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A year ago, after producing hundreds of shoe styles and billions of dollars together, Adidas broke with Kanye West as he made antisemitic and other offensive public comments. But Adidas had been tolerating his misconduct behind the scenes for nearly a decade. B35309 2015 AQ4832 AQ2659 AQ4830 AQ4831 AQ4829 AQ4828 AQ4836 AQ2660 BB1839 AQ2661 BB5350 […] More
The runaway success of the Yeezy collaboration between Kanye West and Adidas came at a price as the company tolerated misconduct by him for nearly a decade.When Adidas cut ties with Kanye West a year ago, ending their wildly lucrative shoe deal, the breakup appeared to be the culmination of weeks of his inflammatory remarks about Jews and Black Lives Matter. But a New York Times examination found that behind the scenes, the partnership was fraught from the start.Mr. West, who now goes by Ye, subjected employees to antisemitic and crude sexual comments and routine verbal abuse. As Adidas executives doubled down on a partnership that boosted company profits and made Mr. West a billionaire, they scrambled for ways to cope with the star’s demands and provocations.Interviews with current and former employees of Adidas and of Mr. West, along with hundreds of previously undisclosed internal records, including contracts, text messages and financial documents, provide the fullest accounting yet of the relationship. Here are seven takeaways.For almost 10 years, Adidas looked past Mr. West’s misconduct as profits soared.Mr. West’s first contract with Adidas, in 2013, had the most generous terms it had ever offered to a non-athlete. In the next one, three years later, Mr. West got more money, and Adidas got a morals clause — allowing it to end the partnership if he did anything that led to “disrepute, contempt, scandal,” according to a copy obtained by The Times.As the partnership earned billions of dollars, Mr. West’s behavior grew increasingly erratic. But it is not clear whether the brand ever considered invoking the morals clause before terminating the deal last year.Both Adidas and Mr. West declined interview requests and did not comment on The Times’s findings.Mr. West showed a troubling fixation on Jews and Hitler in the partnership.Shortly after signing with Adidas, he met with designers at company headquarters in Germany to discuss ideas. He was so offended by their sketches, he drew a swastika on one, shocking employees.He later told a Jewish Adidas manager to kiss a portrait of Hitler every day. He informed a member of the company’s executive board that he had paid a seven-figure settlement to one of his own employees who accused him of repeatedly praising Hitler.Mr. West told Adidas colleagues that he admired Hitler’s command of propaganda. He also expressed a belief that Jews had special powers allowing them to amass money and influence.He brought pornography and crude comments into the workplace.Weeks before the swastika incident in 2013, Mr. West made Adidas executives watch pornography during a meeting at his Manhattan apartment. He continued showing pornography to Adidas employees at work. Last year, he ambushed Adidas executives in Los Angeles with a pornographic film.Staff members also complained to top executives that he had made angry, sexually offensive comments to them.Big demands and mood swings weighed on the relationship.Mr. West contended repeatedly that Adidas was exploiting him. He sought more money and power, even suggesting that he should become chief executive.His complaints were often delivered amid severe mood swings, creating whiplash for employees. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, he at times rejected the assessment and resisted treatment. Tears were common; so was fury. In 2019, he abruptly moved his Yeezy operation to remote Cody, Wyo., ordering the Adidas team to relocate. He used “terms like ‘believer’ and ‘pilgrimage’” to describe those who would follow him there, an Adidas executive told colleagues in a group text chain. In a meeting with Adidas’s leaders that year to discuss his demands, he hurled shoes around the room.Adidas adapted to Mr. West’s behavior: ‘We are in a code red.’Managers and top executives started the group text chain, the “Yzy hotline,” to address issues involving Mr. West.The Adidas team working on Yeezys adopted a strategy they likened to firefighting, rotating members on and off the front lines of dealing with the artist. “We are in a code red,” the team’s general manager texted colleagues in 2019. “The first line is completely exhausted and don’t feel supported.”The company assigned a human resources official to the unit and gave new hires a subscription to a meditation app. The staff regularly gathered for something akin to group therapy.Mr. West on tour in 2016, the year he and Adidas renegotiated their deal.A J Mast for The New York TimesAs the brand grew more reliant on Yeezys, it sweetened the deal for Mr. West.Under the 2016 contract, he received a 15 percent royalty on net sales, with $15 million upfront along with millions of dollars in company stock each year.The “biggest issue,” an Adidas document from contract negotiations noted, was “putting CASH in Kanye’s pocket to show him we VALUE him.” The partnership would propel him to Forbes’s list of the world’s richest people.And in 2019, Adidas agreed to another enticement: $100 million annually, officially for Yeezy marketing but, in practice, a fund that Mr. West could spend with little oversight.He still stands to make money from the Adidas deal.After the relationship ruptured a year ago and Yeezy sales came to a halt, both Adidas and Mr. West were hit hard. The company projected its first annual loss in decades. Mr. West’s net worth plummeted.But they had at least one more chance to keep making money together. In May, the company began releasing the remaining $1.3 billion worth of Yeezys. A cut of the proceeds would go to charity. But most of the revenue would go to Adidas, and Mr. West was entitled to royalties. More
