Racism may be as old as our species, but the dominant language and imagery of racism in our current America is relatively new–less than 100 years old. To understand the dog whistles of the teabaggers, conservatives, Republicans and wingnuts (four groups with almost zero distinction between them) one must pay attention to the movies and especially to the film that created the vocabulary, memes, frames and talking points that are the building blocks of these racist dog whistles. Of course I’m talking about The Birth of a Nation:
Racism is alive and well in America. The Republican Party and the Tea Party movement are using dog whistles to racism as an effective organizing tool in this election cycle. They are, of course, outraged if anybody notices and insulted if anybody who notices is so rude as to mention it and call them out. Hence the shit-spitting attacks at the NAACP in recent weeks. The overt racism of teabaggers Mark Williams and Andrew Breitbart are just the most well known examples. It is not surprising that both of these racists use the internets, twitter, social media and the latest technology to mobilize folks around their dog whistles and to push out to a gullible media a selective cut of information as facts that must be taken seriously.
Racism has always been an early adapter of new technologies–from the printing press to movies to radio to TV to the web to smart phones (racist may even be faster than pornographers)–the racists are quick to use new tools of manipulation. And so it is not a surprise that Williams, Breitbart and their camp followers are using all of the most modern technologies to deliver racist dog whistles to help Republicans win this November. And yes–I know–they will be outraged that I notice and indignant that I pointed it out, but that does not change what they are doing at all.
Racism is smoothly mixed with American pop culture. And in many ways we have D.W. Griffiths’ The Birth of a Nation to thank for that. One could do quite a few entries on this topic (and I expect that I will).
Consider the villain of the film. His name is Silas Lynch. He is a man of mixed race. In 2007 Time Magazine named Silas Lynch as number one villain in the history of cinema. Silas beat out everybody from Peter Lorrre’s pedophile in “M” to Hannibal Lecter to the Wicked Witch of the West. Silas Lynch was a bad mother fuc…[shut yer mouth].
And when it come to the Tea Party and the Republican Party, Barack Hussein Obama is Silas Lynch. If you understand this pop culture reference then so much of the rhetoric, dog whistles, talking points and memes of wingnutopia make ‘sense’ in the context of their batshit crazy view of the world.
There is a lot to explore in the Obama is Silas Lynch wingnut meme, but film history blogger Paul J. Marasa at his site The Constant Viewer pretty much nailed the core wingnut belief when he wrote about The Birth of a Nation. Marasa writes about film as a daily diary dated from the start of cinema. His description of Lynch could be used by any average teabagger to describe their core problem with President Obama:
Lynch is portrayed as the ultimate villain because of his mixed race, presumably possessing the supposed superior intellect of the white man and the supposed cunning deceit of the black man. He is seen as the symbol of all that is morally wrong with Reconstruction. He lusts for power and will betray the trust of his white benefactors as soon as it suits him.
Obama is a race traitor and his supporters are fools. It is a simple message and it comes through loud and clear in the dog whistles of 2010.
I know that pointing this out is rude, but so it goes.
Still, everything that your average teabagger/conservative/Republican/wingnut knows to be true they learned from the movies–especially The Birth of A Nation.
Cheers
Cat Lady
Aren’t the teatards the dogs that have all come running? The question that remains to be seen is what do the dog whistlers do with all those agitated dogs now that they’ve shown up?
Brachiator
Neither The Birth of a Nation, nor the book that it was based on, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, created the vocabulary of racism.
Similarly, Paul J. Marasa is an ignorant fool. He should read a few books, starting perhaps with The Souls of Black Folk.
Dennis G.
@Cat Lady:
You do what has always been done. Form a mob. Resort to violence. Protect the powerful. And then take the rubes to the cleaners. Rinse. Repeat.
It is one of the oldest stories in history.
Cheers
matoko_chan
well……the happy ending is that racism is ingrained in the conservative psyche so deeply and pervasively that they can’t turn it off, even when they desperately need.
Thus Mark Williams and Breitbart.
Every time Breitbart opens his mouth conservatives alienate more black, brown, and young people.
Cuz young people wont vote for old white racists.
They aren’t cool.
