Sandra Scherer (Flickr)
Johnny Depp, as Captain Jack Sparrow, a pirate of ambiguous ethnicity, in “Pirates of the Caribbean.”
Pirates are a perennial favorite for Halloween, made all the more popular by the Pirates of the Caribbean movie series. Yet there’s a deep irony as millions of Americans don pirate costumes and play colonial heroes of the Caribbean while President Trump continues to ignore the suffering of Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands—America’s colonies, many would argue—devastated by recent hurricanes.
The question is worth asking: What does a film series like Pirates tell us about race and whiteness in Trump’s America?
The tenth highest-grossing film series of all time, with a revenue of more than $4.5 billion, this Hollywood franchise purports to talk about pirates who challenged white colonial power in the Caribbean. The series has been mid-wifed by an all-white team of Hollywood producers, directors, writers, and actors, led by Johnny Depp who plays the protagonist, Captain Jack Sparrow.
Wikipedia describes Pirates as “a series of American fantasy swashbuckler films,” based on Walt Disney’s theme park ride of the same name. As scholars of islands and colonialism, we know “fantasy swashbuckler” is an oxymoron. While Disney and fantasy implies an escape, swashbucklers—as a subgenre of action movies—often feature historic events in the plot.
Historically, the series is set after the turn of the 18th century, when the British Empire and its East India Company fought other European empires to take control of the sea and rule the world. By early 1900s, the British Empire was the largest empire in the world; it ruled over more than 450 million people and covered almost a quarter of the Earth’s surface. If we count maritime rivals of the East India Company—the Dutch and the Spaniards feature prominently in the movie series—white colonial rule controlled about 90 percent of our planet a century ago, through slavery, genocide, war, plunder, deliberate destruction of native histories and cultures, and a global environmental devastation of which climate change is today the rightful heir.
The islands in Pirates are lush, edenic, full of hidden treasures and empty of the islanders of color who in reality were ever-present.
Instead of engaging even briefly with the terror of colonial rule in the tropics, the movie settings reinforce clichés of desert islands. The islands in Pirates are lush, edenic, tropical isles, full of hidden treasures and virgin beaches. But they are empty of the islanders of color who in reality were ever-present, often working as slaves and laborers for white plantation owners. When people of color do make an appearance, they are clichés—cannibals (Pelegosto), whores, voodoo priestesses, and Asian villains like Captain Sao Feng (Singapore).
In short, movies like Pirates perpetuate images of islands and the “third world” that were once used to justify white colonial rule over 90 percent of our planet – be it through travel writing, trade documents, anthropological or scientific theories, visual art or a more “highbrow” literary storytelling.
Although Pirates casts the British Empire as a villain, the victims of white colonial power are mostly white. The series is punctuated with images of lynched bodies and islanders on the verge of execution, yet the danger is mostly faced by white, or white-appearing, pirates resisting European colonials.
Even the dead are whitewashed. The ghosts of the sea presented to us in Pirates tell us nothing of the true horrors of the Middle Passage, where millions of black and brown bodies were thrown overboard off ships carrying African slaves and Asian indentured laborers to the plantations of the New World. Instead, through repeated spotlights on The Flying Dutchman’s captain Davy Jones (Dead Man’s Chest) or Captain Armando Salazar and his eclectic ghostly crew (Dead Men Tell No Tales), Pirates sustains white colonials as the dead.
In one excruciating scene in At World’s End, the East India Company loses a maritime battle and one of its ships is about to sink. At this moment, we are presented with Lord Beckett as a colonial hero, facing his death by drowning with heroism.
But what about Jack Sparrow, the protagonist opposing colonial power? Doesn’t he make the series a story about resisting white supremacy?
We think not.
In fact, Johnny Depp’s hugely popular Jack Sparrow character only complements the franchise’s racial logic.
