Blacks should be thankful for legacy of slavery

“But, on a current note, if slavery was the price that a modern American’s ancestors had to pay in order to make one an American, one should get down on one’s knees every single day and thank the Lord that such price was paid. To the extent that America — or New Jersey — ever owed any kind of debt to anyone, that debt was more than repaid through the blood and suffering of 650,000 federal soldiers who died or were wounded during the war provoked by slavery. No one today need feel the slightest guilt, as no one today participated in the wrong.”

- Assemblyman Michael Patrick Carroll (NJ-R)

A White Christmas Indeed!

So, the wife decides to buy some classic Christmas-related movies for the children and the issue of the song White Christmas comes up. I tell the wife to pick up a copy of White Christmas starringBing Crosby and Danny Kaye for both the song White Christmas and a fun scene on a train when Danny Kaye and Rosemary Clooney sing the song Snow. The wife gets to Best Buy, forgets what movie and asks the salesman for the movie where Bing sings White Christmas. Said dude gives wife a copy of Holiday Inn (where Bing also sings White Christmas). Easy mistake, no harm no foul, right?

EXCEPT, I’ve only seen Holiday Inn in re-runs on commercial TV, which means a substantial bit has been cut out. Specifically, a substantial part was cut out of Bing Crosby in Blackface. Imagine my surprise when I step away from a light holiday moview to get a drink for my 3 year old, only to come back to Louise Beavers and pickaninnies singing about Lincoln freeing the slaves. WTF? Where’d that come from?

Turns out that with the notable exception of Turner Classic Movies, which keeps the scene in for historic purposes, most people who have seen that movie only on television have no idea whatsoever that the blackface scene exists. It was edited out years ago. Aside from the the crows in Dumbo, it stands out as one of the most offensive scenes I’ve seen in movies. It took a good minute to even register what I was seeing and cut the thing off.

Not like I was a big Bing fan before. He always seem to have something dark hidden under the more visible boring. He was really only tolerable in films paired with actors with better personalities - Astaire, Kaye, Hope, Sinatra, even David Bowie in that Christmas special. But you know, couldn’t that box have come with a Warning: Explicit Cooning label or something? Gee Bing, thanks for the Christmas surprise. Bamboozled again. Punk. [EbonyJet]

Twenty Years Later: James Baldwin’s America Hasn’t Changed

Baldwin’s biographer and close friend, David Leeming, called his essays “prophetic,” as they articulated an eerily clear-eyed view of America’s peril at the hands of what, in Baldwin’s day, was politely called the “race problem.”
Perhaps Leeming has it right and Baldwin was a soothsayer. But a more plausible explanation is that Baldwin’s work remains contemporary because America’s racial caste system changed so little over the generations that his writing spans.

Baldwin considered race America’s poison pill. And he deftly portrayed Americans of all colors struggling to concoct their own individual antidotes—solutions that are temporary at best and always crazy-making because, at root, the problem is structural not individual.

Today, we still have not reached Baldwin’s understanding of race and racism. It remains a collective problem that we insist upon dealing with on an individual basis. As a result, even our greatest triumphs—the end of legal segregation, broadened opportunity for the slim black middle class—are undermined by broader forces.

In his first essay collection, 1955’s Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin describes an urban ghetto that since has changed only in aesthetic. “All over Harlem now,” he wrote, “there is felt the same bitter expectancy with which, in my childhood, we awaited winter: it is coming and it will be hard; there is nothing anyone can do about it.”

Then and now, reform efforts have failed to alter that bleak reality because they’ve made no fundamental changes. As Baldwin wrote, “Steps are taken to right the wrong, without, however, expanding or demolishing the ghetto. The idea is to make it less of a social liability, a process about as helpful as make-up to a leper.”

So today Baldwin’s Harlem still lingers atop the list of New York neighborhoods with problems ranging from dilapidated housing stock to communicable disease to food establishments that simply fail to pass health inspection. The same is true for other racially defined ghettos around the country.
What is different today is that few discuss race in Baldwin’s structural terms. Instead, we busy ourselves with word games.

We play gotcha with celebrities who use slurs, rather than noticing the morbid conditions African Americans are disproportionately asked to live within. We eagerly embrace commentators like Bill Cosby when they decry the way individuals have adapted to generations of ghetto life. But we nickel and dime any policy effort to change those conditions. We ban the N-word, and we leave the ghetto intact.

This neglect has the same impact today that it had when Baldwin dissected it in 1955. “All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand,” he wrote, “and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.” [RW]