It is going to take an epic asswhupping from the demographic timer to knock some sense into these retards….and its coming.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I get this feeling I could not sit through Birth of a Nation. I still hold that the biggest sign of their racism, though, is Michael Steele. Because they cannot properly deal with blacks as equal human beings, they cannot figure out how to fire Steele for his incompetence. I think they view the way he acts as how all blacks act, and so it’s something they have to put up with to have their token black man in front of the camera.
Someguy
Makes a pretty good case for eugenics, doesn’t it?
Jon H
One could almost see that film as yet another instance of porn leading the way with a new medium.
Not sexual porn, but porn all the same.
Erik
Really wish that link was to the relevant wikipedia page rather than directly to that filth.
Dennis G.
@Brachiator:
Racism has old roots, but I think you make a big mistake to disregard the narrative power of The Birth of A Nation.
Much of our current vocabulary in America is cinematic and rooted in pop culture. And while it is true that earlier iterations of racism have echos in TBoaN, I think it has become the strongest narrative reference in our current .
I may be guilty of in artful prose and please accept my apologies for that. As for Mr. Marasa, he may be–like many of us–an ignorant fool about this or that. Still, he made a solid point about Silas Lynch and a point that I think explains the Obama hatred in so many quarters of wingnutopia.
Peace and cheers
Brachiator
Still, the The Birth of A Nation simply used the new medium of its time to refashion and spread to new audiences long existing racist bullshit.
@matoko_chan:
Racism is as American as apple pie. Many have fought it off, but to try to make it the special preserve of conservatives will only leave you hugely disappointed and unpleasantly surprised.
Dennis G.
@Erik:
Here are some good links:
This
This
This
This
This and
This
Cheers
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Or, as the dingbat from the Barbara Walters show put it, “shifty”
micah616
@Dennis G.: Sorry Dennis, but by virtue of being a mulatto (to use the terms of the day) Obama is not and can not be a race traitor. Stanley Ann Dunham is, as are all white people who voted for her son. Actually, a major theme of the modern Confederacy is that all white liberals are race traitors.
To build on Marsala, Obama is the Confederate’s worst nightmare. He’s everything Negroes aren’t supposed to be. Intelligent, charismatic, and confident. And look at all of those white women willingly swooning over him.
MikeJ
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
huh? I didn’t see the interview, and I don’t know who any of the characters are other than Baba Wawa and Whoopie.
What did they say?
Brachiator
@Dennis G.:
The narrative power of The Birth of A Nation is undeniable. But this is hardly a new idea. The notion that this movie created the vocabulary of racism is nonsense. The source novel, which was part of a trilogy, used every lie and stereotype which long festered in the Southern, and many Northern minds, to try to get even for the “occupation” of Reconstruction. The novel even makes use of the trope of the “tragic mulatto” in the character of Lynch.
Griffith put on the screen what had long existed in novels and plays.
The roots of pop culture are older than cinema. The same is true of our “current vocabulary.”
Bullshit. It might be the strongest that you know. And still, this is not the same thing as having created the vocabulary of racism.
I agree with you here, although a closer reading of Marasa’s piece indicates that he is more aware of the racist background of The Birth of a Nation than you may be. Why do you think he referenced Woodrow Wilson?
I also take your point about wingnut reaction to Obama, but I see it more like the reaction of people to the actual Reconstruction period than to images of Reconstruction in a silent film.
Uriel
@MikeJ:
The actual word was “crafty.”
She didn’t use it when Obama was on the show- I doubt she has anywhere near the courage of her ill-conceived convictions for something like that- but later on in an interview about the show. She claimed she thought the Pres was a great guy, and Michelle is super sweet- but said that in response to her question, “the answer was crafty” and “it sounded as though someone was on their heels.” Due, no doubt to the incendiary wit and political acumen Hasselbeck is world renown for.
The interview was on Hannity. Big surprise
raoul
One cannot talk about Birth of a nation without discussing Intolerance, delivered the next year, DW Griffith attempt to redeem himself as not a racist. DW Griffith was aghast at the racist accusations of BOAN.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
You are seriously misunderstanding the use of the word “vocabulary” here. Film has its own vocabulary beyond the spoken word, and Griffith was the first one who figured out how to take everything that had been invented — the tracking shot, the close-up, parallel editing — and put it together into a single piece of art that had its own peculiar power. He ended up with a film whose impact startled even him, and the reaction to it frightened him enough that he made Intolerance as an attempt to undercut it.