Liliana Melgar made a cameo appearance in Shakira’s latest music video, putting a spotlight on domestic workers and their struggles.The story of Liliana Melgar, a Bolivian migrant who left for Spain 15 years ago, mirrors the trajectory of millions of domestic workers like her who clean, wash, cook and take care of children in households around the world.Except that Ms. Melgar happens to work in the home of Shakira, the Colombian superstar.Shakira’s latest music video, “El Jefe” (“The Boss”), featuring the Mexican band Fuerza Regida, portrays the life of poor immigrants with big dreams, who are stuck working for bad employers who make lots of money that never trickles down. Toward the end of the three-minute clip, Ms. Melgar makes a cameo appearance as Shakira sings, “Lili Melgar, this song is for you because you were never paid severance.”The video has thrust Ms. Melgar — who was reportedly fired by Shakira’s former partner Gerard Pique, a Spanish soccer player, before being rehired by Shakira — into an unexpected spotlight and raised the profile of the roughly 76 million domestic workers around the world.The New York Times tried to reach Shakira, who now lives in South Florida, and Ms. Melgar, but received no response. An agent who represents Mr. Pique did not respond to a request for a comment.Liliana Melgar, who works as a nanny for Shakira, makes a brief appearance in the singer’s most recent music video.Domestic workers play a particularly crucial role in households across Latin America and the Caribbean, where about 1 in 5 employed women are domestic workers, according to the International Labor Organization, the second highest rate in the world after the Middle East.Ms. Melgar’s cameo in the video, which has been streamed more than 57 million times on YouTube, is a sort of vindication following the loss of her job — lifted up by a famous and wealthy female boss. But her case is an exception to how domestic worker have fared in recent years.Before the coronavirus pandemic began in 2020, domestic workers in most Latin American and Caribbean countries had gained new rights that set caps on weekly work hours, established minimum wages, created incentives for employers to sign labor contracts and imposed age limits.But the pandemic, which cratered economies across the region, pummeled domestic workers, causing many of them to lose their jobs. The industry has not fully recovered.“To us, it feels like we’re still living through Covid-19,” said Ernestina Ochoa, 53, a domestic worker in Lima, Peru, who helped found the National Union for Domestic Workers, an advocacy group. “If you had your salary reduced, you never had it increased again.”Ernestina Ochoa, who helped found a group in Peru that advocates for domestic workers, at her home in Lima.Angela Ponce for The New York TimesMany of the rights that domestic workers had won before the pandemic were rooted in an early wave of legislation in Bolivia, Peru, Uruguay and Colombia that was spearheaded by workers who organized labor unions.“Fundamentally, paid domestic work is a job that exists in societies with high economic inequality,” said Merike Blofield, a political science professor at the University of Hamburg, in Germany, and an expert on domestic workers in Latin America.Access to domestic work is a given “if you’re born into a better-off class,” she added.While most governments in the region have ratified international agreements ensuring labor rights for domestic workers, advocates say the pandemic weakened accountability for employers who violated laws. In some cases, housekeepers were prevented from leaving homes they worked in over fears that they would catch Covid and spread it to their employers’ families.The rates of employees who work under a signed contract and are eligible for government benefits and protection — a process known as formalization — is uneven across the region.A 2020 study by the International Labor Organization found that while Uruguay had a 70 percent formalization rate among domestic workers, the rate in many Central American and Caribbean countries was less than 10 percent.Ms. Ochoa, who has worked as a nanny, an adult caretaker and a housekeeper, has been a domestic worker in Lima, the Peruvian capital, since she was 11. Ms. Ochoa’s mother, following a familiar path for many domestic workers, moved to Lima from a rural area to work as a wet nurse for a wealthy white family, as well as to clean other homes.“To us, it feels like we’re still living through Covid-19,” Ms. Ochoa said.Angela Ponce for The New York Times“Back then, we were young girls,” Ms. Ochoa said, “but we would do the work of adults.”In 2020, a law passed in Peru that requires domestic workers to be at least 18, but Ms. Ochoa said the government had shown little interest in enforcing the statute.“Right now, we still have girls working, we still have teens working,” she said. “The government doesn’t see what’s happening. There’s no alternative for parents to say, ‘OK, my daughters won’t have to work because the government will help them.’”The complicated relationship between Latin American families and the workers they depend on has become more openly discussed in recent years, in part because depictions in popular culture, including in music and films, have helped focus attention on a largely invisible work force.The Oscar-winning movie “Roma,” set in Mexico in the 1970s, featured an Indigenous nanny who took care of a white family in Mexico City and became enmeshed in their daily dramas. The movie, which was released in late 2018, spurred conversations about how Latin Americans consider domestic workers part of their families, even as they are underpaid, exploited or abused.And in 2011, a photograph was published in a Colombian magazine that featured a wealthy white family sitting on an opulent terrace while two Black maids held silver trays in the background, setting off an uproar and highlighting the racial divisions that exist among many domestic workers and their employers.Still, history was made last year in Colombia when the country elected its first Black vice president, Francia Márquez, who had worked as a housekeeper.Santiago Canevaro, an Argentine sociologist who has written about the relationships between domestic workers and their employers, said domestic work was so common in Latin America because there was less access to private or government-funded services, like child care centers or nursing homes, than in more developed regions.As more women have entered the work force, families have become more dependent on nannies and housekeepers, many of whom are not necessarily aware of their legal rights.“The employee is treated as a sort of object,” Dr. Canevaro said. “In fact, when marriages fall apart, one of the decisions they make is what to do with the domestic employee.”And because discrimination against marginalized groups is still prevalent in Latin America, many Indigenous and Black women turn to domestic work as the only viable way to support themselves and their families and are often abused, advocates said.“It’s a constant battle to advocate for yourself in your workplace,” Ms. Ochoa said, “and say things like: ‘No, ma’am. My ethnicity and my skin color are Black, but I have a name. My name is Ernestina.’” More
