“Get ready for the pain boy! The pain train is commin’! Whoo whoo!”-Terry "Terrible Terry" Tate: Office Linebacker
When I read through this week’s blogging task, I immediately, and I mean IMMEDIATELY, thought of Reebok’s “Terry Tate Office Linebacker” series of advertisements originally airing during the 2000 Super Bowl. For years after their original airing, this series of commercials commercials, as well as the very persona of Terry Tate himself, continued to strike my funny bone so intensely that viewing them became a routine while at college parties, hanging out with friends, and / or when I just needed a quick laugh. However, after reading chapter 5 of our course text and further reflecting on what I’ve learned about critical literacies throughout my program, close analysis of Reebok’s 2000 representation of Terry Tate both shape and reflect a highly prejudiced set of assumptions and ideologies regarding African Americans. More specifically, the assumptions that African Americans are inherently efficient at asserting power through violence, fear, and intimidation, and the resulting ideology that this natural ability can "pay off” / be productive if it is controlled / utilized by someone perhaps inherently more in control of themselves and / or intelligent. Furthermore, close analysis of these commercials may reveal the underlying ideology that African American’s need to be / should be controlled because of these inherent qualities; if not controlled, they may threaten to challenge the current white status quo vs. support and perpetuate it. After thinking about Terry Tate, I continued to be reminded of additional examples of African American's represented through this ideological lens including the The A-Team's B.A. Baracus and The Green Mile's John Coffee. Analysis and discussion of each follows.
For those of you who have not viewed the commercials and particular character of Terry Tate (played by Rawson Marshall Thurber) that I’m talking about, let me give you a little more background information. In the fictional reality of the series of advertisements, Ron Felcher, white C.E.O. of the Felcher & Sons corporation (a faceless / purposeless corporation as the viewer never really understands what the company actually does other than stereotypical office work), decides that employee productivity, moral, and the corporation's resulting business are suffering. To “fix” the situation, Felcher's strategy (presumably a well thought out strategy as his fictional status of C.E.O. encourages the viewer to perceive him as a competent business man) is to hire Terry “Terrible Terry” Tate, an extremely large and muscular looking African American man. When brought into the company, Flecher bestows upon him the official title / role of “Office Linebacker.” Terry Tate’s job at Felcher and Sons is very simple; if someone is spotted being “unproductive” during his patrols around the office, Tate delivers a healthy dose of both physical and verbal violence, or what he specifically refers to as "pain," to motivate them to get back on task. Examples of Tate’s overall role in the corporation, as well as his method of physical and verbal violence, can be viewed in the video embedded bellow (3:41).
After you view the short clip, consider specifically how the character of Terry Tate, as well as his boss and superior C.E.O. Ron Fletcher, are represented. In addition to Flecher initially hiring Terry Tate because of the competency with his violence-based "skills" as a motivator, Terry Tate considers himself to be born for the job / role:
"I am an enforcer, man. Don’t nothing go down in my house. It’s what’s in the heart baby. Sure I check a few fools. I give ‘em the pain. But sometimes it’s about intimidation you know. (Laughs). It’s mind games... I just do my job man. I do what my God given abilities allow me to do and I thank Jesus Christ for it every single day. And do I enjoy what I do? (Laughs). Hell yeah!”
Through this specific language, Terry Tate not only accepts, but completely embraces his efficiency with violence, intimidation, fear, and pain as his natural, God-given ability / purpose in life. Although the viewer sees Terry Tate using this violence to exercise control over others (e.g., his office coworkers), his ridiculous title and role of "Officer Linebacker" / enforcer are given to him by his boss, the stereotypical middle-aged, highly education, upper class, white male leader figure. While Terry Tate feels a tremendous sense of self-satisfaction in response to finding a niche in the world perfectly suited to his God-given abilities, his white superior is using him for the purpose of further controlling his subordinates. In other words, although it looks like Terry Tate is the one in control of others, the white C.E.O. exercises his control and leadership through Tate. Terry Tate is nothing more than a tool for the white C.E.O's control. The power he feels that he has over his environment / world is a skillfully crafted illusion.