Davidwonk
Birth of a Nation had unprecedented power because it was a movie. I just read, “Slavery By Another Name,” a history of the Jim Crow era. It described how huge a deal Birth of a Nation was when it came out in 1915. It played to packed houses all over the country, and showings in Altanta and other cities were followed by white riots. It was enddorsed by Wilson and the first movie shown in the White House.
Apparently, this movie did more than any other single event to rewrite in the public mind the brutal end of Reconstruction as a just, moral victory of White redemption. It was a singular event in its time.
wonkie
This is sort of off subject.
I was hanging out with the other volunteers at our no kill dog rescue and the anti-Muslim jokes started, really unfunny nasty bigotted jokes.
These are people that on many levels I like. They built a beautiful facility by hand and keep it running with their unpaid hard work. They save about five hundred dogs a year.
But they are real haters.
The thing about conservative haters is that they don’t think of themselves as bigots because they like the blacks/liberals/gays/ Muslims/Mexicans they know personally–its all those Other blacks/liberals/gays/Mexicans etc that aren’t real true good Americans like they are.
Anyway after totally not laughing through a couple “jokes” I abruptly changed the subject. I didn’t know how else to handle it.
It does seem like a characteristic of people who call themselves conservative that they ahve an overdeveloped need to make themselves feel superior by demonizing everyone they see as different from themselves.
wobbly
OMG, the kinder have discovered “Birth of a Nation”.
Nobody watches that film anymore, but plenty watch “Gone With the Wind”. Which portrays the birth of the Klan in a good way, and also features Hattie McDaniel’s character as the true heroine of the movie.
When the film premiered in Atlanta, there was a Negro boy chorus in the lobby, singing songs as the white folks strutted in.
One of the singers was Martin Luther King Junior. Once the Negro boys had sung, they were dismissed.
As to Hattie, she was never invited to the premier. Clark Gable offered to boycott it for her sake, but she refused.
I watch “Gone With the Wind” from time to time. I watch it to see Hattie McDaniel totally out act the the movie stars on the film.
I also watch it to see Atlanta burn.
Some of my ancestors were confined at Andersonville.
I love watching Sherman march to the sea.
El Cid
@Brachiator:
I kind of think that’s what the substance of this post was, not that Birth of a Nation used words and themes unused before.
Is there any point at which you don’t attempt to be some anally obsessive correcting needle-dick? Or is that just part of your raison d’etre?
And, yeah, I know DuBois, and lots of other famed American chroniclers of questions of race, and class too.
Linda Featheringill
@wonkie:
Actually some guy connected with the effort to make Germany judenfrei said pretty much the same thing, except that he inserted jews for all the groups mentioned above.
I guess it is a case of “Some of my best friends . .. . “
Kiril
I think Digby had a post about Birth of a Nation last month, but I can’t find it in her archives. I didn’t realize that Birth had the crafty black man gaining power with voter fraud to inflate black votes and using the evil government to disenfranchise white people. Really, the parallels are striking.
Linda Featheringill
By the way, I was searching the internets to find out who in Germany in the 1930s actually made the statement I referred to above and accidently stumbled onto this site:
http://www.subvertednation.net/jud-sus-1940-the-danger-of-one-jew/
Jesus Christ.
And the dates of the comments are 2010.
Jesus H. Christ.
burnspbesq
@wonkie:
“The thing about conservative haters is that they don’t think of themselves as bigots because they like the blacks/liberals/gays/ Muslims/Mexicans they know personally—its all those Other blacks/liberals/gays/Mexicans etc that aren’t real true good Americans like they are.”
That’s been true since long before any of us were born. The way it used to be said was “Southerners love Negroes as individuals and hate them as a race; Northerners love Negroes as a race and hate them as individuals.” When I was in college in the rural South in the 1970s, it was quite amazing to see the distinction between the way white students thought of and interacted with black students vs. the way they thought of and interacted with black townies.
It’s completely bizarre that people can’t or won’t extrapolate from their own experience.
ed
For the love of Jesus*, Senate Republicans, you know, Republicans who are one step below the muthafukkin Prezz, were actively disparaging Thurgood Marshall.