His feature-length film, “Pressure,” mapped the struggles of Black Britons in an era of unyielding racism. He was knighted in 2022.Horace Ové, a prolific and groundbreaking Trinidad-born filmmaker and photographer whose 1975 film, “Pressure,” explored the fraught experience of Black Britons and is considered the first feature film by a Black British director, died on Sept. 16 in London. He was 86.The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, said his son, Zak.“Pressure” was made on a shoestring, shot in West London with neighborhood characters and Mr. Ové’s friends from film school volunteering their expertise. It was written with Samuel Selvon, a novelist from Trinidad, and it tells the story of Tony, a first-generation Briton and top student who has just graduated from school shouldering the expectations of his traditional West Indian parents and his own ambition, and navigating a community on the boil.As he looks for a job to match his talents, he slowly realizes his is a fool’s errand in racist London. Tony’s older brother is a Black militant — born in the West Indies, he has no illusions about the limitations of the society he has landed in — and he exhorts Tony to join his activist struggle.“Pressure” won awards and critical accolades when it was shown in film festivals in 1975, but it would take three more years to be widely released, as the British Film Institute, which had partly funded the movie, felt its depictions of police racism were incendiary. But Mr. Ové was documenting the climate of the times, and his own experience.“The English ‘Deep South’ has always been the West Indies and Africa,” he told The San Francisco Examiner in 1971. “Until recently, they managed to keep it out of the country. The problem is more complicated in England than in America. In America it’s a visible thing. In England, it’s more of a mental violence.”When “Pressure” was finally released in 1978, critics celebrated Mr. Ové as a significant Black filmmaker — “a talent with which we should reckon,” wrote The Sunday Telegraph — and roundly upbraided the British Film Institute.“It seems palpably absurd to be welcoming Horace Ové’s ‘Pressure’ when the film, one of the most important and relevant the British Film Institute’s Production Board has ever made, was actually shot in 1974 and completed in 1975,” Derek Malcolm wrote in The Guardian. “The BFI should hang its head in corporate shame.”In “Pressure,” Herbert Norville played the lead role of Tony, a recent graduate shouldering the expectations of his traditional West Indian parents and his own ambition.BFI National Archive & The Film FoundationMr. Ové had came of age as an artist in West London in the 1960s. It was a dynamic neighborhood, the heart of the British counterculture and also the Black Power Movement, of which Mr. Ové was an ardent participant.He was a skilled photographer who captured the movement’s leaders and events, as well as his artist peers and Carnival, the ebullient multicultural Caribbean festival that had been exported to Notting Hill in the late 1960s by community activists as a way to celebrate their heritage and ease cultural tensions.He met his second wife, Mary Irvine, at a socialist worker’s meeting; she was the fiercely political owner of a hip women’s clothing boutique called Dudu’s. (It sold no polyester or high-heeled shoes because she felt they were bad for women.)They were a formidable duo. Their West Hampstead apartment became a hub for artists and radicals of all stripes. Michael X, the civil rights activist born Michael de Freitas in Trinidad, lived upstairs. Mealtimes began with the family raising their fists and declaring “Power to the people,” Zak Ové recalled.James Baldwin was a family friend, and when he lectured at a West Indian student center with Dick Gregory, the comedian and activist, Mr. Ové made a compelling short documentary about it.A 1967 photograph by Mr. Ové of Michael X, a civil rights activist, and the Black Power boys in Paddington Station.Horace Ové, via the Estate of Horace OvéMr. Ové was a documentarian at heart — his aesthetic was naturalistic — and he made a number of films for the BBC. “Reggae” (1971) was live footage and interviews that some critics described as that culture’s “Woodstock” movie. “King Carnival” (1973) was a critically acclaimed history of the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival. Skateboard Kings” (1978) chronicled the star skateboarders — the Dogtown crew — of Southern California.“You can imagine Horace showing up in Venice Beach in a massive caftan swathed in African jewelry,” said Zak Ové. “Those kids looked at him and just fell in love.”And then there’s “Black Safari” (1972). It’s a Pythonesque mockumentary about a group of African explorers searching “darkest Lancashire” for the heart of England along the Leeds and Liverpool canal, a good-humored spoof of the traditional colonial narratives.Their boat is called the Queen of Spades, and Mr. Ové is its captain, a character named Horace Ové. Along the way, he and his crew mates have all sorts of adventures, like getting stuck in a lock, coming down with the flu and losing their tempers, witnessing the mysteries of clog dancing and suffering the noise of an oompah band.Mr. Ové in 1979 on the set of “The Latch Key Children,” a television series he directed. via the Estate of Horace Ové“For me, a director is a director no matter what color he is,” Mr. Ové told an interviewer in 2020. “Here in England there is a danger, if you are Black, that all you are allowed to make is films about Black people and their problems. White filmmakers, on the other hand, have a right to make films about whatever they like. People miss out by not asking us or allowing us to do this. We know you, we have to study you in order to survive.”Horace Courtenay Jones was born on Dec. 3, 1936, in Belmont, a suburb in Port of Spain, Trinidad. His parents, Lawrence and Lorna (Rocke) Jones, ran a cafe and hardware store that sold basically everything, including goods for Carnival makers.Horace changed his name to Horace Shango Ové when he emigrated to Britain in 1960. Like many who were involved in the Black Power movement, he wanted to shed his so-called slave name for one that reflected his African heritage. Shango is the Yoruba god of thunder, lightning and justice. But the meaning of “Ové” is still a mystery, Zak Ové said. “It’s a bit like Rosebud,” he said. “I never got a proper answer.”Mr. Ové in the early 1940s in Belmont, Trinidad, with his grandmother, Imelda. The Estate of Horace OveHorace Ové was 24 when he left for England to pursue a career as an artist or an interior designer. He lived in Brixton and West Hampstead, communities populated by West Indian immigrants who had been lured to Britain in the post World War II years by the promise of good jobs, only to be met by offers of menial work and abject racism; Mr. Ové recalled the “No Blacks” signs in the windows of boardinghouses there.He worked as a porter in a hotel, on a fishing boat in the North Sea and as a film extra. When he was cast as a slave in the 1963 film “Cleopatra,” starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the production moved to Rome. He stayed three years, working as a painter and a photographer, and he returned to London determined to make movies, having been deeply influenced by the Italian naturalist approach to filmmaking.Back in London in 1965, Mr. Ové studied at the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School).Over his long career he worked extensively in film and television. His documentary about the Bhopal gas leak in India that killed at least 2,000 people, “Who Shall We Tell,” aired in 1985.A feature film, “Playing Away” (1987), is an amiable comedy of cultures gently clashing when a West Indian cricket team from London is invited to a match in a quaint and insular fictional Suffolk village. