The Race Is To The Swift...

Kudos to kansaschica for sending her spotlight to a story about Wal-Mart. It seems that one Jason Smith went to order "Planet Of The Apes: The Complete TV Series" from the retail giant and was offered a list of "similar items." Click Here for the story, featuring the actual graphics.

In case you're just skimming and don't have time to click and read the tale, the "Apes" similar items offered included:

"Introducing Dorothy Dandridge," the Emmy and Golden Globe winning HBO film starring Halle Berry as the famed actress.

"Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson," a Ken Burns documentary produced for PBS about the first African-American Heavyweight Champion.

"What's Love Got To Do With It," The Academy Award nominated biopic about the life of Tina Turner, starring Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne.

The story continues with the retailer immediately apologizing, calling it a "technical glitch," and then going to the extent of pulling down their "similar items" function altogether until they could determine what caused the "problem."

Sure enough, word travels fast, and people reacted with outrage to this.

My LJ friend kansaschica commented about the whole event with the following:

I would say it was awful as well, except for the fact that ordering Home Alone, or other non-apelike movies will get you the same recommendations.

Hello, people. Stop looking for racism where it doesn't exist. Seriously. Don't you have children that need tending, pets that need to be walked, dishes to be done, or anything else to keep you occupied, just like I do?

But then again, I've been told I'm a racist because I "can't understand" because I'm white.

Quick reminder--I'm not Aryan. I'm part Cherokee, part gypsy, and part Irish. And I never even thought there was a race issue with Jews until I heard that Racist George freak on the air. I'm a product of the midwest... where we really don't think about race, because, seriously, folks, it's just pigmentation of the skin.

What's interesting about this story to me is that I see several things happening on several levels and it's not all that straightforward.

First, it seems to me that Wal-Mart is despised by a lot of people, just on principle. It represents a lot of what many Americans see as a major problem with the country today. This gigantic retailer is at least partially responsible for helping to destroy mom and pop stores all across the United States, because, with its size and income, they can literally steamroll the competition, leaving themselves as a monopoly in a community. Yes, they can provide cheap prices on items, but the cost is to anyone that is unfortunate enough to own a retail business in the same neighborhood as one of their sprawling superstores. It is one of the big reasons why New York City does not want Wal-Mart within the city limits of the five boroughs. It does seem as though Long Island is going to get a Wal-Mart soon, though.

If you despise a company, you tend to look for its flaws. And if you find something, you want to trumpet it from the highest mountaintop. I'm sure that a major reason this story became so big, so fast, had less to do with "racism" per se and more to do with the fact that people want to knock this company down a few notches. Goliath came in and bumped off all other businesses in countless neighborhoods. Here's a special delivery rock from all the little guys you squashed on the way to being America's Favorite Store.

kansaschica makes a very reasonable point. The "suggested items" function could have produced the same results with any film or television program. Possibly. I don't have any emprical knowledge about this. I've never visited the Wal-Mart website, so I don't know what you would get if you did a search for DVDs. However, it does seem odd that all of the films associated with "Planet Of The Apes" would be these titles in particular. Why wouldn't the very first offerings be the two "Planet of the Apes" motion pictures: the original 1968 Charlton Heston epic or the 2001 Tim Burton "retelling?" Or perhaps any of the "Planet of the Apes" sequel films, which featured Roddy McDowell from the late 1960s and early 70s? Wouldn't that be a more obvious association with the title listed? How about the two previous "King Kong" films, the 1933 version with Fay Wray or the 1976 version with Jeff Daniels and Jessica Lange? There was no "Gorillas In The Mist," the biopic of researcher Dian Fossey which starred Sigourney Weaver. Where's that on the list? Or any of a series of Nature or National Geographic programs about the Great Apes.

I wish I could definitively say that this was not some little racist dig by someone working for the company, but I just can't do that. I don't know one way or the other. Maybe yes, maybe no. And I'm not saying that Wal-Mart is responsible for this, since disgruntled employees have been known to behave in outrageous ways for their own purposes, but still, people have lost their jobs for less.

