“
Reaction to “Honey Boo Boo” would seem to prove that TLC has successfully pinged a host of American biases about class and size and gender and race.
There is no denying that the word “ghetto” and “street” are all kinds of racially charged, evoking images of urban, black dysfunction. The comments above are revealing of one interesting thing: Some folks may be made uncomfortable by “Honey Boo Boo” because it challenges their association of thin, shining, educated middle-classness with whiteness and Southern accents, fatness and poverty with blackness. They are ignorant of the similarities between white and black Southerners and white and black poverty, and so, when Honey Boo Boo drawls one of her famous phrases, she is acting like a “ghetto slut” or a “street kid.”
And then there is “slut.” Women and girls who are not compliant and quiet must be promiscuous–and promiscuous women are bad (i.e. sluts). The phrase that provoked this name calling was Alana’s “A dolla make me holla.” The kid claims to like money. Fine. But it is the adults analyzing the show who have equated a six-year-old’s love of money with prostitution. I am certain that Alana’s involvement in pageants plays a role in this analysis. Child pageants are highly-sexualized and disturbing affairs. But I also believe that a little boy saying the same phrase would likely be praised as a future business tycoon not accused of selling sex.
But Suz-at-large’s comment, though less offensive, is also revealing. There is a chorus of folks claiming that “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” is a bridge too far, the bottom of the barrell, the worst of the worst and the last thing we’ll see before the Four Horsemen arrive. And I believe this notion is also driven by who the Thompson/Shannon family is and how people like them activate American disgust in a way far greater problems do not.
We could have turned off the TV when VH1 was trading on stereotypes of black men with “Flavor of Love.” We could have pushed back when show runners on countless programs hunted for and showcased angry black women. The cable cord could have been cut during any of the shows from “Real Housewives of Orange County” to “Basketball Wives” designed to display women as catty, back-biting gold diggers. “Toddlers and Tiaras,” the show that spawned “Honey Boo Boo” has lasted five seasons.
”
-
Tami Winfrey Harris, “What’s Wrong With Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” Clutch Magazine 9/4/12 (via racialicious)
As someone who descends from sharecroppers up to as recently as my grandmother’s generation, my grandmother who stood in a field picking cotton barefoot and used chewed-on blackgum branches for toothbrushes as a child, on up to the point where my mother, my brother and myself moved into the projects, there is definitely nothing more uncomfortable to middle/upper class white people than poor whites, particularly from the south.
Why? Because when black people sound or look or live like that, it’s the way that they are supposed to be, but when white people do, then there’s something really fucked going on. They’ve done something really fucked in order to manage to lose their natural rights to middle-classdom and wind up living amongst the others. Which is why white hard-knock stories are so popular — there’s nothing better than seeing someone like, say, Eminem restored to their rightful place.