The obvious critiques of crass materialism aside, Santa Claus is but a user friendly symbol of the State’s capacity to engage in blatant forms of surveillance and to police behavior in the absence of actual surveillance.
“Santa Claus is Coming to Town”:
Some Notes on Christmas and State Surveillance
by Mark Anthony Neal
It was one of those Hallmark Mahogany moments; we were all in the living room in front of the fireplace, the Christmas tree was lit, Christmas carols on the stereo as my youngest daughter played Mancala and my oldest finished up her homework. As The Temptations’ stellar version of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” played in the background my oldest gave a curious look and blurted out, “Santa sounds like a stalker.” She was referring specifically to the lyric “he knows when you are sleeping/ he knows when you’re awake,/he knows when you’ve been bad or good/So be good for goodness sake. ” My daughter was on to something. Every holiday season millions of American embrace a seemingly innocuous symbol, that is in truth a powerful reminder of the reality of State surveillance in everyday life.
As citizens, we are practically trained to never fully interrogate the dominant symbols that circulate within American culture, including Santa Claus. I remember, as a child, wondering how Santa traveled down a chimney that my family—or anybody else in the South Bronx for that matter—did not possess. In my youthful nationalist days, it was easy to reject the idea that some “fat white man” would be honored for providing gifts that hardworking black women and men, like my parents sacrificed to provide for their families. These critiques largely spoke to the obvious cultural ramifications of Black Americans embracing symbols that did not reflect our heritage. The relative explosion of Ebony Santas and heritage consumables like Hallmark’s Mahogany greeting card line (even Kwanzaa essentials can be purchased at Pier 1) were blatant attempts to respond our need to see our heritage celebrated during the holiday season. But even this heightened sense of multicultural reflection get us further away from the more troubling aspects of Santa Claus.
The obvious critiques of capitalism and crass materialism aside, Santa Claus is but a user friendly symbol of the State’s capacity not only to engage in blatant forms of surveillance, but to essentially police behavior in the absence of actual surveillance. Indeed how many parents have exploited their children’s knowledge that Santa “knows when you are bad or good” as a means of reigning in bad behavior. When you consider the proliferation of Santa Claus imagery in popular media in the post World War II period, much of which targeted children, one gets an inkling of the ways that American’s are socialized at very ages to accept and expect certain forms of State surveillance.
Children’s programming ranging from the classic Rankin-Bass productions of the 1960s and 1970s such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1965), Santa Claus is Coming to Town (1970) and The Year Without a Santa Claus, to current theatrical fare such as the Tom Hanks produced The Polar Express (2004), which was adapted from the 1985 book, all portray Santa Claus as a benevolent patriarch. Benevolent, that is, as long as children (and presumably adults) adhere to some State sanctioned notion of normal and legal behavior.
This particularly brand of Santa Claus is also positioned in opposition to disruptive outlaw figures—think about the ways that Burgermeister Meisterburger in Santa Claus is Coming to Town reproduced anxieties about Soviet-styled Communism or how the Miser Brothers of The Year Without a Santa Claus fame are used to gently chide the kinds of male flamboyance often associated with homosexuality.
Yet there are moments, when the sheen of Santa Claus is eroded. In The Terrible Twos (1982) and The Terrible Threes (1989), Ishmael Reed’s brilliant satirical novels, he highlight corporate complicity in the maintenance of the Santa Claus myth, as well as offers a revisionist take on the original Dutch version of St. Nicholas and his “helper” Black Peter. Even Tim Allen’s Santa Clause 2, features a draconian militaristic version of Santa Claus, that suggest an Old St. Nick perfectly pitched for the era of the Patriot Act.
I for one keep thinking of the old recording, “Back Door Santa” a soulful banger recorded in the 1960s by the lyrically profane Clarence Carter. Originally collected on A Soul Christmas (1967), the song details the sexual exploits of a Santa Claus who samples more than warm milk and cookies when he visits. As Carter sings, “they call me backdoor Santa/ I make my runs about the break of day/ I make all the little girls happy/while the boys are out to play.”
Though "Back Door Santa" is playful in its sexual innuendo, the song also indexes some of the anxieties associated with black life in the 1960s as things like COINTEPRO (under the behest of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover) literally threatened black lives on a daily basis. When one takes into account the December 4, 1969 State sanctioned assassinations of Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark (in what poet Haki Madhubuti describes as a “One-Sided Shootout”) or even the recent revelation that the late historian John Hope Franklin was subject to FBI surveillance during the 1960s, so-called Christmas songs like “Back Door Santa” simply take on a different meaning.
