The N Word by Jabari Asim

Author:Jabari Asim [Asim, Jabari]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The actors ... had expressed their anxiety over racial elements of the production yet agreed to play the slaves more or less as Margaret Mitchell and Sidney Howard had written them. In return, Shapiro vowed that they would not have to say "nigger." Selznick, with mixed feelings, honored Shapiro's promise. The words "darkies" and "inferiors" stayed in the screenplay—but not "nigger."

But that significant deletion didn't appease the critics in the black press—nor should it have. The film's succession of simple, shuffling, fanatically devoted darkies inevitably evoked all the tragically misplaced priorities and self-betrayal associated with "house niggers"—even if they were never addressed as such. The Chicago Defender, a particularly strident critic, lambasted the production, calling it "a weapon of terror against black America." The harshest condemnations came from Melvin B. Tolson, a columnist for the Washington Tribune who is best remembered today as a gifted poet. In two essays published in 1940, Tolson took the film apart while chastising blacks who enjoyed seeing it. Negro fans who embraced Victor Fleming's production simply because it compared favorably to The Birth ofa Nation suffered from low expectations, in Tolson's view. "Since Gone With the Wind didn't have a big black brute raping a white virgin in a flowing white gown," he wrote, "most Negroes went into ecstasies." A little jubilation can cloud the faculties, he suggested, and make palatable things that would be unacceptable in more sober circumstances. For Tolson, "The Birth ofa Nation was such a barefaced lie that a moron could see through it. Gone With the Wind is such a subtle lie that it will be swallowed as the truth by millions of whites and blacks alike."

"Of Motion Pictures," Lawrence Reddick's important 1944 essay, touched on many of the same points that Tolson raised in 1940, when Gone With the Wind was on nearly every moviegoer's mind. His twenty-two-page essay critiqued a "checklist" of 175 films with regard to their treatment of African Americans and included a still-discussed list of pervasive black stereotypes found in the media. Whereas Sterling Brown had identified six distinct black characters portrayed in fiction (see chapter 5), Reddick came up with a few portrayed more:

The savage African

The happy slave

The devoted servant

The corrupt politician

The petty thief

The irresponsible citizen

The social delinquent

The vicious criminal

The sexual superman

The superior athlete

The unhappy non-white

The natural-born cook

The natural-born musician

The perfect entertainer

The superstitious churchgoer

The chicken and watermelon eater

The razor and knife "toter"

The uninhibited expressionist

The mental inferior

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