in my abdomen there". It's not a response evolution rewarded back in the day.

But my favorite critics, while willing to attack work that is truly repulsive, are very good at making clear when they're working from affection. I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but the first six seasons (of seven) had nonwhite humans portrayed only rarely and only negatively; even before I'd ever encountered a blog, I thought that was fucked up. I'd also noticed that its "feminism" mostly gives strong roles to conventionally beautiful women with superpowers. Later people noticed for me how Buffy urges us to have more sympathy than we perhaps ought to for, e.g., Xander's use of a magic spell to invalidate consent issues, and his willingness to murder his female friend's boyfriend out of Friend Zoned jealousy, and his willingness to abandon a later woman he supposedly loves at the altar. Am I saying only bad people therefore would watch it? No; Buffy was funny, brilliantly characterized, well-scripted, imaginative, and dealt with a wide variety of growing-up issues and scenarios, doing a good job far more often than not -- perhaps more often than any other show in TV history. But it could have been much better, and by the time Joss Whedon was making Dollhouse, with its multiracial cast, he was ready to make consent and rape culture motivating issues of the show. Because, one assumes, enough people complained that some got through.

I love Doctor Who, but it's historically been a show about a highly educated white man who travels with all-too-interchangeable women to do good deeds for the natives. (With the exceptions of Barbara at the 1963 beginning of its run and Ace right before its 1989 cancellation, plus Romana during Douglas Adams's brief tenure in charge, every standout 20th-century "companion" was almost entirely a case of the actress -- Katy Manning, Louise Jameson, Janet Fielding -- overcoming dreadful material by sheer personality and acting.) One of its best-loved 20th-century episodes, the Talons of Weng-Chiang, which sparkles with wit and inventiveness, portrays Chinese people as vicious subhumans and the working class as figures of low comedy, yet fandom is far less likely to object to that than to one unconvincing monster costume halfway into its running time. In the 21st century, Who's first showrunner tried to fix its racial record and turn the female companions into characters with actual rooted lives and personalities; its second has done even more work on companions-as-people, and gone far out of his way to establish that actually, the Doctor doesn't have to be white or male next time he regenerates, because that stuff is as fungible as height and hair color. Yet the show is still attacked on race and gender grounds; why not? It's still deeply flawed. It can be attacked with love, because it's a funny and dramatic adventure show that transforms itself into something new every couple of weeks, and that's a great flawed base to begin with.

"But it's fiction", you might argue. "Everyone knows it's all made-up stories, so why not just enjoy them?" Because that misunderstands the human brain: our brains are built on stories! We react more powerfully to a picture or story of one hungry child than we do to frightening statistics about child hunger. (We also react more powerfully to a picture of a smiling woman on a donation-seeking mailer, whether her smile is real or fictional, for that matter.) We remember stories even after they're debunked. Our brains are very poor at tagging information to account for their source; I've looked futilely in the wrong places to find articles I know I read any number of times, which is why I try to just copy/ paste everything I think I'll want later. For that matter, our brains will alter our memories based on simple prompts: witnesses will describe very different car accidents if asked about the cars "smashing" than about them "hitting", and can be manipulated into or out of selecting photos of suspects as the person they saw. Meanwhile, I have a variety of minor random beliefs that I'm not sure if I believe or not because I have no idea where they come from.

(Example: I know I read some science thing once that convinced me that spontaneous pregnancy without any sex occurring is a real thing that occasionally can happen to women. I even remember running math through my head to determine that in a world this big, it probably happens 5 or 10 times a year, which even after you account for many women being sexually active anyway, presumably leaves 1 to 3 severely confused pregnant women every year. Was my source good? Is this real? I apparently thought it was twenty years ago, but other than that I have NO FREAKING CLUE.)