*Quintana. Nobody fucks with The Jesus.
Paul E. Dare
Racism and pornographers have always been early adopters of new communication technology. Peas in a pod.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
I understand Griffith’s use of the “vocabulary” of film. I don’t think that this is what Dennis G meant here.
@El Cid:
Dude, if you can’t deal, just move on.
sven
@wonkie: I live in a very red state and run into similar ‘jokes’ from time to time.
People often don’t think about how their speech might sound to other people. If you can call attention to it without explicit criticism it might be enough.
I often use something like:
“I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this conversation” or
“What exactly are we talking about?”
Sometimes you can see people actively thinking about what they said and visibly feeling guilty about the comment, occasionally even apologizing.
And then there are other people….
Still, this is still probably the best thing I’ve seen on the topic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Ti-gkJiXc
Dennis G.
@Brachiator:
Griffith established vocabulary for cinema and racism in America. Yes, he built on what was already there, but he made it a common view point of what it meant to be an American. His film revived the KKK and led to the open marches in DC. His film gave immigrants from Europe a narrative of racism they used to assimilate into America.
The vocabulary was cinematic and it was also deeply racist. And while one could fairly argue that he did not ‘create’ either vocabulary, he was the one who made both into popculture phenomenons. And in both threads the language Griffith presented informs conversation about film and race to this day.
If my use of the word “create’ is an obstacle, then my apologies. Replace it with popularized, promoted, or hyped.
I doubt that we are far from a common viewpoint on this subject.
Cheers
Alex S.
I’ve never seen Birth of a Nation, but I’d just like to note that the most successful movie of all-time (adjusted for inflation) portrays the life of a slave owner and romanticizes the southern way of life (Gone with the Wind).
Mnemosyne
@Alex S.:
You know, I have two film degrees and I still have never seen Gone With the Wind. I just never got interested in it (I’m more of a Double Indemnity girl) and the more I hear about it, the less interested I am in seeing it.
They tried to do a screening of Birth of a Nation here in Los Angeles a few years ago but the number of protests (and a few bomb threats) shut it down. It was actually kind of annoying that it got shut down because they were trying to show it in context with a panel discussion afterwards but, nope, it was too controversial.
YellowJournalism
Wow. The comparisions made here are amazing and, sadly, too true. I’m a big DW Griffith nerd. I have seen Birth of a Nation six times all the way through. (It’s really difficult, especially when they get to the watermelon and chicken-eating scene and during the attempted rape scene.) I haven’t watched it in more than seven years, and still, picturing how Lynch was portrayed reminds me of quite a few teabagger signs, including the infamous witch doctor sign.
We can all thank Griffith for making a film that inspired the greatest directors in history, including Welles, Scorcese, and countless others. Even those who don’t admire or even know much about the man have benefited from his mastery of film techniques to drive a narrative. (And he also put into motion the careers of many silent stars of the day, like Mary Pickford or Lillian Gish.)
Unfortunately, we can also thank him for giving the KKK the greatest propaganda film ever that renewed the organization’s numbers in record time.
I think the argument over whether Griffith created the vocabulary of racism or not is silly, since he drew the images he created from his own personal prejudices, stregthened by a story that gained popularity before the film was ever made, a story that had to have been created from that author’s own racist tendencies. Griffith just took that, combined it with a more coherent cinematic technique, and here we are years later still dealing with the aftermath.
@Mnemosyne: A lot of people cite Intolerance as his apology for the racist themes in Birth, but I find that Broken Blossoms is a better redemption, although it ironically reinforced many racist stereotypes against Asians even as it stretched (not broke) some barriers regarding the portrayal of interracial and interfaith love.
Of course, other people would take the more karma-related redemption of Griffith dying pretty much alone and penniless, his career forever tarnished by racism to the point that the Director’s Guild took his name off their most prestigious award.
YellowJournalism
@Mnemosyne: If you ever get a chance, try watching it two ways. One would be from a historical perspective, including what was described above about Hattie McDaniel’s role in the film. The other way would be to look at it from a feminist perspective. I find Scarlet O’Hara to be a very complicated woman and a character that challenged the day’s traditional notions of what a heroine should act like. (Traditional would be Melanie Hamilton.)