Also, further consider the representation of C.E.O. Ron Fletcher. In the commercial, the viewer never sees Fletcher working with his subordinates. Instead, the viewer sees isolated shots of him seated behind his desk, hands folded, explaining in an even, calculated tone, with his framed degree clearly displayed over his right should, sitting in his fancy leather chair... his decision to utilize Terry Tate. For example, Felcher is represented as an experienced, competent, and strategic businessman as he cites measurable employee improvement following Terry Tate's employment: “Since terry has been with us, our productivity has gone up 46%. We’re getting more from our employees than ever before.” In other words, if not for Felcher's control, insight, strategic planning, and control of Terry Tate, the viewer may perceive Tate as the stereotypical "dangerous / menace" African American vs. a productive employee. Without Felcher's control, Terry Tate's violence might run the risk of destroying Felcher's power vs. perpetuating it. In other words, the viewer might perceive that Terry Tate is "hurting" the workers vs. helping them as a colleague to "increase their productivity."
In one of the later clips of the series, Felcher decides that if one office linebacker had such an impact on office efficiency, hiring another one would do absolute magic. Putting his plan into action, Felcher "drafts" another employee; Courtney Cate, white Office Linebacker.
The viewer then sees Terry Tate and white counter-part Courtney Cate blast people around during their patrols of the office. However, by the end of the clip, the C.E.O. feels that Courtney Cate's "skills" aren't "refined" enough to "do the job." In other words, he is not acting violent enough. As a result, Courtney Cate is transferred to the less busy Felcher and Son's European office to "hone" his "skills." Although Courtney Cate used, accepted, and embraced violence as his God-given gift identical to Terry Tate, only the African American Tate was taken seriously and considered violent enough for the job by the C.E.O. For example, look back to the first clip where the anonymous white, male worker pleads with Tate for his safety: "Please don't hurt me! Please don't hurt me! (Starts crying)." Because the viewer understands that the African American Terry Tate is "just performing his job" for the good of the company under Felcher's control, they don't take the employee's pleas seriously. What if the viewer did not see Felcher's and / or Courtney Cate's contribution to the commercial and relationships to Terry Tate? Would they perceive Reebok's representation of Terry Tate as a stereotypical violent African American menace? Or a hardworking, loyal worker and contributor to society?
"Answer me before I knock yo' head right off yo' shoulders!"
-B.A. Baracus
Terry Tate Office Linebacker is not an isolated representation of African Americans as inherently violent beings that need to be controlled. Another popular character represented in such a way is the A-Team's B.A. Baracus played by Mr. T. In fact, the similarities between the representation of Terry Tate and B.A. Baracus are startling. On the level of their specific language use alone, Tate discusses his delivery of "pain" to "fools," while B.A. Baracus uses identical language as he brings "pain" to "suckas" and "fools." Also, identical to Tate, B.A. Baracus is represented as not only accepting, but completely embracing his efficiency with using violence to get the job done and get the A-Team through another ridiculous mission. Just like Tate, any form of talk and / or negotiation takes a back seat to either physical or verbal threats as though they literally come naturally. Finally, focusing on his image alone, B.A. Baracus is represented as exotic, tribal, and / or uncivilized (his hair style, jewelry, facial expressions) in comparison to his "normal / civilized" looking white peers (direct your attention to above images). Like Terry Tate, B.A. Baracus does not fit your description of an average / normal person - even their very appearance (looking big, "wild," and so on) is crafted to portray violence, primitiveness, fear, intimidation, and so on.
Like Terry Tate, B.A.'s violence needs to be mediated by an external force (the remainder of the A-Team) in order to be perceived by the viewer as productive / useful / good to the larger group vs. simply a violent menace. For example, for those of you who aren't fans of the A-Team (my God my nerdiness is coming out in the blog posts), B.A. is deathly afraid of flying. When a mission calls the A-Team to a location in the world reachable only by plane, B.A. absolutely refuses to travel, threatening his peers with physical or verbal violence if they push the issue too far. As a result, the ONLY way that the rest of the A-Team can get B.A. on a plane is to either knock him out, drug him, overtake him, or otherwise control him with force in order to get him to the mission location and later utilize his brute strength to their advantage. Bellow are a series of clips from across the show highlighting the frankly violent, controlling, and disempowering methods that were used by the remaining white members of the A-Team to get B.A. on a plane. As an extreme (or extremely unrealistic, however you want to look at it) example, B.A.'s unconscious body is shown being thrown from a plane with a parachute in order to get him safely to the ground! (YouTube user disabled embedding for some reason, so you'll have to follow the link if you're interested).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zgQGfBOnh8
"Why, they's angels. Angels just like up in heaven"
-John Coffee
Although certainly not the last example of the phenomena that I'm focusing on, I'd like to discuss one more popular media representation of an African American who needs to be controlled because of his natural, God-given abilities. Adapted to film in 1999, Stephen King's The Green Mile tells the story of John Coffee, an African American wrongfully accused of the rape and murder of two young girls. However, there is something extremely unique about the character of John Coffee; he has magical powers. In addition to John Coffee being represented as hulking, violent, exotic, and so on exactly like Terry Tate and B.A. Baracus (notice how Coffee literally dwarfs the white prison guards with his girth and size in the above image), Coffee has the ability to read people's minds, thoughts, and emotions, transfer his thoughts and emotions to others via his touch, and literally suck the life out of people via bugs that magically come out of his mouth.