When it comes to race and gender, stories drive the differences between us. Lise Eliot's book Pink Brain, Blue Brain is an exhaustive, patient, careful, and in-depth book about research into gender differences; it's extremely clear that at least puberty, there are only tiny biological differences between boys and girls. Charles Murray tried to use statistics to prove that blacks are genetically less intelligent than whites, but more than half the IQ difference disappeared in twenty years after the Civil Rights Act -- twenty years which did not foster immediate equality of racial treatment -- and by the way, average IQ *in general* has been rising three points per decade over a century, forcing a constant resetting of the scores to hide the worrisome fact that the tests claim we're all geniuses now, or at least that all our grandparents were morons.

Which doesn't mean you're wrong to see boys doing boy things, girls doing girl things, and the races separating themselves out even beyond all the assistance that zoning, unequal school funding, and white flight provide. What it does mean is that children are all ready to do the categorizing themselves, based entirely on observation and stories. In chapter three of NurtureShock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, we learn that American six-year-olds who are given two large stacks of facial photographs to sort into two piles -- and left alone with no guidance in terms of how -- will sort by race 2/3 of the time, often to the horror of their parents. (1/6 will sort by apparent sex, 1/6 by other idiosyncratic schema.) The good news from the chapter is that parents can have a positive effect by talking openly about race, including the reality of racial discrimination, with their kindergarteners; I read the book in time to do so, happily. The bad news is that they're watching and learning all the time, and they're noticing the ways girls and boys, and whites and blacks, seem to be very different. As social role-seekers, they will tend to conform to the patterns they see (and especially from ages 4 to 6, be very forceful in urging their peers to). They're also noticing that whites and boys seem to be more powerful, richer, more successful; and as a default, without firm training otherwise, a child's just-world hypothesis will teach him or her that this must be the natural way of things.

So it matters who we see doing what. One of my favorite politicized critics, Jack Graham, questioned why (for example) the show Luke needs to show so unrealistically many black female police officers: isn't it condescending, he wondered, to think black girls need TV representation to cast themselves into stories? They probably don't, I replied: what's important is, they provide examples *for white men*.

Everything we've researched about hiring and promotion decisions show they're heavily image-based: an interviewer (and before that a mentor, a school counselor, a teacher...) has a mental image of what a doctor or a police detective or a cellist or a quarterback looks like. The job of onscreen affirmative action is to give people in power -- often still white and/or male -- more varied, more open-minded mental images to act upon.

More dodgily, there's also merit in showing people and institutions being more progressive than they are: people are also more inclined to engage in bad behavior they see as common, *even if that behavior is condemned*. It's why it was disastrous when the U.S. National Parks briefly tried signs asking visitors not to vandalize the parks by proclaiming the behavior was too common: on a subconscious level visitors went "Oh, that's normal, is it?", and it became several times as common until the signs were removed. It's also the reason Trump's victory is scary even beyond its catastrophic policy implications: the very fact that he "won" immediately gave people prone to racist/ anti-Semitic views the sense that it's okay to express them aggressively now.

And so, we circle back to our novelty song. Little of this is in there, but so much of it is implied. Why does it matter that Friends portrays New York City as a place for white people whose stories matter, where black people provide very occasional comic relief? It matters in the sense that Friends rents space in the brains of tens of millions of people, and it doesn't pay even low controlled prices to do so. It's watched as fiction, but its images are not therefore stored much differently, and these images are perhaps worse, less kind, less just guides to the world than they could have been. "A little bit" racist, the song decides.

Does that mean the show is vile? Not at all! Nobody able to catalog all those characters is trying to pretend they weren't fans. Friends had good aspects, judging by the couple of dozen episodes I watched, and wasn't unusually over-white at a time when to watch black folks in TV you had to watch UPN and have Aaron (Boondocks) MacGruder make fun of your poor taste. Now the Wire had its turn as a brilliant hit drama, and we have people-of-color-centered good shows like Jane the Virgin, and Insecure, and Atlanta -- after no shortage of complaints, funny or angry, about their lack.

Perfection is not with us. But kvetching a little along the way can help. And doing it while fond and smiling is, when possible, the happiest of methods.