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The Black Roots of Hollywood
| Article
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20454 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1992 |
1,946 Words |
| Author
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James F. Cooper
James F. Cooper is editor of American Arts Quarterly and art
critic for the New York City Tribune. |
A writer approaches the history of blacks in Hollywood with some trepidation. Peter Noble, despite his excellent research for The Negro in Films (published in the 1940s), unfortunately employs a patronizingly white-liberal tone. Few writers, white or black, have dealt effectively with the subject. One exception to the rule is Donald Bogle, an Afro-American professor at Rutgers University and perhaps the leading authority on the sad history of blacks in Hollywood, which he documented in a series of books that includes Blacks in American film and Television and Brown Sugar.
If the Senate subcommittee on Supreme Court nominees was embarrassed by charges that Clarence Thomas was being "lynched" by its all-white-male group because he was "uppity," it is because the phrase recalled images of black stereotypes that have inflamed movie audiences since D.W. Griffith's 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation. This film is rarely shown commercially except, like Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (made in Nazi Germany), in select "art" theaters.
Although Afro-American performers like Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, Danny Glove, Michael Jackson, and Prince are big stars, the question remains: Are they perpetuating past stereotypes to entertain whites? Where, for instance, are the Hollywood role models to match the eloquence and dignity of the black professionals who testified on behalf of Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas?
Some scholars are using the history of Black Hollywood to stir up racial animosity. Leonard Jeffries, chairman of the Department of Black Studies at City College of New York, states that a Hollywood-Jewish conspiracy "put together a system for the destruction of black people." Unfortunately, the media devoted more space to questioning Jeffries' qualifications as a scholar than to investigating charges of ninety years of racial discrimination in the motion picture industry.
A lifelong movie fan, I've witnessed countless degrading stereotypes on the screen, not only those concerning Afro-Americans, but Asians, Germans, Arabs, Jews, women, and others. Many Hollywood films released during the 1930s, '40s, and '50s cannot be shown today, not only because they might provoke riots, but because whites under age forty would be shocked to discover the cultural discrimination tolerated by their grandparents. Many of these old films are now regarded as "classics" by people too young to realize they are watching carefully edited versions.
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