Plus, you’re missing out on a great Gable performance, aside from It Happened One Night.
Mnemosyne
Not only that, IIRC the film helped the KKK spread out of the South into the rest of the country by providing bigots with a new identity they could cling to as noble knights defending their country from the blacks, the immigrants, and the Jews. It took a Southern phenomenon and turned it into a nationwide craze.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
Two film degrees?
Is the second one a sequel?
(and that’s just a joke, not snark)
YellowJournalism
@Mnemosyne:
That really bothers me. How can you learn from something if you don’t learn about it in the first place?
Anne Laurie
If anyone’s interested, Birth of a Nation is available through Netflix — both on-disc and via streaming “Instant View”.
Never watched it myself, nor Gone with the Wind in its entirety. But I did read The Clansman: A Romance and GwtW when I was 12 or 13, in the late 1960s (back when movies were not an in-home technology). I was fascinated with Mark Twain and my very literate mother pointed out that Clansman was an all-American commercialization of the “Sir Walter Scott” sickly-Sothron-romance that Twain blamed for so much of his fellow Southerners’ particular idiocies. In case anyone wonders, Clansman was not a well-written book, even by popcult/bodice-ripper standards… I was reading Doc Savage and bad translations of obscure Jules Verne at the same time, and those were better reads.
Gone with the Wind, on the other hand, was a perfectly workmanlike story about a flawed but talented & hard-working woman trapped in a hopelessly self-destructive society — it’s quite “proto-feminist” if you’re not distracted by the idiocy of its biggest fans.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Dennis G.: I have to say that when I read your post I was struck by the word “created” also so yes, I would agree that furthered, developed, consolidated, or another choice would fix that right up.
“Popularized” I’m not so sure about, since as others have at least touched on, racism is just the latest manifestation of what was once slavery and before that, genocide. Or at the same time actually. Pretty popular stuff at the time.
Put another way: being so racist that you could enslave people who you deemed inferior as a race– or simply eliminate them and take their land– was not something seen as a hideous fringe aberration at the start of our country but was more or less acceptable to the mainstream.
What you want to avoid I would gently suggest is any seeming claim that Griffith, or anyone else, foisted racism on people, or gave them an excuse or a vocabulary for it and so on.
It’s something we’ve been unlearning, not learning, and pretty much right from the start.
WereBear
What I took away from this post was how film creates narratives for us; how many people have a enormous chunk of their attempts at connection summed up with quotes from highly popular movies.
It’s a vocabulary and a touchstone of shared events. “Game over, man,” is not just a way of establishing a shared joy in the movie Aliens; it has also spread to people who have never seen the movie, yet grasp how it conveys a deeply pointless endeavor.
We didn’t invent deeply pointless endeavors, anymore than Don Quixote did. But artists create shorthand ways of conveying meaning; and that’s what The Birth of a Nation did.
Michael
@YellowJournalism:
Interestingly, I live about 2 miles from his very modest gravesite (the Screen Directors Guild didn’t spend much on it), and conduct some historical/ghost tours that includes a visit to the former funeral home that they conducted his funeral from.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@micah616:
This.
The thing that horrifies conservatives the most is that this man is competent. Competence plus confidence == UPPITY!
Actually, it makes perfect sense– if there was one thing guaranteed to get the lynch mobs out of bed at night, it was an uppity nigrah.
rickstersherpa
In the first chapter of “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” James Lowen’s takedown of idiocy of American history text books, Lowen details the active interaction between D.W. Griffith and Woodrow Wilson, who saw the movie in a private screening in the White House and promoted it.
See: http://books.google.com/books?id=EtBV9_LRsWcC&dq=lies+my+teacher+told+me&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=nfdXTIqhCIO78gaZns2pCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CEEQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false
It is only a correlation, not proof of causation, but some of the worse race riots in American History in Houston, East St. Louis, Chicago, Tulsa, and Rosewood during the period of 1917-1924, and BoN contributed to the awful zeitgeist of that time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosewood_massacre
At the moment, the dehumanization of Hispanics at the moment (see recent hysterics by Senators Kyl and McCain) and Muslims (See Newt Gingrich and column by Cal Thomas in today’s Examiner to see some of the worst, most vicious, type of comments.)