The problem about looking at the racism issue from a Causasian point of view is that no matter how sympathetic people are about it, it's impossible to translate. Now, I don't want to make anyone feel guilty, or grab the thorny crown of martyrdom here. I just mean to state the facts. If you are white, or look white, life is different from those that do not. If you forgot about Hurricane Katrina, let this be a brief reminder. Life is simply not the same thing for everyone in this country.

Personally, I think we should get over racism too. I'm constantly amazed at how this hundreds of years old issue is still in our faces in the 21st Century! What does that say about OUR race? The Human Race?

But looking at this Wal-Mart story again, you have to be particularly big to shrug it off and say it's nothing if it relates to the essence of your being. One claim was that "television programming" was offered because the consumer was looking at a TV series on DVD. So, why did the theatrical "What's Love Got To Do With It" come up as a selection? And why did the company rep so quickly apologize for this if it was so innocuous?

Clearly appearances count for a lot in retail, and it appears that this is a less than arbitrary set of selections.

The heart of the matter is the "insult to injury" element that happens whenever something like this occurs. Let me try to put it in some sort of quick, cohesive historical perspective.

African Americans began their lives in this country as slaves. Their families were pulled apart. They were kept illiterate. They were forced to work and breed and do what they were told. When they were freed, they were afforded almost no rights, and they were constantly persecuted, frequently killed and certainly harrassed. When they finally received the rights that the rest of the human race had, their Caucasian counterparts had built companies and acquired great wealth. People were reluctant to hire brown skinned individuals for generations. Education was not easy to come by, and this helped to slow the growth.

As a result, many minorities got a bad start in life. And, just like in a football game, if you give up four touchdowns in the first quarter, it's tough to win, or get back to even, which is what we're talking about here, even with a lot of time left.

So, what we're dealing with here is a chronic problem and another apparent slight that happened along the way. Get over it, right? It's no big deal, right?

The reason people react isn't specifically because of this incident, or error or whatever this is. It's because they are living in a mess. Urban squalor. In some ways, it's just the Status Quo talking. As long as people need to have someone to consider themselves "better than," racism will exist. It's just an easy way to point to another person and say, "you're not the same as I am."

If your life isn't happy, anything that insults you will be magnified.

And there are a lot of unhappy people here. That's the other side of the coin that has turned this into a media story.

If only I could travel to Nikki's midwest, where race is just a pigmentation of the skin. I really believe that Nikki thinks, acts and conducts her life just that way, and that most of her friends and neighbors do the same. The unfortunate thing is Nikki and folks who think the way she does are not the only ones out there. There are a lot of people that still firmly believe that they are better because of their heritage, will allow breaks for people who "have the right look," and that leads to the vicious cycle things that have brought us where we are now.

The whole Wal-Mart and racism issue meet at the corner of CONTROL and POVERTY. Wal-Mart controls the marketplace in any area that it enters. They are just so big, they suck up all of the oxygen in the atmosphere, leaving other retailers gasping, choking and dying in their wake. The consumers that are desperately trying to save money so they can have some of the good things in life shop at Wal-Mart. Cheaper helps out the personal finances. But they are helping to ruin the economy of their areas by eliminating any alternative choices.

Meanwhile, racism doesn't allow people control of their own lives. They must "make do" with what they get, or struggle against incredible odds to succeed. Of course there are exceptions that prove the rule, but there are millions of people still stuck right where they are: in poverty.

So, what's the answer? How can we fix this? The answer is easy and crystal clear.

We can't.

I don't mean to sound like a defeatist or something, but realistically, there's no way to balance the ledger. It's never going to happen. As long as making money is the most important thing to people, as long as people continue to be "pre-judged" on sight, and as long as this country makes it more and more difficult for those that don't have to get, all of the politician's speeches, the media commentary and the corporate apologies will continue to placate, not to help.