io9 has the story of Weird Tales, the venerable science fiction magazine that committed to run an excerpt of a novel called Saving the Pearls, in which people of color tyrannically oppress white people, who are considered ugly and genetically disadvantaged because ozone layer damage makes them much more susceptible to UV rays, apparently in part because the author, Victoria Foyt, told the editors the people who were criticizing her were just haters. In the statement from the Weird Tales publisher, he says:

Marvin was approached by Victoria Foyt, and was asked to review her novel. He was told that she was being slammed online by people who had not read it. I have not read the novel, but have gone over its online presence today. I have no need to read it. I saw the blackface video and read the excerpts the author and publisher chose to make available. I must conclude that the use of the powerful symbols of white people forced to wear blackface to escape the sun, white women lusting after black “beast men,” the “pearls” and “coals,” etc., is goddamned ridiculous and offensive. It seems like the work of someone who does not understand the power of what she is playing with.

In a way, this reminds me of the controversy over TLC’s great reality show All-American Muslim, when advertisers including Lowe’s and Kayak pulled out of the show after a fringe Florida group that purports to represent many more people than it actually does, told them that the show in some way was a contravention of their values. Both cases are a reminder that when someone is really eager to discredit a controversy, or to tell you that something that seems utterly anodyne is secretly nefarious, it’s probably worth going to the source material, or whatever of the source material is available, and making your own independent judgement.

Jonathan Chait has a long, and important, essay in New York about the extent to which our popular culture is liberal. But while I think the piece is required reading, and that Chait is largely correct about the extent to which Hollywood values are essentially if not particularly articulately liberal values, I want to quibble with him on a few issues. I don’t really think the culture war is over, it’s just in a new phase. And it’s important to acknowledge that for all the liberal values it espouses, Hollywood employment can be astonishingly, shockingly illiberal in a way that impacts and diminishes the breadth and depth of the liberalism that’s reflected in the content the industry produces.

It’s true, as he writes, that “Americans for Responsible Television and Christian Leaders for Responsible Television would be flipping out over the modern family in Modern Family, not to mention the girls of Girls and the gays of Glee, except that those groups went defunct long ago.” But it’s not as if other groups haven’t risen up to replace them. Retailers may have become comfortable rebuffing organizations like the Million Moms when they complain about something as anodyne as Archie Comics that portray gay people getting married and serving in the armed forces. But as the reaction to TLC’s All-American Muslim, a reality show that explored the lives of an interconnected group of Muslim families in Michigan, shows, conservative groups can be shockingly effective when their target is a minority with less social capital than the gay community. Home-supply giant Lowe’s and travel booker Kayak both pulled their ads from the program in response to a boycott organized by a front organization, the Florida Family Association. Just because conservative agitation campaigns have moved from condemning gay characters to treating the portrayal of Muslim families as normal Americans as a suspect practice doesn’t mean they’re not still active, and that they can’t still be effective.

Chait also suggests that the very fact that The Dark Knight Rises was hailed as a conservative movie suggests that conservatives have largely ceded the debate. That’s a debate that depends in part on how conservative you believe The Dark Knight Rises is. But it also doesn’t really take into account the effort to build a parallel structure to Hollywood to create and release deeply conservative movies like the anti-abortion film October Baby, which made $5,355,847 at the box office, or Act of Valor the rah-rah Marine movie that took in $70,012,847 domestically and another $10 million overseas. If liberals are able to use mainstream Hollywood to, as Chait puts it, use “their platform to raise their audience’s consciousness about racial tolerance or the environment or distrusting government officials,” on a broad but not particularly deep level, conservatives are using their cultural products to rally people who are already deeply invested in a shared set of ideas, whether that abortion is wrong, or that unquestioning praise of the troops is critically important.

And while Chait points out that Hollywood is an industry that makes liberals and conservatives talk somewhat differently about the market than they do in other spheres—”One oddity of the Hollywood-liberalism debate is that it makes liberals posit the existence of a perfect, frictionless market, while conservatives find themselves explaining why a free market is failing to function as it ought to,” he writes—he ignores one of the strangest disjuncts between Hollywood’s stated and practiced values, and one the deepest drivers of the shallowness of Hollywood liberalism: the striking illiberalism of the industry’s hiring practices. The Hollywood liberals who shape the worldviews Chait discusses are largely white men, and the actual patterns of employment in the industry are the kind of nightmare stories liberals like to tell about what American life would look like under conservative rule. I’ve repeated these statistics to many times that I’m exhausted by them, but no discussion of how liberal Hollywood is can really be an honest one unless it’s acknowledged that in the 2010-2011 television season, women were just 15 percent of writers and that women of color directed just one percent of episodes, or that in 2009, the pay gap between white men and minority writers of both genders in television was $23,325. These are maddening numbers that represent a fundamental and powerful contradiction between the ideals of Hollywood and its practices, and that shouldn’t be ignored just because the ideas in a lot of films and television shows are fundamentally if not exceptionally liberal. Powerful Hollywood liberals should not be allowed to walk on hiring practices because their work reaps results a decade and a half down the line, and we should not assume that the liberalism espoused by Hollywood content is truly representative of the spectrum or priorities of liberalism, particularly given the portrayal of women and people of color, when they actually get roles in front of the camera.
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For those of you who couldn’t make our panel on Islam and pop culture at SXSW earlier this week, I’m hoping to have video to post eventually. And it feels fitting that after discussing what the next step in depictions of Muslims might look like after the cancellation of All-American Muslim, word’s out about a new show that could be an innovation both in those images—and in alternative sources of funding for pilot production. Here Come the Muhammads would feature a soldier coming home to tell his Christian family—his father’s the pastor at a local church—that he’s converted to Islam. “I’ve seen all the shows about [Muslims in] sleeper cells,” comedian and show creator Preacher Moss told Illume magazine, which has a fascinating piece on the project. “I wanted to be able to do something that’s funny and meaningful.”