Sparrow’s physical appearance combines traits from various “ethnic” peoples through his tan skin, kohled eyes and dreadlocks. Is he white? Is he a person of color? These questions intrigued us even more because the family ties of the series’s leading white characters–Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Swann, Orlando Bloom as Will Turner, Dominic Scott as Henry Turner or Kaya Scodelario as Carina Smyth—often drive the plot in the series.
Yet the films never reveal specific information on Jack’s lineage or racial identity; they offer only quick snippets to his past. All we know is our tan-skinned hero was born in the middle of the Indian Ocean during a typhoon. Jack’s father Captain Edward Teague, once pirate lord of Madagascar, appears only briefly in the series looking as racially ambiguous as his son. When asked by Jack how his mother is doing, Teague shows his son a “shrunken head,” a practice most audiences will associate with non-white ethnicity.
What intrigued us most about Jack’s racial identity is a deleted scene—mentioned in passing in the series—in which the protagonist loses his ship when he sets free a cargo of slaves. What might Jack’s relationship to the slaves be? Is he only an enemy of the British Empire, or also a member of a community of color? Nothing in the five films sheds light on this absent scene, which actually engages with the racial history of the Caribbean—a telling omission in a film series by an all-white team.
What might Jack’s relationship to the slaves be? Is he only an enemy of the British Empire, or also a member of a community of color?
What’s frustrating, yet sadly unsurprising, is that the series chooses a white actor to play the role of a racially ambiguous pirate who symbolizes freedom against Empire. And it does so while both setting the films historically in a time when millions of people of color were struggling for their freedom against white empires and releasing them in a moment when Hollywood and the publishing industry have been challenged as notoriously white.
Through his ambiguous identity and political allegiance, Jack Sparrow—captain of the Black Pearl, manned by a “crew of the damned”—thus speaks for people and histories of color without engaging with them in any real way. Pirates repeats and normalizes a staggering history of white oppression while sanitizing it of its dark side, a history that continues to have dire economic and political consequences across the globe.
With its latest sequel released in summer 2017, Pirates only reinforces the white supremacy now so routinely reflected in Trump’s words (endless Syrian refugees, Muslim terrorists, Mexicans criminals and job stealers, irrational North Koreans, and most recently, needy and expensive Puerto Ricans and Virgin Islanders).
“Oh, come on,” we can hear movie fans argue. “The goal of the Pirates franchise is to entertain its audience, not offer us a history textbook. It’s meant to lighten us up! Can’t we just give it a rest and have some fun for a change?”
We think not.
As long as white professionals and gatekeepers of the entertainment industry don’t take responsibility for their choices in storytelling, especially when courting “diversity,” they’ll continue to repeat a tired history of white storytelling across media that has dehumanized, erased, or conveniently spoken for people of color, while making billions in profit. Hollywood cannot any longer evade its ethical responsibility toward normalizing racism in the name of entertainment.
“Oh, come on,” we can hear movie fans argue. “Can’t we just give it a rest and have some fun for a change?”
We think not.
Besides, Hollywood has given us range of award-winning movies that portray World War II with historic complexity and the deep humanity of those who paid the cost of fascism. No billion-dollar earning Hollywood franchise would be defended in the name of entertainment if it depicted “good” Nazis and a sanitized version of the Holocaust, one that produced not only sequel after sequel but also popularized theme parks and Halloween costumes on Jewish suffering. White representations of non-white minorities in media deserve the same humanity and a basic ethical treatment.
We’re dangerously deluded if we think that what goes on screen does not directly impact our reality. America has elected a famous TV personality as its latest President: the entertainment world has penetrated the most powerful office in the world, and the screen that separates reality from fantasy has disappeared altogether. We choose to be a complacent, entertained audience at our own peril.
Namrata Poddar writes fiction, nonfiction, and teaches transnational American literature at UCLA.
Usha Rungoo is a native of Mauritius, and a newly-minted US permanent resident. She is completing a PhD dissertation in the departments of French and African American Studies at Yale University.