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it a “movie about the comic pretensions of social and political organisms — the kind of community-comedy at which British moviemakers have excelled.”In addition to his son Zak, from his second marriage, Mr. Ové is survived by his daughter Genieve Sweeney, from his first marriage, to Jean Balosingh; a daughter, Indra, from his second marriage; and a daughter, Ezana, and a son, Kaz, from his third marriage, to Annabelle Alcazar, a producer of “Pressure” and many of Mr. Ové’s films. All three marriages ended in divorce.Mr. Ové, left, with the writer James Baldwin in 1984 at the opening of the exhibition “Breaking Loose,” a retrospective of Mr. Ové’s photographic work. via the Estate of Horace OvéIn 2022, Mr. Ové was knighted for his “services to media.” In 2007, he was made a commander of the British Empire; while he was in a taxi on the way to the palace for the ceremony, Mr. Ové pulled out a CD of James Brown’s funk anthem “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud,” and asked the African cabby to play it at full volume, which he was delighted to do.“I’m always interested in characters,” Mr. Ové told the Black Film Bulletin in 1996. “I’m interested in people that are trapped, Black, white, whatever race: That is what attracts me to the dramatic film, the trap that we are all in and how we try to get out of it, how we survive and the effects of that trap.” More
The singer, who already faces one lawsuit alleging a hostile work environment, has repeatedly denied wrongdoing.A former wardrobe designer who worked briefly on Lizzo’s 2023 tour before being dismissed filed a lawsuit on Thursday alleging that the tour’s wardrobe manager had created a hostile work environment that tour management and Lizzo failed to address.In the complaint the plaintiff, Asha Daniels, who worked on the tour for less than a month, names Lizzo as a defendant, but does not accuse her directly of harassing behavior. In a news release accompanying the lawsuit, Ron Zambrano, her lawyer, said, “Lizzo is the boss so the buck stops with her.”The filing comes more than a month after three of Lizzo’s former dancers, who are also represented by Zambrano, sued the singer and her production company, accusing them of creating a hostile work environment. Lizzo has denied the allegations, and her lawyer has said she plans to countersue. On Thursday, a spokesman for Lizzo called the latest suit an “absurd publicity stunt” and noted that the singer had never met the plaintiff.In the court papers submitted on Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court, Daniels said she was asked to join the tour in early 2023 by the wardrobe manager, Amanda Nomura. The lawsuit alleges that throughout Daniels’s employment, Nomura had made “racist and fatphobic” comments and mocked both Lizzo and Lizzo’s background dancers “by doing an offensive stereotypical impression of a Black woman.”The lawsuit also alleged that a backstage manager on the tour sent a photo “graphically depicting male genitalia” to a group text message that included the plaintiff, tour management and other crew members; the lawsuit said the singer’s management failed to properly address the message, responding to it with humor in a way that encouraged an “unsafe, sexually charged workplace culture.”The plaintiff also said she was subjected to long hours and frequently denied breaks, alleging that Nomura required her to be on her feet all day despite an ankle injury.Attempts to reach Nomura on Thursday were not immediately successful.In response to the lawsuit, a spokesman for Lizzo, Stefan Friedman, said that Daniels never had any contact with the pop star during her time with the tour.“As Lizzo receives a humanitarian award tonight from the Black Music Action Coalition for the incredible charitable work she has done to lift up all people, an ambulance-chasing lawyer tries to sully this honor by recruiting someone to file a bogus, absurd publicity-stunt lawsuit,” Friedman said.He went on, “We will pay this as much attention as it deserves. None.” More
Contestants on a recent episode of a Polish reality TV show used blackface to imitate Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé. It was not the first time the racist tradition had been featured.A reality TV singing competition in Poland is under fire after two contestants used blackface to imitate Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé during an episode that aired over the weekend.“Your Face Sounds Familiar” (or, in Polish, “Twoja Twarz Brzmi Znajomo”) appears in multiple countries, including the United States, where it ran on ABC for one season in 2014 and was called “Sing Your Face Off.” The show encourages contestants to recreate the appearance and sound of famous singers as accurately as possible.In Saturday’s episode of “Your Face Sounds Familiar,” the singer Kuba Szmajkowski won with his rendition of Mr. Lamar’s “Humble.” Mr. Szmajkowski performed in blackface and wore his hair in cornrows in order to look like Mr. Lamar.Mr. Szmajkowski posted video of his transformation to his 163,000 Instagram followers, with the caption “get ready with Kendrick.” The video showed the singer in front of a mirror getting multiple layers of makeup applied. A representative for Mr. Szmajkowski did not immediately respond to a request for comment.While Mr. Szmajkowski’s post about his transformation received thousands of likes, hundreds of people commented on it, many of them expressing criticism and anger.“This is top racism. Do you not see how inappropriate this is? Not to mention offensive? Wrong,” one user wrote.Another contestant in Saturday’s episode, Pola Gonciarz, performed Beyoncé’s “If I Were a Boy,” also using blackface in an effort to evoke the look of the superstar.