brotherpeacemaker

I have always had an unnatural attraction to cars. When I was little my favorite toys were Hot Wheels, Matchboxes, and Johnny Lightenings. I had so many cars I could never keep them in one of those carrying cases. It never occurred to me to keep them in their original container untouched to accumulate value. If I was with my mom when she made the purchase that package would be opened and the car would be rolling across the counter before the cashier could lift her finger off the buttons that rang up the purchase. I remember getting one or two of the race track sets, but they never came with enough tracks to make the type of layout I wanted to build. A figure eight is okay for the other kids. I needed something that resembled the intersection of various highway ramps through downtown Los Angeles, Houston, and Miami combined and then boosted with more highway construction steroids. I would grab all the books off the bookshelf and use them to make elaborate buildings for my cars to drive through. Honestly, I invented a model of the high tech city in the movie Minority Report when I was still in diapers. I love cars. All ways have. All ways will.

So when I discovered the cartoon Speed Racer I was in animation heaven. It was a cartoon that spoke to me. It was as if some guy over in Japan was actually thinking, there is a kid in America who loves cars and we need to create a cartoon just for him! Speed Racer was that cartoon. The Mach 5 was the coolest Hot Wheel I had ever seen. Speed Racer got to drive as fast as he wanted, as fast as he could, the most powerful car in the world. He had a father that had his own garage and could build cars like the Mach 5 from scratch. How cool was that? He had a plane jane girlfriend who lived in the neighborhood and had her own helicopter. But he constantly found the one woman in every episode that needed help. He had to fight off every woman in every race he ever entered. And he had a really cool theme song!

Here he comes! Here comes Speed Racer! He’s a demon on wheels!

There was the episode with the Mammoth Car. The episode where Speed had to race the Gang of the Assassins. There was the episode where Speed and his mechanic friend Sparky had a fight just when the Mach 5 was in the middle of a rebuild and Speed had to finish the job himself, stayed up all night to do it, managed to make it to the race only to have the steering wheel fell off or something stupid like that and Sparky came back to do the repair in the middle of the race and Speed won! It was one of those famous races around the world so there was plenty of time to get back into the race to eek out a win. That was an entire generation ago. I haven’t seen a Speed Racer episode since I went off to college. Yes, I really did faithfully watch that cartoon for that long.

The release of the new Speed Racer movie brought all kinds of distant memories to the surface of my conscious brain. And with a better appreciation of the social programming that I was subjected to as a kid I now look at the Racer family and friends with a totally different perspective. Speed Racer, like just about every cartoon developed in the sixties and prior, didn’t have much regard for black people. The cartoon was developed in Japan with the American market in mind.  And in the sixties, black people were not even remotely considered an equal part in the American equation.  It is no accident that Speed Racer looked a lot like an anime version of Elvis Presley with exaggerated, huge doe eyes. By any measure Mr. Presley became an icon of American sixties culture with such movies as Girl Happy, Spinout, and Viva Las Vegas. I think the only movie he appeared in where a black person had any kind of role was Change Of Habit when Barbara McNair played Sister Irene Hawkins. I don’t think I ever saw an African based character in any type of significant role in a Speed Racer episode. And I never thought anything of it. I accepted the world of racing animation void of black people. I accepted the conditioning that white people belong everywhere, white people are truthful, white people are the heroes, white people have integrity, and black people do not exist on any significant level. It took a long time for me to recognize that very subtle but nevertheless powerful social conditioning with racial implications.

And now that I can see the programming I can actually take the steps necessary to start expunging that conditioning from my brain as well as do what I can to keep it from infecting the young impressionable people in my life circle. Hopefully, my son will never know anything about the world of Speed Racer. I have to confess to a bit of nostalgia when I think of myself watching the original Speed Racer cartoon all those years ago. I fondly remember rushing home after school so I could watch the program and sing the songs and not give a damn about the physics of the Mach 5, a car that could drive up walls, chop down trees in a fraction of a second with a rotating blade that popped out of the front air intake, and turn into a submarine. Speed Racer could do anything with the possible lone exception of appearing in an episode with a memorable black person.