Playing the race card : melodramas of Black and white from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson
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Bibliographic Information
Playing the race card : melodramas of Black and white from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson
Princeton University Press, c2001
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [369]-384) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The black man suffering at the hands of whites, the white woman sexually threatened by the black man. Both images have long been burned into the American conscience through popular entertainment and today they exert a powerful and disturbing influence on Americans' understanding of race. So argues Linda Williams in this boldly inquisitive book, where she probes the bitterly divisive racial sentiments aroused by such recent events as O.J. Simpson's criminal trial. Williams, the author of Hard Core, explores how these images took root beginning with melodramatic theater, where suffering characters acquire virtue through victimization. The racial sympathies and hostilities that surfaced during the trial of the police in the beating of Rodney King and in the O.J. Simpson murder trial are grounded in the melodramatic forms of Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Birth of a Nation. Williams finds that Stowe's beaten black man and Griffith's endangered white woman appear repeatedly throughout popular entertainment, promoting interracial understanding at one moment, interracial hate at another.
The black and white racial melodrama has galvanized emotions and fueled the importance of new media forms, such as senous, "integrated" musicals of stage and film, including The Jazz Singer and Show Boot. It also helped create a major event out of the movie Gone With the Wind, while enabling television to assume new moral purpose with the broadcast of Roots. Williams demonstrates how such developments converged to make the televised race trial a form of national entertainment. When prosecutor Christopher Darden accused Simpson's defense team of "playing the race card," which ultimately trumped his own team's gender card, he feared that the jury's sympathy for a targeted black man would be at the expense of the abused white wife. The jury's verdict, Williams concludes, was determined not so much by facts as by the cultural forces of racial melodrama long in the making. Revealing melodrama to be a key element in American culture, Williams argues that the race images it has promoted are deeply ingrained in our minds and that there can be no honest discussion about race until Americans recognize this predicament.
Table of Contents
Illustrations ix Preface xiii Acknowledgments xvii Introduction: Playing the Race Card 3 Chapter One: The American Melodramatic Mode 10 Chapter Two: "A Wonderful, 'Leaping 'Fish": Varieties of Uncle Tom 45 Chapter Three: Anti-Tom and The Birth of a Nation 96 Chapter Four: Posing as Black, Passing as White: The Melos of Black and White Melodrama in the Jazz Age 136 Chapter Five: Rewriting the Plantation Legend: Scarlett "Totes a Weary Load" 187 Chapter Six: Home Sweet Africa: Alex Haley's and TV's Roots 220 Chapter Seven: Trials of Black and White: California v. Powell and The People v. Orenthal James Simpson 252 Conclusion: Our Melodramatic Racial Fix 296 Notes 311 Bibliography 369 Index 385
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