Race Traitor by Noel Ignatiev

Author:Noel Ignatiev
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781136665264
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 1996-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

John Brown or “Lawrence of South Dakota”?

The most appealing thing about Kevin Costner’s 1991 movie, Dances With Wolves, is the ending: Costner’s character, a white lieutenant sent out West to “manage” the Indians and protect white settlers, returns from the Indian village speaking Lakota and wearing native dress. The film’s appeal hearkens back to popular writing during the sixties that proclaimed our generation “different” because, among other things, “we” rooted for the Indians in the TV westerns we grew up on. (Blacks, Latinos, and Native-Americans maintained they always did.) Dances With Wolves finally put that crossover dream on screen.

Another recent example of the crossover genre, Sommersby, was a 1992 American remake, set in the Reconstruction South, of the French film The Return of Martin Guerre. It had the hero John Sommersby (Richard Gere) submit to execution for a murder he didn’t commit. To admit he was an imposter, he tells his wife (Jody Foster), would invalidate the contracts he signed that promised land ownership for the first time to black farmers, working with whites on the old Sommersby plantation.

The Long Walk Home (1990) contains one of the strongest depictions I’ve seen in a Hollywood drama of a white person forced to make a decision on breaking with “the club.” When Miriam Thompson (Sissy Spacek) for her own convenience drives her maid Odessa Cotter (Whoopi Goldberg) to work during the 1955 Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, she not only fractures her marriage by defying the authority of her husband (Dwight Schultz), she also rejects his appeal to racial solidarity When she cheerfully dismisses Odessa’s warnings that joining the carpool means police harassment and tickets, Odessa replies, “It ain’t just the tickets. Once you step over there [to the carpool parking lot] I don’t know that you can ever step back This boycott’s gonna survive without you drivin’ And what about when it ain’t just the bus?”

Miriam has to think about this—so what her husband and the women at the bridge club said was true! She decides to join the car pool and winds up confronting a white mob that includes her husband. She is slapped to the ground. “Get your daughter and walk with the niggers!” commands one man. Taking her daughter’s hand, she crosses the line that Odessa prophesied, joining hands with hymn-singing black women in refusing to leave the parking lot. Her life has been changed by their struggle. Tomorrow she may still be a rich housewife, but more than likely she’ll be a single mother looking for work (in a car with broken windows) and doing her own dishes. I suspect that this film got less enthusiastic reviews than the popular, paternalistic Mississippi Burning (1988) because instead of “good” and “bad” whites fighting over passive, grateful black people, it depicted different shadings of whites, capable of racist violence, acquiescence to racism, or the Hegelian leap to freedom.

The guilt is there, but the treason is safely ensconced in the past, in familiar settings: Western frontier and Jim Crow South. But even to admit that this is what should have been (and in fact was) done poses an alternative.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.