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Hollywood in Blackface
Brett Stevens at the right-wing blog Amerika has a well-written review of Hollywood in Blackface, by Paul Kersey of Stuff Black People Don’t Like. Kersey’s book is about the long-standing trend of movies to present blacks in the roles of wise leaders, intellectual and scientific experts, and mature counselors—roles which, let us venture to say, they rarely or never occupy in the real universe. If a significant number of blacks were actually like the characters that Morgan Freeman and, before him, Sidney Poitier have played so convincingly and touchingly in the movies, we’d be living in a different world.
The phrase, “a different world,” reminds me: Long ago I owned a book called A Different World, about the history of the progressivist left and its illusory and destructive hopes for the transformation of society and of humanity itself. Which further makes me think: Sanity means, among other things, discerning the difference between the goods and improvements that are possible in this world, and the goods and improvements that are, by the very nature of things, not possible. A society that produces and consumes huge amounts of ubiquitous mass entertainment in which the members of that society’s most violent, backward, hostile, and dependent racial group are systematically cast as the leaders of that society and as the epitomes of virtue and wisdom—a society that believes that it actually conforms to or that it must and can be made to conform to this fictional image—is insane. Email entry |