JOHN F.

KENNEDY-INSTITUT
FR NORDAMERIKASTUDIEN
ABTEILUNG FR KULTUR

Working Paper No. 89/1996

Michael Rogin

Two Declarations of Independence:

The Racialized Foundations of
American National Culture

Copyright 1996 by Michael Rogin

University of California at Berkeley
Berke1ey, Cal.
U. S. A.

I88N 0948-9436

January 1996

Michael Rogin
Department of Political Science
University of California
Berkeley, Cal. 94720-1950

Two Declarations of Independence:

Tbe Racialize4 Foun4ations of American National Culture

Begin with the facts.

The founding Hollywood movie, Birth of

a Nation, celebrates the Ku Klux Klan.

The first talking picture,

The Jazz Singer, was a blackface film.

off ice success is Gone with the Wind.

The all-time top film box

Blackface minstrelsy was the

first and, before movies, the most popular form of mass culture in
the United States.

Burnt cork and the frontier myth together

produced a self-conscious, distinctive, American national culture,

the culture that gave birth to Hollywood.

Blackface minstrelsy and

the myth of the West declared nationalist independence from the Old
World.

Whereas the political Declaration of Independence made an

anti-colonial revolution in the name of the equality of all men,

the

declaration

of

cultural

independence

emerged

not

to

free

oppressed folk but to constitute national identity out of their

subjugation.

White supremacy, white over black and red, was the

content of this national culture; its form was black over white,
blacking up, and Indianization: "The wilderness strips off
the garments of civilization and arrays

[the colonist]

in the

hunting shirt and mocassin," wrote Frederick Jackson Turner.

outcome is

a new product that is American."l

"The

So much is indisputable in spite of political agendas that

would wish American history away.

How to understand the conflicted

relations that the history of the united states ought to force on

our attention -- between equality and white supremacy, politics and
culture, racial domination and racial desire, the two declarations
of independence -- so much is legitimately contested ground.
Both the political and cultural declarations of independence
crossed racial lines, the latter displaying the racialized bodies
whited out beneath the former' s universal ist claims.

"That old
c~lled

. Declaration of Independence" extended what Lincoln

"the

father of all moral principle" to those not "descended by blood

from

our ancestors. ,,2

Speaking for

equality,

the Declaration

promised that immigrants could become Americans and black could

turn white.

Minstrelsy, showing that for some Americans blackness

was only skin deep, allowed whites to turn black and back again.
Whether

one

understands

blackface

as

the

alternative

to

the

Declaration or the return of its repressed, the two forms together

provided Americans with an imagined community, anational home.
But the forms that transported settIers and immigrants beyond their
Old World identities rested on the fixed statuses of those who did
not choose to make the journey, native and African Americans.
the

differentiation

chattel,

of

white

immigrant

workers

from

And

colored

organic to the creation of race-based slavery at the

origins of the united States, repeated itself -- under burnt cork

and Jim Crow -- for the waves of European immigrants that came to
these shores after legal slavery had come to an end.

The people'

held in bondage and denied all citizenship rights fronted for the
making of Americans.

Also a metaphorical crossdressing, and in no

way merely second in importance to minstrelsy, the frontier myth

made out of Indian dispossession a politics and culture that both
overlaps with and departs from the race relations visible under
literal and figurative burnt cork.

The frontier myth is chronicled

elsewherei here,

introducing the united states in. blackface, my

sUbject

relationship

is

the

between

the

two

Declarations

of

Independence, the bearing of our racialized national culture on the

color-blind invocation of individual rights.

The First Declaration of Independence

The
founding

two

Declarations

sacred

document

of

Independence

of American

appear

national

within

identity

manifesto signed at Independence Hall on July 4,

the
The

1776 derived

"equal and inalienable" rights from the "state of nature."

But the

original American state of nature on which Thomas Jefferson stood

spawned not only individual rights but also Indian dispossession
and chattel slavery.
of

Independence,

The slave owner who fathered the Declaration

by

conjoining

slavery

to

national

right,

bequeathed to Americans a doubled national birth in hereditary

group

privilege

and

individualism.

The

Declaration

of

Independence, demanding freedom from enslavement to England for a

new

nation

built

on

slavery,

is

the

core

product

of

that

mesalliance in political theory, just as blackface is its central

cultural progeny.

The racialized foundations of the United States erupt on the

surface

of

the

document

declaring

our

national

birth.

