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What hath ‘Roots' wrought?THE TWELVE-hour broadcast in prime time of ABC’s dramatization of Alex Haley’s Roots is already being proclaimed the biggest hit of television history, with Nielsen ratings speaking louder than the critics who, quite correctly, found the program “historical soap opera.” The TV spectacular was, frankly, pablum. It was a gross oversimplification of Haley’s commendable, if flawed, historical fiction, which advanced its own cartoon of American history, featuring a mentality which, asnoted by so sympathetic a publication as The New Republic, “weights every scale against the whites...”Clearly it is time to replace in the popular consciousness those mythologies which have obscured American history, but who will seriously contend that the premises of D. W. Griffith’s monumental Birth of a Nation still obtain even among our least enlightened citizens? But even if they did, there would arise the question of justifying the replacement of one distortion with another. Obviously, a program such a Roots satisfies certain current social and political appetites but its historical integrity remains arguable. Its producers seem never to have read Morisonand Commager, nor even to have considered such examples of contemporary scholarship as Time on the Cross and we suspect that the matter never crossed their minds.Roots may not be history but neither, for thay matter, is Tail-Gunner Joe, The Unquiet Death of Ethel and Juliet Rosenberg, The Front nor Scoundrel Time. And, in some respects, it may be worse.There is no clearer evidence for this than the that of the new,leader of the Congressional BlackCaucus, Parren Mitchell ofMaryland, who recently told a we gathering of black businessmen in Washington that he was so incensed by Roots that he was glad no white friend called on him at that time — he would not have been able, he said, to have controlled his rage.We wonder what is to be gained from rekindling animosities between the races which we were all relieved to feel had exhausted themselves during the “long, hot summer” that was the 1960s Retroactive hostility may have a place in American life but only, suspect, for those who see politics, to quote Schlesinger, asan “outlet for private greivances and frustrations” or even collective ones. In neither case, doesmuch of a truly constructive nature result
Newspaper Details
Morgantown Dominion Post
Morgantown, West Virginia, US
Mon, Feb 14, 1977
Page 8
Full Page
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Anonymous
USA 29 Jan 2020
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