Art, like Science, can be great and still be immoral. At least three great movies (BoN, Triumph of the Will, and GWTW) illustrate this. Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is almost unplayable due to its anti-semiticism and McBeth is a nihilistic a vision as any artis has ever presented.
Yes, some of the memes are old, but BoN and GWTW worked them into the modern culture of 20th century America.
RSA
@WereBear:
I’m glad someone brought this up–I suspect that only a tiny fraction of Americans have seen Birth of a Nation. Checking Amazon, a 2009 remastering is ranked around 7,000, while a 2009 anniversary edition of Gone with the Wind, for contrast, is at 350. If BoaN has been influential on racist thinking, it’s been indirect and filtered through other works and media. I think.
EconWatcher
I have a problem with this kind of analysis: Does anyone think that if a white Democrat had won the election and pursued the same agenda as Obama, the wingnuts would have gone any less insane? I don’t think so, and I don’t see how anyone who was a sentient adult during the Clinton years could think so.
Yes, some of the vitriol has a particular hue with this president. But it’s really the same story.
Bobby Thomson
@wobbly: This.
Woodrowfan
@rickstersherpa:
Lowen is not very reliable on Wilson. A couple points.
1. contrary to popular belief, BoN was not the first film shown at the White House, it was the second.
2. Griffith cherry picked Wilson’s books for his quotes, and left out the part where Wilson wrote that the Reconstruction Klan went to far, and disturbed the peace more than they preserved it.
3. The bit about “History written with lightening” is pure fiction, and didn’t appear until the 1930s. The only eyewitness account (by one of Wilson’s daughter’s friends) said he was silent through the screening and left without saying a word.
4. Wilson crumpled his program into a ball and left it on the floor. One of his friends picked it up and saved it. (I know, I’ve held it)
5. Wilson never endorsed the film. He refused to publicly denounce it either, but in private called it “unfortunate”
6. FYI, contrary to some claims, Dixon was not Wilson’s student. They were students together, briefly, at Johns Hopkins.
7. BoN was a HUGE success, but the advertising for it used multiple quotes from members of Congress and other popular politicians and leaders from both parties, and not Wilson. Teddy Roosevelt’s 1912 running mate endorsed it.
The best recent article on BoN and the myths around it is Lennig, Arthur. “Myth and Fact: The Reception of The Birth of a Nation.” Film History. 16:2 (April 2004) 117-141.
Note, this is not to claim Wilson wasn’t racist, but there are some popular myths around WW and BoN that should be cleared up.
Yellowjournalism: You’re a better film fan than I am. I’ve seen all of BoN, but only by watching parts at a time.
zoe kentucky in pittsburgh
I understand it might make you uncomfortable– it would be far preferable to think that it’s not the case, that this country doesn’t have so many people with such racist tendancies– but it’s sort of hard to deny. Unfortunately ignoring the dogwhistles doens’t make them go away or any less real.
Yes, the right would have been wingnutty if Hillary was president (although then we would have seen misogyny rearing its ugly head instead) there is something about Obama that makes them a different kind of nuts. Put it this way, many of the teabaggers/wingers who are so outraged are the very same people who, when polled before the election, said “this country isn’t ready for a black president.”
4tehlulz
@EconWatcher: I was a sentient adult in the ’90s. I can’t imagine that even Newt (edit: at that time – he’d do it now though) would think about tinkering with birthright citizenship:
flukebucket
@Mnemosyne:
Amen. It ain’t the stars and bars they are flyin’ here
Suffern ACE
Cruella Deville has black and white hair. Dalmation puppies are innocent and cute with black spots. A lot of conservatives think Obama is lying when he said he quit smoking because if the people know that he smokes like Cruella does, then they will know he wants to make them into fur coats. Why? Because someone has been making accusations of secret coat making plans.
I don’t think that there are racist dog whistles being used currently. Overtones, undertones, Flintstones. I think it is often direct and clear that they don’t like him, want to dehumanize him, and convince others to dehumanize him too. Nothing personal, really. They do that to everybody.
