Arrested Development and Philosophy_ They've Made a Huge Mistake - Kristopher G. Phillips [46]
Franklin is regarded as essentially black (at first, at any rate), and his activities are those stereotypical ones associated with his race. Of course, Franklin is too over the top and ridiculous for us to fail to notice that stereotypes are being employed (nobody’s that oblivious!!). But the severity of the stereotypes just lets us see them all the more clearly.
Franklin: Can I tell you somethin’ my man?
Gob: Sure, Franklin.
Franklin: You are one cold [Long beep]. Speaking of mothers . . . let me give that oatmeal some brown sugar [Gob begins to make Franklin molest Lucille, as George Sr. jumps off of the couch to defend his wife] [“Meat the Veals”]
Franklin’s lust for old white women isn’t even his worst trait. Franklin, it turns out, is also a pimp (“Family Ties”). But despite being a sex-crazed pimp, Franklin is very sensitive to issues of race.
Gob: I just had an old friend who wanted to tell you [brings Franklin around to face Lucille]
Franklin: how much I miss you.
Lucille: oh . . . who let this little black [BEEP] . . .
[Franklin, soaked in ether, kisses Lucille, rendering her unconscious. Buster enters.]
Buster: Hey, brother!
Franklin: Who you callin’ brother, you honky ass . . . [“Meat the Veals”]
And how could we forget Franklin’s (third season) T-shirt bearing the phrase, “George Bush doesn’t care about black puppets”? But despite his sensitivity to issues of race, Franklin doesn’t speak for the African-American community—even if Gob sometimes acts as though he does.
Gob: Franklin said some things that whitey just wasn’t ready to hear.
Michael: Gob, weren’t you also mercilessly beaten outside of a club in Torrence for that act?
Gob: He also said some things that African-Americany wasn’t ready to hear, either. [“Meat the Veals”]
And yet, for all the politically incorrect racial slurs, Franklin presents us with some important reminders about race. As perhaps the most imperial identity, someone’s race is often wrongly regarded as telling us what we need to know about them. Arrested Development spoofs our tendency to let race “go imperial”—and thus also critiques the idea that race is anything essential to a person—when, in “Meat the Veals,” the police confront Franklin behind the wheel of a car.
Cop 1 [pointing gun]: Put your hands up or we’ll take that as a sign of aggression against us!
[Franklin sits silently behind the wheel of an automobile.]
Cop 2 [pointing gun, frantic]: They’re not up! He’s aggressive!
Not only are the stereotypes we associate with race wrong; the very idea that race is essential to what a person is is wrong. Arrested Development manages to show this as well. Franklin, in a devastating laundry disaster, gets bleached out. In losing his color, he somehow also gains a British accent. “You’ve ruined the act Gob . . .,” Franklin, now bleached-white, tells a saddened Gob. The idea that the puppet’s color made it essentially the kind of puppet it is also calls into question our own assumptions about race.
The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah (1954–) tells us that racism is not our only problem. Our bigger problem is what he calls racialism—the belief that races are in some deep sense real (in the way that stars and atoms are real).6 Races aren’t any more real than baseball teams or traffic laws: They exist only insofar as we think they exist. The problem with thinking races exist in the deep sense, though, is that we start thinking that people must be the race we identify them as. In fact, racial identity is performed—much as Gob performs Franklin’s racial identity. It isn’t something we are, but something we do. If we could think of race in this way, we’d make it easier to be white, and easier to be brown. (Gob: That’s the exact kind of joke he would have loved. . . .)
An Ethics of Identity
Given how precarious our identities are—and how much value-baggage comes with them—we might be better off without them entirely. Of course, we all know that’s not really possible. As Aristotle,