However, it's important to point out that some of the previously mentioned assumptions are challenged as John Coffee is represented as a "gentle giant" figure despite the powers that he has. Unlike the representations of Terry Tate and B.A. Baracus, John Coffee is portrayed as being extremely meek, mild, and good at heart. In fact, John Coffee tries to use his powers for good as he desperately tries to save the little girls he was accused of murdering. The stereotypical representation of the naturally prejudice white male figure is also bucked as the white prison guard Paul Edgecomb decides that Coffee is a gift from God, and therefore is beautiful and deserves life. However, Coffee himself requests that he be executed! In addition to the prejudice society who accused him presumably because of his race, size, and presence at the crime scene (where his attempt at resurrection was mistook for murder and rape), Coffee himself believes that he is simply too powerful to "fit in" with the rest of the world. Coffee acknowledges that no force in the world can control him, embracing death to "even out" the great imbalance in power that he perceives. Embedded bellow is the extremely moving scene were Coffee is led to the execution he himself asks for. Overall, despite John Coffee being represented as an inherently gentle vs. violent African American, the above ideology remains intact as he acknowledges the world's inability to control him.
Out of all of these examples, Michael Clark Duncan's portrayal of John Coffee is the ONLY representation of African Americans that does ANY work to challenge common assumptions, asking the viewer to instead ask themselves questions such as: is this right? Does John Coffee deserve this? Do we treat all African Americans in this way? Do we treat all people who do not perfectly align with the accepted norm / status quo in this way? Is this what we want as a society? Is this what we want to teach our children? However, for the remaining two examples, I feel pity for Rawson Marshall Thurber and Mr. T. who decided to star in the roles of Terry Tate and B.A. Baracus respectively because either 1.) they couldn't see / understand the prejudice in the ways that they are being represented / choosing to represent themselves, or even worse 2.) they could see /understand the prejudice and committed to the roles anyways because they were persuaded with the right dollar figure.
At the conclusion of my analysis, I can't help but ask myself, where does / should change actually start? Although I consider myself an individual of pretty high moral standing, I'll be honest; if the price were high enough, I cannot guarantee I would continue to hold fast to my current moral codes. If actors, models, graphic designers, marketers, and other people who make a living off of the representations they produce can be bought into representing WHATEVER is asked of them regardless of their personal morals, values, and beliefs, is focusing change on underlying racial ideologies futile? Or should this change be focused elsewhere? At our economy? At our consumer lifestyle? I know that these systems are interlocking, and that there is no "answer" to such questions, but I think we should be thinking about questions like these as educators.
Finally, to prove that viewers do indeed internalize and perpetuate these, and many other, media representations whether it be race, class, gender, sexuality, and so on as objective reality, check out this piece of Terry Tate fan fiction. "Jackass Generation," oh how many laughs you give to me...
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PART TWO
Other disciplines that represent the phenomenon I've chosen are the fields of criminal justice / rehabilitation and public health. The link bellow will direct you to a short, easily readable document titled "Race, Ethnicity, and Health Care" produced by the Kaiser Henry J. Family Foundation. Although I understand that this source leans to the public health vs. criminal justice / rehabilitation end of the spectrum, the specific statistics and discussion I found square beautifully with a general discussion of each discipline.
http://www.kff.org/minorityhealth/upload/7541.pdf
If you look at the pie chart in the lower-left column of the first page, notice that young, African American males represent approximately 14% of the American Population (as of 2004). However, as you read on, this source states that young, African American males represent over 40% of the prison population, 7 times that of young, white males. Although I'm not necessarily a numbers person, another anecdotal resource that I found states that approximately 10.4% of the ENTIRE African American male population ages 25 to 29 were incarcerated in 2003 (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0881455.html). In short, It is a gross understatement to say that these numbers are startling.
