Movie Talks Archives

Posted by: wildandhairy at February 20, 2006, 12:40 pm

Topic: King Kong!! WOW! (Reviews) Forum: JoBlo

I appreciate what you have written. Perhaps when you appeared to equate slaves to morons, you did not mean that. Part of the point is that, with respect, you are lost in a "western" definition of education. Your position is that because the slaves did not go to schools in the confederacy--and it is true that the slave owners had no interest in their property learning to read--that they were illiterate, ignorant, etc. Again, my friend, it appears to me that you have a lot of reading to do before you comment on this topic. For starters, you do not appear to be aware of the fact that the slaves in some places created their own little schools, which of course their owners did not know about. Your blanket description of slaves as illiterate and ignorant is far from the truth. You may also wish to take into account that some of the human beings kidnapped from Africa and forced into slavery in the United States were Princes and Princesses in their own lands. Highly educated by Western standards? Perhaps not. But to describe them as ignorant, or even illiterate (as some found ways to learn to read) is simply uninformed. And this is part of what I was concerned about originally, with films like Gone With The Wind. Racism by omission is just as bad as racism by commission. That a film about the South during the Civil War does not use the word "slave" once, instead dwelling on racial stereotypes of African Americans being generally stupid and easily manipulated, both ignores history and promotes racism itself. That is the problem with GWTW. By ommission, it is racist. How would you react to a story about an Aryan Nazi woman who is concerned about her love life, and who happens to work in Auschwitz, and whose job it was to pump gas into the death chambers--but the story ignored mentioning Jews, genocide, etc? Would it be acceptable then to ignore Nazi atrocities? That is my point, even if perhaps not well expressed. In our discussion I was reminded of my high school social studies teacher, Mrs. White actually was her name, who in 1964 was telling her class (in New York, not in Alabama) that the South had to be given more time to step desegregation, as it was only one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

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