“Your Face Sounds Familiar” is produced by Endemol Shine Poland, which is owned by the French company Banijay. In a statement, the company said, “Banijay condemns Endemol Shine Poland’s local execution of ‘Your Face Sounds Familiar,’ which contradicts our group’s global values.” A spokeswoman declined to provide more details until an investigation is completed.It’s not the first time the program has come under fire for the use of blackface. In 2021, a white contestant wore blackface to portray Kanye West performing “Stronger.”In response to that criticism, the show said the negative comments were surprising. “The Polish edition of the show, seen as exemplary abroad, always tries to show great performances, which strive to be as close to the original as possible,” an Instagram post from the show read at the time.This time around, “Your Face Sounds Familiar,” which is in its 19th season, has not yet publicly responded.The show’s Instagram account indicates that multiple contestants have dressed in blackface to perform as Black singers, including Snoop Dogg, Ray Charles, Bill Withers and Missy Elliott. Mia Moody-Ramirez, a professor at Baylor University in Texas who specializes in how race is portrayed in the media, said Mr. Szmajkowski’s performance was particularly offensive because of the combination of blackface, cornrows and his use of a racial slur, which is among the song’s lyrics.She said the continued use of blackface on the show might be because the stigma surrounding it is smaller in Poland, which has a population that is overwhelmingly white, than it is in the United States. About 97 percent of Poland’s population identifies as ethnically Polish, according to Minority Rights Group International.“We are living in a global society,” Dr. Moody-Ramirez said. “If it is produced in one country, it is going to be seen around the world.”In the United States, blackface dates back to early 19th-century minstrel shows, and the racist tradition — even though widely condemned — has persisted, showing up at bachelor parties, in old photos of politicians and elsewhere. The popularity of blackface was at its height in the early 20th century and has waned sharply since the 1950s, but it has not disappeared around the world.In Europe, too, there has been something of a reckoning. In Britain in 2020, some comedy shows that included blackface or racial slurs were removed from streaming platforms, including BBC’s iPlayer and Netflix. And in the Netherlands, a holiday tradition in which people dress in blackface to portray Black Pete, a servant to St. Nicholas, is slowly changing. More
In “The Great White Bard,” Farah Karim-Cooper maintains that close attention to race, and racism, will only deepen engagement with the playwright’s canon.THE GREAT WHITE BARD: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race, by Farah Karim-CooperWas my relationship to Shakespeare and race in need of a reality check?I asked myself that question as I did the 50-yard dash to catch the G train for a rehearsal of “Hamlet,” clutching in my hand a copy of “The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race,” by Farah Karim-Cooper. The book takes a necessary look under the hood of the plays, delving into the Elizabethan and Renaissance ideals of race and how Shakespeare helped shape and define them. “Instead of worshiping his words,” Karim-Cooper writes, interrogating them “allows us to confront crucial questions of our day.”As a Black actor who has had the chance to play many of the plum Shakespearean roles, had I been looking at his work through rose-colored glasses? Of course I knew there was racism in Shakespeare, but to what extent? This question is top of mind in drama schools and theaters of late, with Shakespeare’s relevance at stake. I know because I’ve been brought to campuses to discuss it.So this summer I made “The Great White Bard” my trusted, troubling and fascinating companion on train rides, during rehearsal breaks, in dressing rooms and backstage, while working on Shakespeare’s greatest play on arguably New York’s greatest stage, the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.Karim-Cooper, a director of education at Shakespeare’s Globe theater and a professor at King’s College London, is not merely analyzing from a distance; she’s an eyewitness on the front lines. Since 2018 she has helped put together festivals on “Shakespeare and Race” at the Globe — facing social-media blowback as a result. And she’s drawing on a growing body of important research by prominent scholars, including Ayanna Thompson, Kim F. Hall and Margo Hendricks.In a sweeping yet forensic 336 pages, “The Great White Bard” argues that “Shakespeare’s texts are a reservoir of what is known as race-making” — how language can define racial identity and establish hierarchy.The book details how racism plagues Shakespeare’s plays and Shakespeare scholarship. Both, Karim-Cooper contends, overtly and subtly elevate whiteness and denigrate Blackness, rendering true inclusion practically impossible. (Sexism and misogyny play a big part, too.)The result: Shakespeare for the few and not for the many.Yet Karim-Cooper is by no means offering up a luminary for cancellation. “To love Shakespeare means to know him,” she writes. “At some point love demands that we reconcile ourselves with flaws and limitations. Only then can there be a deeper understanding and affinity with another.”The book illuminates the numerous instances of racialized language in “Othello” (that “barbarous Moor”); “The Merchant of Venice” (Shylock described as “devil,” “wolf,” “dog” and “cur”); and “Titus Andronicus” (Aaron the Moor, also “barbarous”). Descriptions of interracial relationships in “Titus” and “Antony and Cleopatra,” Karim-Cooper argues, dehumanize Blackness and establish white supremacy.Her insights also reach into unexpected places, as when she finds sexual stereotyping of Black and dark women in the comedies “Much Ado About Nothing,” “Love’s Labour’s Lost” and “As You Like It.”The author’s analysis is both dizzying and impressive, yet at times overzealous. Some parsing of the texts feels narrow and binary, diminishing the scope and scale of their multiple meanings. Her carefully reasoned claim that words like “kindness” and “fair” are inherently connected only with whiteness runs the risk of hyperbole, in Shakespeare’s time or now. Surely the boogeyman can’t be everywhere.I have always found myself in Shakespeare, as if these works were written for me. I feel seen, heard and recreated by them. In playing many of his leading roles, I have found pure joy and pain, surrendering to the better and darker angels in myself. In some cosmic way, I believe these characters are as much drawn to me as I am to them.This is not to say that I haven’t had to come to terms with racism in the texts, from my first “Othello” in 1992 to my most recent turn as Shylock in 2022, with stints as Macbeth, Antony, Richard III and Prospero in between.Where I found racism, I also found complex characters who took my breath away with their great depth and astonishing humanity. Words, words, words: Shakespeare’s words contain multitudes of meaning, ideas and emotions that in my Black body become mutable and ancestral — shifting with time, intention, context, perception and culture.Every night after a “Hamlet” performance, as I headed home from the Delacorte, my grappling with “The Great White Bard” would resume. It has indeed exposed me to flaws and limitations, while also affirming Shakespeare’s power and abundance. Perhaps Karim-Cooper and I are after the same thing. I challenge some of her findings, but I respect her book and the alarm she sounds.“The Great White Bard” contributes to an essential discussion on Shakespeare and race, one that must include literary scholars, historians, etymologists, audiences and, yes, even actors. Let us all debate and think critically about the issues Karim-Cooper raises. At the end of the day, such tough love can guide us to truly love Shakespeare.John Douglas Thompson is a New York City actor who most recently played Claudius in “Hamlet” for Shakespeare in the Park.THE GREAT WHITE BARD: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race | By Farah Karim-Cooper | Illustrated | 336 pp. | Viking | $30 More