“Santa Claus is Coming to Town”:
Some Notes on Christmas and State Surveillance
by Mark Anthony Neal
It was one of those Hallmark Mahogany moments; we were all in the living room in front of the fireplace, the Christmas tree was lit, Christmas carols on the stereo as my youngest daughter played Mancala and my oldest finished up her homework. As The Temptations’ stellar version of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” played in the background my oldest gave a curious look and blurted out, “Santa sounds like a stalker.” She was referring specifically to the lyric “he knows when you are sleeping/ he knows when you’re awake,/he knows when you’ve been bad or good/So be good for goodness sake. ” My daughter was on to something. Every holiday season millions of American embrace a seemingly innocuous symbol, that is in truth a powerful reminder of the reality of State surveillance in everyday life.
As citizens, we are practically trained to never fully interrogate the dominant symbols that circulate within American culture, including Santa Claus. I remember, as a child, wondering how Santa traveled down a chimney that my family—or anybody else in the South Bronx for that matter—did not possess. In my youthful nationalist days, it was easy to reject the idea that some “fat white man” would be honored for providing gifts that hardworking black women and men, like my parents sacrificed to provide for their families. These critiques largely spoke to the obvious cultural ramifications of Black Americans embracing symbols that did not reflect our heritage. The relative explosion of Ebony Santas and heritage consumables like Hallmark’s Mahogany greeting card line (even Kwanzaa essentials can be purchased at Pier 1) were blatant attempts to respond our need to see our heritage celebrated during the holiday season. But even this heightened sense of multicultural reflection get us further away from the more troubling aspects of Santa Claus.
The obvious critiques of capitalism and crass materialism aside, Santa Claus is but a user friendly symbol of the State’s capacity not only to engage in blatant forms of surveillance, but to essentially police behavior in the absence of actual surveillance. Indeed how many parents have exploited their children’s knowledge that Santa “knows when you are bad or good” as a means of reigning in bad behavior. When you consider the proliferation of Santa Claus imagery in popular media in the post World War II period, much of which targeted children, one gets an inkling of the ways that American’s are socialized at very ages to accept and expect certain forms of State surveillance.
Children’s programming ranging from the classic Rankin-Bass productions of the 1960s and 1970s such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1965), Santa Claus is Coming to Town (1970) and The Year Without a Santa Claus, to current theatrical fare such as the Tom Hanks produced The Polar Express (2004), which was adapted from the 1985 book, all portray Santa Claus as a benevolent patriarch. Benevolent, that is, as long as children (and presumably adults) adhere to some State sanctioned notion of normal and legal behavior.
This particularly brand of Santa Claus is also positioned in opposition to disruptive outlaw figures—think about the ways that Burgermeister Meisterburger in Santa Claus is Coming to Town reproduced anxieties about Soviet-styled Communism or how the Miser Brothers of The Year Without a Santa Claus fame are used to gently chide the kinds of male flamboyance often associated with homosexuality.
Yet there are moments, when the sheen of Santa Claus is eroded. In The Terrible Twos (1982) and The Terrible Threes (1989), Ishmael Reed’s brilliant satirical novels, he highlight corporate complicity in the maintenance of the Santa Claus myth, as well as offers a revisionist take on the original Dutch version of St. Nicholas and his “helper” Black Peter. Even Tim Allen’s Santa Clause 2, features a draconian militaristic version of Santa Claus, that suggest an Old St. Nick perfectly pitched for the era of the Patriot Act.
I for one keep thinking of the old recording, “Back Door Santa” a soulful banger recorded in the 1960s by the lyrically profane Clarence Carter. Originally collected on A Soul Christmas (1967), the song details the sexual exploits of a Santa Claus who samples more than warm milk and cookies when he visits. As Carter sings, “they call me backdoor Santa/ I make my runs about the break of day/ I make all the little girls happy/while the boys are out to play.”
Though "Back Door Santa" is playful in its sexual innuendo, the song also indexes some of the anxieties associated with black life in the 1960s as things like COINTEPRO (under the behest of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover) literally threatened black lives on a daily basis. When one takes into account the December 4, 1969 State sanctioned assassinations of Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark (in what poet Haki Madhubuti describes as a “One-Sided Shootout”) or even the recent revelation that the late historian John Hope Franklin was subject to FBI surveillance during the 1960s, so-called Christmas songs like “Back Door Santa” simply take on a different meaning.
