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Racism:By SUSAN WELLS (Editor’s note: Wells is a member of the New American Movement.)“Birth of a Nation,” D.W. Griffith’s 1918 version of Reconstruction history, is a remarkable film. Its shooting was marked by producer/director Griffith searching for a “happy plantation” effect, throwing a handful of dimes into a crowd of black extras with the command “Scramble for ’em! That’s it! Laugh and cut up!” For its promotion, hooded and sheeted horsemen rodedeaftheir stewardship, the regents’ proclamations about their legal rights are plainly beside the point. They evade the issues raised by the criticisms, provide no explanation for why questioned decisions were made, obfuscate any attempt to engage in substantive dialogue and raise blood-pressure levels all around. They only make sense if one holds the dubious assumption that wisdom inexorably follows from legal entitlement. Now if this be true, then we must accept that the behavior of the police is always justified because police officers wear badges, that the orders issued by a general are always appropriate because the general is entrusted with command and that the bills enacted by the Legislature are always sage and just because the legislators were elected to office. If the absurdity of this assumption is obvious in these examples, why is it not equally obvious in the case of the management of the University? And yet the regents’ continued emphasis on their mandate, in response to questions and protest, would imply that a principle which is patently ridiculous elsewhere makes eminent sense when applied to the functions of their office.THE POTENTIAL tragedy in this state of affairs is that the repeated failure to join the issues and to work in good faith towarddown city streets, an appropriate beginning for a movie publicity stunt. “Birth of a Nation” shows slaves, newly liberated from what Griffith describes as the idyllic life of the plantation, inexplicably resentful of their former masters.THE RECONSTRUCTION legislature is shown as a group of barefoot buffoons, singlemindedly bent (horrors!) on passing laws making interracial marriage legal. They have, of course, been stirred up by an outside agitator, Simon Lynch, the mulatto protege of carpetbagger Stoneman, who has a fiendish plan for “the complete emancipation of the Negro race.”A character called “the renegade Negro Gus” attempts to rape one of the frail, delicate, and helpless specimens of southern white womanhood who populate this film, and the Klan, its flag “consecrated in the blood of a white woman” is formed to restore order. It does. The Carpetbaggers repent, and “The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defense of their Aryan birthright.” The movie ends with a lynching, the brutal suppression of black people, many flaming crosses, an all-white election, and return of the blacks to Africa. In the final frames, the God of War dissolves into the Prince of Peace.PERHAPS IT was the final invocation of religion that im-pressed the New York clergymen who recommended in a letter to a New York newspaper the film because it “tends to prevent the lowering of the standard of our citizenship by its mixture with Negro blood. ” That argument, by the way, should appeal to the UT admissions office, which is also concerned about the lowering of standards. Woodrow Wilson wept when he saw the film. An Atlanta reviewer, after describing how “hot blood cries out for vengeance ... the legions of the Invisible Empire roarguest viewpointyesterday and... . a rooouo anrf that’s Rrown. bv the wav. took aGuest Viewpoint»L. T ...almnMt aUAltdown to the rescue, and that’s when you are lifted by the hair and go crazy.” A familiar sensation, no doubt, to U.S. Supreme Court Justice White, who was moved by the film to reminisce about his youthful days with the Klan.Others were not so pleased. Hundreds demonstrated against the film in New York and Boston. Scores of black people were arrested for trying to enter theaters where it was shown. Many audiences hissed Klan scenes. Women suffragists objected to the film strenuously. In Chicago and Cleveland, the film was banned outright, along with the less famous and more blatant Hollywood production, “The Nigger.”FROM THE film’s release in 1919 until the present, it has been, in the owners’ word, “controversial.” But it might be instructive to ask why such an obviously old-fashioned, blatant and crudely racist film still has the power to move audiences. Last year, when the film showed at UT, the student audience cheered the entry of the Klan — a response which isn’t made prettier by claiming, as some students did — that it was a joke.“Birth of a Nation,” to put it bluntly, is a skillfully filmed, concentrated and primitive expression of the racism that still permeates life in the United States, and especially at the University, to this day. This fall, the Klan was distributing “nigger hunting licenses” in Austin high schools. At the same time, in a more refined and patrician form of racism, Regent Allan Shivers was telling students that UT would handle its problems with integration just fine, thank you, if it weren’t for the meddling of HEW. (In other words, if we didn’t have to worry about integration, we’d be as happy as clams.)And Botany Prof. Walter Brown decided to open his spring classes with an intensive lesson in capitalist “science: ” the science that proves that black people suffer from poverty and oppression, not, as you might have expected, because of hundreds of years of discrimination, but because they are genetically inferior.Brown, by the way, took a leaf from Griffith’s book. Griffith answered objections to “Birth’s” portrayal of blacks by saying that he’d shown plenty of “good Negroes” who were faithful to their former masters; Brown allowed as how the black students in his class just might be exceptions to the general rule — they might be intelligent. But after all, Brown said, “there’s no point in trying to educate people who are stupid.”IT’S VERY important, I think, not to see these especially striking instances of racism as isolated incidents or personal quirks. They are part of the general system of racism, large and small examples of the systematic attempt to prevent black people from reaching “full emancipation.”Brown’s blatant class lecture is a less polite form of the same “science” that the University administration uses in its reply to HEW. Rogers quotes with polite regret the same studies proving that black people have no business in the University that Brown quotes withtodaytransparent delight. The crude racist caricatures of the Klan are softened, applied to other minorities and used to sell records, beer or pancakes.“Birth of a Nation” presents its racism in obvious, neatly labeled forms, but the racism of the University, and the capitalist system generally, is often accompanied by the disclaimer that we’re just tyring to be scientific, or sell records or make a joke.As Griffith put it, “No ethnic slur is intended.”People didn’t believe Griffith in the Twenties, and we don’t need to believe his respectable successors now. People didn’t respond passively to the original showings of “Birth.”We don’t need to sit silently when more modern forms of racism are peddled in our classrooms, in movies or by the University administration. We can educate ourselves, speak out and organize — the showing of “Birth of a Nation” Tuesday should be a reminder to us that there’s a lot of work to be done.DOONESBURYsee, if you msVMOVEINUJITH ANDY, WEN IV \ BE ABLE TO HELP mrr hfjpfFORGET IT, CLYDE! I'M NOT M0Y/N6IN LUfTHWHY NOT?. I MEAN,YOU FOLKS BOTH CLYDE, I DI6 ON EACH OTHER, DON'T WANT RJ6HT? WELL, IF.. TO DISCUSSf IT! I'M NOTMWTN60UT!OKAY, OKAY, TAKE IT EASY-1 REA- 600D.N0U) LTZB THESE THINGS PLEASE 6ET TAKE TIME.. OUT-I'VE/ 6OTT00ETLOOK, tLL VB YOUMYNUMBER.. IF THERE'S ANY BREAKTHROUGH../
Newspaper Details
Austin Daily Texan
Austin, Texas, US
Tue, Feb 03, 1976
Page 5
Full Page
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USA 15 Jan 2025
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