Racism, Ellie Kemper, and History

Ellie Kemper

Twitter, which is frequently vulnerable to the worst forms of swarming behavior, apparently remembered that Ellie Kemper existed yesterday. The Kimmie Schmidt actress netted attention she probably didn’t want when someone discovered she once won a lite-beer “beauty pageant” organized by a St. Louis civic group with racist ties. The usual responses poured forth like a fountain: Kimmie Schmidt is a Nazi agent! Back off Kimmie, she was only nineteen!

The weird unfolding drama (Kemper hasn’t commented as I write) swirled around questions of exactly how culpable social media should hold Kemper, for having ever been involved with such an organization. Twitter’s short character count excises all nuance, of course, so the controversy devolves into painting Kemper, and the organization that rewarded her, with a broad brush. Everything descends, though, to a simple dichotomy: Kemper is, or isn’t, guilty.

I propose this misses the point. Faced with evidence that a historically racist organization controls one of St. Louis’s major annual summer festivals, tweeters are apparently casting around for someone to blame, individually. Put another way, this news presents evidence that systemic racism continues to exist, and picks society’s winners, in a major American city, and instead of decrying the system, tweeters seek a high-profile individual to blame.

Double-checking sources doesn’t make things any easier. Nearly every accusation cites this Atlantic article from 2014, which never mentions Kemper’s name. Moreover, this source says the formerly segregated organization that awarded Kemper this “pageant” (which, apparently, wasn’t competitive) isn’t nearly so bigoted as her accusers suggest. The article suggests its organizers have struggled, somewhat, with the group’s clearly racist past.

Judging from the source, the Fair Saint Louis, formerly the Veiled Prophet Fair, definitely had its roots in the desire to preserve racial and economic privilege. Author Scott Beauchamp describes how founders wanted to exclude the city’s Black population, poor whites, and trade unionists from power. However, Beauchamp also describes how the organization desegregated twenty years before Kemper was crowned, a year before she was even born.

Saying the group officially desegregated itself only says so much, of course. As journalist Sarah Kendzior writes, St. Louis today is a majority-Black city, but economic might and political authority remain concentrated in White hands. If Fair Saint Louis preserves its role in keeping the wealthy connected, nominally letting Black Missourians through the door doesn’t fix anything. I can’t address that; I prefer Kansas City myself.

St. Louis, Missouri

Several years ago, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book Strangers In Their Own Land described the experience of mostly White people living in chronically poor parts of America. Hochschild chose her subjects for their poverty, but also because their regions traditionally supported a conservative political agenda that willfully punished the poor. Why, she wondered, do poor Whites seem to vote for their own continued impoverishment?

Ever the scientist, Hochschild avoided assigning explanations to her subjects’ behavior. She simply observed that people conformed themselves to their environments; even transplants from left-leaning areas, many of them registered Democrats, took on the political and religious leanings of their region. Humans, ever the consummate social animals, came to resemble the places they chose as home. Possibly because doing otherwise was like fighting the tide.

(Matthew Desmond wrote something similar: nobody blames the poor for their plight more than other poor people.)

Therefore, I have difficulty blaming Kemper for what happened when she was nineteen. Already an aspiring actress, she showed up in public and participated in a cheapjack attention grab, hoping it would kick-start her career. (As a trained actor myself, one of the reasons my career stalled at the gate was my unwillingness to participate in such displays.) She was part of her community, and comported herself accordingly.

Whether Fair Saint Louis remains racist, despite desegregating over forty years ago, is irrelevant. So is whether Kemper, at nineteen, had enough individual agency to make decisions about history. What matters is that twenty-two years later, Twitter, a notorious engine of self-righteous dogpiling, decided that blaming Ellie Kemper for the persistence of racism in America would fix… well… anything. Because we still think assigning blame equals solving the problem.

Fair Saint Louis was certainly founded in racism and classism. Then it survived its time because people go along to get along. Now, decades later, the exact same conformist mob mentality seeks to blame Ellie Kemper because America’s racist legacy hasn’t gone away yet. The mob can’t handle that individuals can’t sway systems (ironically enough). The Twitter mob wants an individual to blame. The system just laughs.