The show’s meant to solve one of the most common criticisms of All-American Muslim, that it focused too narrowly on Lebanese-American Shia Muslims rather than representing the full diversity of Islam. From the sounds of things, it would keep Muslims and Christians in conversation, rather than depicting Muslism as part of a closed community. And I’m glad Ross is putting front and center the idea of what Muslim comedy might look like. One thing some of us on the panel discussed after seeing Marc Maron interview Jeffrey Tambor at SXSW was the fact that while Jewish humor is very much the product of an enclave, it’s also solidly established as part of the American vernacular, an internal conversation that’s entirely comprehensible to the general public. There’s no such Muslim equivalent yet, and seeing how that plays out would be fascinating.

Then, there’s the matter of the show’s funding:

Currently, Moss is in the process of securing funds to develop a pilot – a process that he said is taking a very different approach from previous shows depicting Muslims.“We’re treating it totally as a start-up, so the idea is that we want to develop a pilot that’s the result of community work, not just one guy,” he said.

Modeled after the Allah Made Me Funny project, a comedy tour founded by Moss that aims to portray the underrepresented peaceful Muslims, Moss plans to raise $50,000 in funding in the same way money is raised for building masjids, schools or hospitals – one that allows community ownership and, consequently, community pride. The low-budget pilot will also require less repayment later, he said.
“However we distribute, there’s community ownership,” he said. “A lot of these shows they put out – Aliens in America, Little Mosque on the Prairie and All-American Muslims – they had literally no connection to the community.”


I’m all for experiments in fan and community investment in programming, but I’d hate to think that giving the community ownership could trade off with getting a show like this to a larger audience. So if there’s a network looking to add a comedy with Muslim characters where the creators are willing to shoot a pilot on their own, Here Come the Muhammads might be worth a look.

TLC has cancelled All-American Muslim, its reality series about an interconnected group of Muslim families in Dearborn, Michigan. The show pulled relatively low ratings—even as the show’s buzz reached its height, fewer than a million people were tuning in on Sunday nights. And members of the cast told the Detroit Free Press that TLC explained that the ratings were the reason All-American Muslim wouldn’t be coming back for a second season.

The show was also the subject of a campaign by prominent Islamaphobes. Pamela Geller insisted that the show was offensive because it refused to portray Muslims as extremists, terrorists, and criminals. The Florida Family Association, essentially a one-man front group with a history of running boycotts rather than advancing family values, convinced hardware giant Lowe’s and travel discounter Kayak to drop their advertising on the show. Lowe’s tried to hide behind claims of negative buzz for the show on social media, though there was little evidence of any such chatter that wasn’t inflected by anti-Muslim sentiment, and Kayak’s founder wrote an incoherent attack on the show in response to criticism. Both companies were subject to intense pressure to reinstate their advertising, and music executive Russell Simmons offered to buy up spots on the show, only to find that they were sold out.

That All-American Muslim couldn’t find an audience is disappointing, and not just because the Florida Family Association and Geller will treat the decision as a victory. It was a warm, unsensationalistic show that featured serious debates about religion, obligation, and community norms—in other words, the best that reality television is capable of. This is a loss for quality television, as well as for tolerance.

I’m obviously thrilled to see good ratings for Homeland‘s first-season finale: I like seeing pop culture behave like a meritocracy once in a while. But it got me thinking about whether or not Showtime’s new hit is trading off with All-American Muslim, which is seeing a downturn in viewership. 10 p.m. on a Sunday is obviously a tough time for a family-oriented show in any case, and I’d be curious to see how the show did in another slot, like 8 p.m. on Fridays. But it also meant that a show specifically designed to dismantle misconceptions about American Muslims by showing them living and debating their faith was running against a show that poked holes in stereotypes about Islam and terrorism and gave one of its main characters space to explain his conversion and show him at prayer. It would be great to open up new audiences to that conversation. But that takes time. And it’s too bad to have two shows with those themes competing with each other.

The Florida Family Association has managed to do a lot of damage with its All-American Muslim boycott over the last week and a half, whether by convincing companies like Lowe’s and Kayak to absolutely humiliate themselves, or by stirring up anti-Muslim sentiment against the cast of a touching and totally uncontroversial reality show. But fortunately one thing sanctimonious moralizers do well is make lists, and they’ve kept track of advertisers who stuck to their guns and either continued to advertise on the show after the FFA started its campaign.

So if you’re withdrawing your business from Lowe’s and Kayak and, during the holiday season, looking for new places to spend some money, you can use their list against them. Those advertisers include:

– Big Lots
– Conagra’s Hunt’s Diced Tomatoes
– Discover Card
– Disney for The Muppets
– GeicoHonda North America, for the Accord and Odyssey
– HTC Phones
– Mucinex
– Delsym
– Resolve Clean
– Drano
– Glade
– Scrubbing Bubbles
– Kay Jewelers

That’s not to say that any of these companies are saints, but sometimes doing business can also be doing a decent thing. Next time I pick up some cleaning products, at least, I’ll stick with these brand names. And if I have a secret admirer out there contemplating holiday jewelry, you know where to look.