Black Jeopardy

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/29/snl-black-jeopardy-louis-ck-video_n_5057305.html

I came across this video on SNL last week and I feel it somewhat ties into our discussions throughout the semester about cultural appropriation.  It is definitely a funny video, but is that humor justified?  The video carries a variety of implications and raises several questions.  What does it mean for a white person to study African Americans in academia?  What does it mean to be black in the 21^st century?   Is there another civil rights movement looming for African-Americans in the near future?

First, what does it mean for a white person to study African Americans in academia?  There has been an incredibly insightful set of resources that have emerged over the last half-century about African-American history, culture, and politics.  Some of these scholars have been white and some have been black and some have been of other races and ethnicities.  Academic literature is raceless much in the same what that the airwaves of the 1950s were raceless.  Until you look up a picture of the writer or the singer, who is to say what color their skin is.  For example, of the six professors that make up the core of the Rhodes Africana Studies Department, Kendra Hotz, Luther Ivory,  Leigh Johnson, Susan Kus, Charles McKinney, Robert Saxe, Katheryn Wright, only two are black. What does it mean for someone to be an expert in a field outside their cultural, racial or ethnic background?  What does it mean for a white student at Rhodes to be an African-American studies minor/major?  I remember seeing a skit between a black student and white student over whether or not the black student was an African-American studies major.  To what extent should African-American studies become its own entity and to what extent should it be assimilated into “mainstream” curriculum?

On a second note, the video seems to ridicule an underclass African American culture and the idea that blacks are social people, gossipy, and skeptical of white people.  Jeopardy topics range from “pssssh!” to “White People” to “That Girl” with no acknowledgement to “African-American history” like the white contestant desires.  Yet, 3 of the 4 characters are black.  Furthermore, what does being “black” really entail?  Why does the host suggest that the topics are “all we have to work with?”  Similarly as above, the clip raises the question of who has the right to black culture.  Are whites allowed to laugh at jokes made by people of a particular sub-group knowing full well that making the same them joke themselves would have led to a CNN scandal?  Aside from whites being the majority, I think this ambiguity of cultural ownership is what lead to cultural appropriation.  The mainstream would rather incorporate the “popular” things of a sub-culture in order to be politically correct, in other words, that which makes the mainstream most comfortable.