SCRAPPY PRINCESSES AND ETHNIC ODDBALLS

 In the first part of TOTALITARIAN TOKENISM, I said that the essay-series would focus more on art than politics, though I had to set up some of the political background for the very idea of tokens. In that essay I concentrated only upon the political background for racial conflicts, but the series as a whole will address two other categories of conflict: those revolving around gender equality, which we usually label "feminism," and those revolving around sexual proclivities. The last of these three categories has no place in this essay, though, because sexual-proclivity conflicts essentially did not exist in the era I'm addressing: the era of 20th-century American art from roughly 1900 to 1960.                                                                                      

One might call this era "Before Tokenism," because there really wasn't an established practice of signaling one's virtue by appealing to marginalized groups. If the tendency did exist in politics, anything comparable in the fiction of the era seems nugatory, particularly in the new forms of media that blossomed during the 20th, principally movies, radio, comic strips, comic books and television. In that era as in eras previous, it was a given that creative authors wrote for the majority in most cases, and that meant that most American productions defaulted to the use of White characters, usually of Ango-Saxon extraction. This default in itself was not part of a dastardly scheme to keep "people of color" down, though there were specific narratives designed to promote racial disenfranchisement, as with Thomas Dixon's novel THE CLANSMAN. Dominantly the motive for authors to use White characters was that (a) Whites comprised the majority of the readership, and (b) White people in the real world had fewer restrictions on their behavior within many though not all possible story-settings. One may call this state of affairs a "status quo" but not entirely a conspiracy.                                                                                                                                       

 Nevertheless, White readers of the early 20th century were well aware that not all races or ethnicities dissolved into the melting pot of cultural assimilation. Though some ethnic characters outside the bounds of the Status Quo might be villainous, many were more on the level of "oddballs" who amused readers with their eccentricities. It's important to remember, though, that popular entertainment often targeted Caucasian characters as ethnic oddballs. In the BLACKHAWK cover above, the Chinese cook Chop-Chop-- whose status with the heroic pilots is ambivalent since he fought with them on the ground but did not fly a plane-- is clearly set up to look funnier than the other members. Yet some of the "straight" members evinced linguistic curiosities that was also used for humorous purposes, with Hendrickson the German expostulating "dunder" all the time or Andre the Frenchman making remarks about "mam'selles." Some racial and ethnic portraits were unquestionably as deprecating as those of Dixon's CLANSMAN novel, and Black characters in comics were drawn as almost non-human caricatures of actual Black people. But even if the majority of "ethnic oddballs" were not mean-spirited, the Status Quo probably discouraged a lot of authors from depicting ethnic types as anything but amusing curiosities. So in America there was hardly any movement against the Status Quo vis-a-vis ethnic depictions until the 1950s, though the larger wave of tokenism, good or bad, did not begin until the 1960s. We tend to remember the "good tokens" of the period, such as Alexander Scott of TV's I SPY, or The Black Panther as a member of Marvel's AVENGERS, because as I specified earlier, these "tokens" were unquestionable representations of the ideals professed by Classic Liberals. What the bad ones would be I leave open for speculation.                                                                                                                                 

Now the fictional emancipation of women followed more of a zigzag course. In the late 19th century there were a variety of prose fiction adventure-books so resolutely aimed at male readers that either women did not appear at all (Stevenson's TREASURE ISLAND, Verne's 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA) or women only performed minor functions. Doyle's 1912 LOST WORLD exemplifies the latter pattern. Reporter Ned Malone only becomes involved in adventure because the woman he wants to marry claims he's not adventurous enough, and when Malone returns, covered in glory, the jezebel has married an entirely ordinary suitor. But reading prose was a single-person experience, and it seems that both films and comic strips sought to impress female patrons as much as male ones. Thus, when LOST WORLD was adapted to film in 1925, a female lead was imported into the story, making the movie more potentially popular with feminine patrons by the inclusion of a strong romance angle. I would not define any of these "princesses in need of rescue" to be tokens of belief in feminine equality. and even the more tomboyish heroines like Sheena and Nyoka don't necessarily represent any such belief. Only the William Marston Wonder Woman might be fairly seen as a pure token, since her character incarnates Marston's beliefs about female empowerment-- though I tend to doubt most of the comic book's readers engaged seriously with the author's theories.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      I'm obviously skipping over many potentially pertinent examples in both of these categories, but this is only intended to be a sketch of the social realities of the Status Quo, which would begin to suffer its first real challenge in the decade of the 1960s.