Queer villains are all over our screens these days. What do they have to say?IT BECAME A meme the second the words came out of Jennifer Coolidge’s mouth. Trapped on a yacht with a small group of ornately charming men who’ve lured her into their world with calculated flattery, she now realizes they have no intention of letting her ever return to the luxury resort where they found her. In the final minutes of the second season of HBO’s “The White Lotus,” Coolidge’s rich, lonely, addled Tanya McQuoid pleads her case to the boat’s captain. “Please! These gays,” she implores in her signature husky bleat. “They’re trying to murder me!”Listen to This ArticleThat moment — the line that launched a thousand GIFs, not to mention T-shirts, coffee mugs and emblazoned hand fans — was brilliantly designed for the decontextualization it quickly underwent. But it also marked a milestone in the history of gay representation in film and television because … it was true: Those gays were trying to murder her! What better way to obtain her fortune and secure their status as haute Mediterranean palazzo dwellers? Although poor Tanya isn’t long for this world, she does manage to take down most of them before exiting, like the trained hit woman she isn’t. And the gay men in the show’s audience? We were the first ones cheering.Why was this OK? (And yes, weirdly, it was OK.) It helped to know that a queer man, the show’s creator, Mike White, had originated the idea. If you’re gay, chances are you understood that you were on safe ground with the show — that this wasn’t homophobia but, rather, a joyous reclamation of the idea of gay monstrosity from the homophobes who held custody of it for decades.The scene also upended the conviction that negative stereotypes can be assiduously monitored and tallied to determine whether a film or drama or sitcom or line or joke is with us or against us. For many L.G.B.T.Q. consumers of culture, including me, that kind of tensed, hyperwary watching — “Is this good for the gays or bad for the gays?” — is a hard habit to break. Several generations of us grew up exposed to movies and TV shows that forced us to develop a bitter awareness that, at any minute, we could be confronted with an ugly caricature or made the target of a cruel slur deployed to generate laughs or cheers from a straight audience. Several younger generations of gay men were raised in an era when the industry regularly patted itself on the back for earnest “representation” designed to show straight viewers that gay people were “just like us,” though only rarely were gay characters allowed to be just like themselves. And still younger generations have come of age in a world in which gay creators have increasingly taken charge of the way queer characters are depicted. But a murderous cabal of gays? Not since Sgt. “Pepper” Anderson broke up a trio of kill-crazy lesbians who ran a nursing home in an early ’70s episode of the Angie Dickinson cop show “Police Woman” had television gone there, and even 50 years ago, that story line was viewed as sufficiently retrograde to warrant a rebuke from critics and gay activists alike.What “The White Lotus” did felt so backward that it was, paradoxically, transgressive — not to mention very gay. This punchline was so air quotes appalling that gay viewers could enjoy it without having to fret that straight viewers might get the wrong idea about us. (And if they did decide that gay people were lethal Eurotrash yacht queens? Better, I suppose, to be feared than hated.) In any case, “These gays …” was primarily about ownership. It wasn’t “We can take a joke”; it was “We can make a joke.”The 20th-century Manhattan writer Truman Capote (above, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the 2005 biopic) will be the focus of a Hulu series starring Tom Hollander.ShutterstockWHAT WASN’T APPARENT when the show aired is that those killer gays presaged a trend: We’re witnessing an explosion of out-and-proud gay villainy. Showtime’s forthcoming limited series “Fellow Travelers,” created by the gay writer Ron Nyswaner, whose credits stretch back to “Philadelphia” (1993), is a kind of idiosyncratic dramatized history of gay-movement politics from the McCarthy years through the early days of the AIDS crisis. Its protagonist, played by the gay actor Matt Bomer, is not a heroic activist or a noble victim but a ruthless, chilly, opportunistic user, an ambitious closeted husband, father and eventually grandfather who, in an early episode, manipulates the timid male lover he dominates into writing an anonymous letter that could destroy the life of a lesbian friend. The character is complex, but nobody would call him a good guy.Showtime recently canceled plans to air another limited series that is literally about a gay man who’s trying to murder people, but Netflix picked it up, and eight episodes of “Ripley,” an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel “The Talented Mr. Ripley” starring Andrew Scott as the obsessive killer, will likely be released next year. Readers first met Ripley in 1955, when Highsmith introduced him as a young American of indeterminate desires whose envy of the rich, indolent playboy he’s been hired to bring home from Italy shades into a kind of lethal longing — to be him, have him, replace him. Ripley’s sexuality is murky in Highsmith’s five novels, and in the hands of her many adapters, he’s been as heterosexual as when Dennis Hopper plays him in Wim Wenders’s “The American Friend” (1977) or as gay as when Matt Damon portrays him in Anthony Minghella’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999). And this time? We don’t know yet, but Scott has already described him as “a queer character.”A third limited series, “Capote’s Women,” a continuation of Ryan Murphy’s “Feud” anthology for FX and Hulu, will feature Tom Hollander — one of the murderous gays from “The White Lotus” — as Truman Capote. (Full disclosure: I am working with Murphy on an unrelated film project.) The Capote drama will apparently concentrate on the latter period of the writer’s life, in which Esquire’s publication of excerpts from his novel “Answered Prayers” (1987) was viewed as