Somedays, I expect to wake up and find that people are debating ebonics and whether or not “Gansta” rap promotes violence and whether to put birth control implants on adolescent African American girls. When I read analysis like this, I feel like I am have traveled back in time, when progressives spent too much time looking for the reasons why other people were resisting their ideas by looking deep and around the edges and in the far-far=wayback of the time-before rather than addressing concerns directly or talking to each other, or reflecting on how they too might be dehumanizing groups and treating them unfairly. “Thought police” comes to mind as a dog whistle. Progressives really fell on hard times shortly thereafter.
Xenocrates
Thank you, Dennis; I think you have absolutely hit this particular nail on the head. As always, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Accusations of racism (a word we really need to get rid of, imho) are uniformly met with wounded cries of “I know I am, what does that make you??” from the Teatards. And to accuse the NAACP of being “racist” is like calling the Jewish victims of the Holocaust “anti-Semites.” Please. Just stop the BS, and admit what you are all about! Just read another blog post on the subject this morning, and it reminds me that the other big “crisis” is the fact that this country is rapidly becoming non-majority “white.” (I place this word in quotes because the only “race” I’m aware of is the “human” variety; skin color variations are just that.) However, the shrinking former majority of tired old white guys is now scared that the “Other” is taking over Murika…too late, idiots. Get used to the new face of the USA or die; it’s called “evolution.” Also, too, let’s face it; Dimbart and all the rest only exist because the modern corporate news media pay them so much attention and respect. I say ignore them and they will go away.
YellowJournalism
@Woodrowfan: I sat through it once for the hell of it to find out just how bad it really was after it was brought up in a world history class, twice for two different film classes, two times in order to write a short paper, and one more time to admire the cinematic elements after watching a documentary on Griffith hosted by Martin Scorcese. I admit that the last time I was fast forwarding through some of the worst moments.
I just miss discussing this kind of stuff with other grown adults. In fact, other than my recorded Silent Sundays, I don’t get to think or chat about silent films and the birth of cinematic language much these days. Two-year-olds don’t understand cinematic nuance much. They just like the part where Chaplin eats his shoe.
Woodrowfan
@YellowJournalism:
I shown some short silents in my history classes and then discuss them. “The Hazards of Helen” seems popular especially as most of my students are young women.
In my frontier class we compared film versions of Custer’s Last Stand and then watched 1903’s “Great Train Robbery” and compared it to “Butch Cassidy” and then the opening gunfight in “The Wild Bunch.”
BobS
@4tehlulz: What effect would this have on the myth of corporate personhood? Frankly, if sacrificing the citizenship of unborn children of non-citizens is what it would take to eliminate the thing most responsible for ruining this country, or at least provoke a nationwide debate, put me down as a yes vote.
Brachiator
@Woodrowfan:
Thanks for this background info. I didn’t know about most of these details about the reaction to Birth of A Nation.
@YellowJournalism:
Sadly, pop culture moves on. When I was in college, I knew people who just couldn’t watch silent films. They were just too “old timey.” Now, I know people who absolutely refuse to watch any black and white film.
Mnemosyne
@Woodrowfan:
Kino on Video has a lot of Buster Keaton shorts available — you should see if you could get “The Paleface” to show in your class. That would be really fun because it would show how firmly many of the western cliches were already established by the early 1920s.
For a longer film, Our Hospitality is fun from a historical point of view because they actually built a replica 1830s train which AFAIK is still in the Smithsonian’s collection and they were pretty careful to get the fashions right.
You do need to pre-screen a bit, though, because there are some, er, unfortunate scenes in a few Keaton films.
Don’t even get me started on Preston Sturges and race — there’s a scene in The Palm Beach Story that’s so egregious I have to fast forward through it. (Look! Rich white guys using a black bartender for target practice! And he’s scared! Isn’t it funny? Blech.)
Mnemosyne
@YellowJournalism:
I have got the book for you, though you’ll have to track it down used since it’s out of print: Behind the Mask of Innocence: Films of Social Conscience of the Silent Era, by Kevin Brownlow. Brownlow is probably the pre-eminent scholar of silent film and the book is absolutely fascinating to see what “social problem” films people were trying to make in the silent era and how often they got blocked or censored by the usual suspects.
Woodrowfan
Also check the “Treasures” collections. A nice selection of films and the commentary is often quite interesting.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000T84GOY/ref=oss_product