I would like to think that the criminal justice / rehabilitation system exists, and that people make the choice to enter this particular system, because they have the underlying assumption that individuals who have committed offenses can in fact be rehabilitated and are still "good" human beings. Unfortunately, MANY individuals both within and outside of the rehabilitation system perceive such research findings as the objective evidence that African Americans as a group are IN FACT an inherently violent group of people through an illusory correlation; "If 10.4% of African Americans end up in prison, they surely must be more violent!" As a result, the assumptions and ideologies discussed throughout this blog continue to be accepted / perceived as objective "truths" about our realities. The representations I've included and analyzed throughout PART ONE this posting really make a lot of sense when you place them side-by-side with this illusory correlation; if it is indeed accepted as the "truth" that this is the way this particular group of people simply "are," they will continue to be represented as such, keeping them in the subordinate position perceived as natural for them within our society.
However, direct your attention to some of the other figures found in the Kaiser Foundation article:
-The unemployment rate for young African American men is over twice the rate for young white, Hispanic and Asian men.
-In addition, fewer African American men between the ages of 16 and 29 are in the labor force compared to white, Hispanic and Asian men in the same age group. Over 20% of young African American men live in poverty compared to 18% of Hispanic, 12% of Asian and 10% of white men.
-Fewer than 8% of young African American men have graduated from college compared to 17% of whites and 35% of Asians.
-And the list goes on and on.
Similar to sociology, the discipline of public health assumes that disadvantaged people are at a disadvantage in the first place not because of any personal / natural traits (e.g., being unmotivated, unintelligent, unhealthy, it's what they "deserve"), but because they are in fact put at a disadvantage by a larger interlocking system of oppression designed to exploit them. As a result, ideologies surrounding the discipline of public health include striving together with other disciplines and people to research and understand forces / systems of interlocking oppression in order to raise the social status of disadvantaged people / promote equality because they "deserve" more access to resources (e.g., medical care, employment, education, health specific education, and so on), vs. working to keep them oppressed because they "deserve" less access. The images bellow powerfully represent this ideological difference between the discipline of public health and the overall popular media. To explore this difference, contrast the bellow representations of African Americans generated after an anecdotal google search of the very term "public health" to the images posted in my PART ONE analysis:
In contrast to the images used in PART ONE of this posting, African Americans / marginalized people here are represented as equally intelligent, capable, useful, and otherwise equal to there white peers. They are not represented as violent, hulking, abnormal "others," but normal equals and human beings.Unfortunately, the creators of popular media texts don't appear to adhere to these particular assumptions and ideologies when representing African Americans (as well as other marginalized groups) in the media. In my opinion, the reasons behind this trend are very simple as well; it takes some brain power and effort to question and try to understand the complexities our reality. By nature, human beings accept / take the path of least resistance, finding it much easier to accept / support the already in place status quo vs. critically analyze, challenge, and evaluate it against complex ideas of equality, justice, and so on. Rather than asking "Is this way of life promoting what I think is just, fair, equal...?" it is MUCH, MUCH easier to say "Well, it's just the way it is, what can I do?" And when you mix in the almighty dollar, people become even more complacent, including the people / groups who are the very objects of discrimination!
To conclude this extremely long posting (thank you so much for reading), this is why I decided to put forth the work to go into the field of teaching, as well as support media studies in general; it is my goal to give students the tools to critically identify, question, reveal, and evaluate the underlying assumptions and ideologies of our complex world in order for them to judge whether or not they are compatible with where they want to "end up" in this life. As a teacher, it is not my job to teach them where I think they should "end up." I have my agenda, and they have theirs. However, I do believe that it IS my job to provide the tools necessary for them to make the most informed choices as possible based on the personal agendas that they do have, whatever they may be. It is my goal to give them the tools necessary for them to perceive that they can in fact change conditions they perceive as unjust vs. being oblivious to them, or worse, accepting them.
Thank you again for reading, watching, and listening.
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