a friendship-rupturing betrayal by the society women whose company the author craved. Although it hasn’t been revealed which version or versions of Capote the show will bring forth, a degree of villainy is baked in, since Capote himself, on one talk show appearance after another, cultivated an image as a demonic, acid-tongued imp. It’s the Bad Gay renaissance we never asked for but somehow seem to have long wanted.To be specific, this is gay male villainy — lesbians and bisexuals, long underrepresented in a world of pop culture still dominated by male creators, are insufficiently ubiquitous in movies and TV to be reframed as fun bad guys. (A delightful recent exception: the homicidal lesbian elders played by Judith Light and S. Epatha Merkerson in Rian Johnson’s “Poker Face.”) And trans villainy is, right now, not an option in pop culture: The struggle for acceptance remains too imperiled for anyone to be glib or ironic about goals like positive representation. White gay men make better marks; as members of two dominant cultures, we’re easy targets in a world in which everyone’s hyperconscious of identity, and we have enough clout to be labeled part of the problem without that critique being racist or sexist.Last year, Hollander ushered in the latest Bad Gay renaissance when his character, Quentin, conspires to kill Tanya McQuoid, played by Jennifer Coolidge, on the second season of HBO’s “The White Lotus.”Courtesy of HBOThat itself is an indication of how far we’ve journeyed from, say, 1981, when the gay culture writer and activist Vito Russo published “The Celluloid Closet,” a book that traces Hollywood’s contempt for and mistreatment of gay characters from the earliest days of cinema. Russo explored a subject that had previously been viewed by moviegoers simply as the way things were — the treatment of gay people as pansies and wimps, perverts and tragedies, serial killers and suicides. He wrote the first edition of his book roughly a decade after the Stonewall uprising — during which, while television slowly but steadily humanized gay characters, giving them dignified guest appearances in ongoing comedies and dramas as well as the occasional TV movie, feature films continued to traffic in mincing best friends, bar-crawling lowlifes, killers and victims. The James Bond films, those bastions of heterosexual virility, toyed with a pair of gay hit men in 1971’s “Diamonds Are Forever” and, in general, big-screen queer sexuality was often murder adjacent (“Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” “American Gigolo,” “Cruising,” “Dressed to Kill”) when it wasn’t comical, absurd or doomed.But what neither Russo nor his readers could have known was that AIDS was about to change the world. For the next 15 years, after the virus became prevalent, gay characters gradually became exemplary — the only choice during a struggle in which Hollywood felt compelled to represent the part of American society that didn’t want gay men demonized, marginalized or dead. This period, bracketed roughly by “Victor/Victoria” (1982) and “In & Out” (1997), wasn’t free of queer villains, but they were often greeted with ire and contempt: When the serial killer Buffalo Bill was showcased in “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991), backlash was so intense that its director, Jonathan Demme, turned around and made “Philadelphia,” about an admirable, likable gay lawyer seriously ill with AIDS. To say that many of these films were made with persuasion in mind is not to disparage them. Anti-gay agitprop had been a staple of Hollywood for decades; what was pro-gay agitprop but a long-overdue attempt to fight fire with fire?By the late ’90s, Good Gays had become staples of both movies and TV series — 1998 marked the beginning of “Will and Grace” — and, not soon after that, it finally became acceptable for a new kind of Bad Gay to stand up and be counted. Twenty-three summers ago, a group of strangers went to Borneo and had their adventures filmed for 39 days and, when it was over, one of them was a millionaire. Richard Hatch, then 39, was the first gay villain of the reality TV era, and a shock at a time when L.G.B.T.Q. television presences were supposed to model relatability and safeness. On the night of the first-season finale of “Survivor,” more than 51 million Americans watched as one competitor Hatch had beaten offered a disgusted endorsement, labeling him a snake and his rival a rat, then telling her fellow jurors that they should honor what nature intended and vote “for the snake to eat the rat.”It’s hard now to convey what a violation of accepted norms it was for a straight woman to use that language about a gay man on national television, especially since, in retrospect, Hatch’s malevolence was wildly overstated. All he was guilty of was figuring out how to work the game before everyone else did. What Hatch was doing — observing a playing field as only a lifelong outsider could, then using the ruthless detachment that exclusion can generate to his advantage — was, to many gay viewers, a recognizable survival strategy now revealed on a nationwide scale. The cultural ascent of a Bad Gay was a shock: Hatch had the dubious honor of becoming the first homosexual man America could hiss at when the country was only just past the most acute phase of the AIDS pandemic and beginning to uncouple male homosexuality from death. For gay people, the question was complex: Should we hate him, root for him or both?IF YOU’RE GAY and over 30, you’re probably at least somewhat used to assessing negative reflections of yourself on a spectrum that stretches from the flatly unacceptable to the semi-embraceable. At the most extreme end, for instance, there is the slur that gay people are groomers, a charge closely tied to the idea that homosexuality is a spreadable disease. Because social conservatives have always found the accusation of preying on children an irresistible way to threaten sexual minorities, it should not be surprising that in the last couple of years, the groomer libel has been transferred from gay men to drag queens and trans people.But history provides no shortage of other gay villain clichés from which to choose. There’s the trope that gay people — or gay-coded characters — are weak, cowardly, sniveling (think of Jonathan Harris as Dr. Smith on the 1960s TV series “Lost in Space” whimpering, “Oh, the pain, the pain!”). That one’s almost more boring than it is defamatory — but it’s still defamatory, even when drolly done. There’s also the old, double-edged McCarthy-era insult, intriguingly played with in “Fellow Travelers,” that gay people are security risks on two fronts: They harbor a secret that makes them susceptible to blackmail, and their resentment toward the oppressive straight world makes them obvious candidates for double agentry; in other words, we’re potential victims and potential moles. Then there’s the having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too stereotype that gay people are fine but gay closet cases are all potential serial killers. Finally, there’s the broad-brush (and essentially misogynistic) derogation of gay men as effeminate, an old insult that has been so effectively reclaimed by happily effeminate gay men that it’s lost much of its sting. As Harvey Fierstein subversively states in the 1995 documentary version of “The Celluloid Closet,” “I like the sissy,” and that stereotype, the movie origins of which can be traced back to the silent era, can range from hurtful and belittling to joyful and empowering, depending on who’s doing the sashaying and shantaying, and to what end it’s being used.In “Fellow Travelers,” soon to be on Showtime, Matt Bomer plays Hawkins Fuller, a federal official with a vengeful streak.Ben Mark Holzberg/ShowtimeThere’s one kind of gay villain, though, that seems especially alluring these days, including to gay men. It’s the Wicked Queen — the devious, manipulative, cunning, conniving male homosexual who has learned how to stay two steps ahead of anyone who thinks they can outsmart him. The Wicked Queen often shows up in stories that take place in a primarily gay universe: He’s the selfish one, the callous one, the one who’s a bitch to all his friends — his malice doesn’t need to be filtered through the gaze of the straight world. It’s our business, and it’s there for our delectation. At his most refined and extreme, the Wicked Queen seems not only to relish his criminality but to turn it into a louchely decadent performance piece. These are the gay villains who are currently having their moment in the spotlight. Performative, even showy gay (or gay-coded) villainy — the idea that we’re dark-souled masterminds who know how to be stylish and sociopathic in a single gesture — has been around forever; it’s evident in everything from George Sanders’s Addison DeWitt (technically straight but really not) in “All About Eve” (1950) to Cesar Romero’s Joker in the 1960s “Batman” TV series to Dr. Evil’s pinkie raised to his pursed lips in the “Austin Powers” movies to Divine’s early 1970s collaborations with John Waters to the latest seasons of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Yes, it’s a vicious attack on our collective character but, honestly, as vicious attacks go, some of us kind of enjoy that one.Perhaps, on occasion, we even wear it proudly. The murderous gays in “The White Lotus” certainly do; they escort Tanya to an opera not long before they intend to kill her, almost as if they were event planners pulling together a theme weekend, and to win her confidence, they actually pretend to be a different gay cliché — the obsequious Gay Best Friends, forever fluttering around and consoling the heroine, happy to serve as her supporting characters. Using one stereotype to conceal a worse one? That’s so ruthless, it’s applause-worthy; it’s what one of the drag house members in Jennie Livingston’s documentary “Paris Is Burning” (1990) means when he explains, “Boys are the stupidest. They don’t know how to do a stunt right. Now, faggots will do a stunt and, I mean, you will never catch up with it until years later!” Translation: Gay people know how to play the long game because we have to know; we’re tough, we’re smart and we’re sly because that’s how we endure.It’s worth noting that the appealing Bad Gay is, and should remain, the province of fiction. In real life, if you internalize those personality characteristics too thoroughly, you do not become a fascinating charismatic antihero; you just become George Santos. But in pop culture, there’s something unexpectedly liberating, even progressive, about seeing gay characters unshackled from the necessity of making a good impression. (It’s why John Early’s staggeringly self-absorbed, needy gay millennial in the cult comedy series “Search Party” [2016-22] was so beloved by gay viewers.) In its first two seasons, the comedy series “The Other Two,” a savage and specific take on our boundless appetite for fame, presents one of its main characters, the aspiring actor Cary Dubek (played by Drew Tarver), as an essentially Good Gay, a young, appealing guy who came out on the late side and is now simultaneously learning to navigate the dating world and the thousand natural shocks and humiliations of struggling on the margins of show business.But in the recently concluded third and final season, Cary finally makes it, if not to the top then to the middle, and goes full Bad Gay. He becomes a camera-hungry, friend-shafting, insincere, self-dramatizing narcissist. In the hands of the show’s co-creators, the former “Saturday Night Live” head writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, it feels clear that Cary doesn’t lose himself so much as find himself — the monster he has been all along was just waiting for a chance to emerge. It pains me to say it, but this is, in a way, what diversity looks like (at least, this is one of the things diversity looks like): the dead-on representation of a type that a lot of gay men have met in life but that rarely makes it onto a screen.It’s fair to ask whether we can afford this at a moment when those who hate and fear queer Americans are getting louder and bolder. But no minority culture has ever thrived by retreating to role model politesse in response to the menacing behavior of those who are never going to approve of them anyway. Besides, there’s something undeniably satisfying in saying to homophobes, “You think drag queens reading fairy tales to children is scary? We’ll show you scary.”It’s also a welcome change from a time in which every single movie or television show that was good for the cause had to be greeted with a dutiful round of applause or show of support, no matter its faults. Almost 40 years ago, in his 1987 revised edition of “The Celluloid Closet,” Russo wrote, “There is a tendency on the part of politically committed lesbians and gay men to make allowances for the aesthetic shortcomings of films that offer a more accurate picture of gay life than has been previously seen. This is the temporary cultural reaction of people grateful for a refreshing change in the way their lives are reflected on the screen. This will also moderate with time.” Russo was right, but I wonder how he’d react to the fact that gay culture has virtually inverted itself. Rather than make apologies for stories with good intentions and dubious entertainment value, we now get to see ourselves as worse people in better product. It seems odd that the fragile, perhaps precarious luxury of being able to enjoy an entertaining range of gay villains is a signpost of progress. But a qualified win is still a win, and this victory can, perhaps, be counted as one of the strange spoils of a larger, long-fought battle: the chance to be ourselves — all of ourselves — even when we’re monsters. More