The

Declaration is now a visibly hysterical text, since the editors of

Jefferson's

autobiography

(in

which

Jefferson

included

the

Declaration)

use three type faces to distinguish between three

drafts: the passages of Jefferson's original that remain in the

final version, those excised by the convention, and those added to
Jefferson's language.
marks

Although the entire Declaration shows the

of multiple authorship,

rendered

incoherent

only the section on

by their omnipresence.

slavery

is

Jefferson himself

sought to blame the King of England for inflicting slavery and the .
slave

trade

on

the

colonies,

although

the

crown' s

effort

to

regulate the trade in slaves, sugar, rum, and molasses was actuaIIy
a cause of the Revolution.

But Jefferson's displacement of the

crime was too antislavery for other southern delegates,

and the

document signed at Independence Hall retains only the accusation.

against George III of inciting slave insurrection. 3
The Declaration of

Independence,

as

i ts multiple

drafts

expose, bequeathed a Janus-faced legacy to the new nation -- the

logic that the equality to which white men were naturally born
could be extended to women and slaves, and the foundation of white
freedom on black servitude.

Slavery's deep embeddedness in the

united states produced the Declaration's slide from condemning

slavery
freedom.

fo~

inflicting bondage to blaming slaves for demanding

As that reversal infected Jefferson himself, moreover, it

took a sexualized turn.

Faced with southern resistance, including

his own, toending hereditary servitude, Jefferson grounded slavery

in an irreedeemable defect in black bodies that neither conversion
to Christianity nor emancipation could cure.
Virginia

appended

speculations
"nature."

of

to

his

"science"

proposal
on

the

to

Jefferson's Notes on

emancipate

inferiority

of

slaves
Africans

the
in

Because black men desired white women, wrote Jefferson,

they could not be freed without "staining the blood" of their

former masters.

Although the father of the Declaration favored

returning freed slaves to Africa, his twin policies of segregation

-- slave and Indian removal -- worked only in Indian policy.
Jefferson's wish to "remove [blacks] beyond the reach of mixture, "
conflicting as it did with actual white dependence on African
Americans, issued forth in a quadruple fantasy -- that interracial
sex was a barrier to emancipation, that it stained blood, that it
was driven by black and not white practice, and that colonization
could solve the problem. 4
Slaveowners like Jefferson -- his father-in-law, his nephew,
and

likely the

father

of the Declaration himself

-- produced

children "descended by blood from our ancestors" whose condition,

Lincoln notwithstanding ,

followed that of their slave mothers.

Claiming that it was the black desire for white that required the
separation of the races,
black.

Jefferson inverted a white desire for

That desire took the forms of labor and sex,

slavery and miscegenation,

in Jefferson's time.

chattel

As expressive

performance -- blackface minstrelsy -- white possession of black

would help produce a second, cultural, declaration of independence

during the age of Jackson.

The Second Declaration of Independence

Indian land and black labor generated the Euro-Afro-Americas
trade

that

industrial

laid

the

production,

foundation
and

for

state power

commodity
in

the

agriculture,

united

states.

Slavery not only financed and undergirded the American revolution;

by keeping the propertyless proletariat racially stigmatized and in
chains,

as Edmund Morgan showed,

it

permitted the assertion of

natural rights for the white population without threatening social

revolution at home. 5

Chattel slavery, the expropriation of Indian

and Mexican land, and the repressive use and exclusion of Chineseand Mexican-American labor were the conditions of American freedom
rather than exceptions to it.
Racial subordination formed the American nation, giving racist
stereotypes an intractable material base resistant to the wish for
equality.

Thus white predation was

inverted and assigned

to

colored nature, most famously in the attributions to Indians of

violence and lack of respect for the property of others, and in the
assignment to blacks of laziness and the sexual desire for white
women.

The fantasy of racial contamination names, against itself,

the contaminated origins of the united States in white supremacy.

But

paradox

formation

of

distinctive

lies at
the

the heart

united

national

States.

identity ,

of the
For

racial
the

basis

development

the emancipation of

the

of

the

of

United

states from colonial dependence on England, derived not only from

expropriated

Indian

land

and

black

labor,

but

also

from

proclaimed intimacy between whites and peoples of color.

society

that

developed

materially

from

establishing

The
rigid

boundaries between the white and dark races developed culturally

from transgressing those boundaries.
bodily

fluids

supremacist

issued

elevation

forth
of

the

in

Hysteria over the mixing of

racial

white

crossdressing.

above

the

inferior

constituted red and black as points of attraction.

entered, in sexual and

theat~ical

The
races

White men

invasion, the black bodies they

had consigned to physicalized inferiority.

Minstrelsy practiced

what James Snead calls ", exclusionary emulation,' the principle

whereby the power and trappings of black culture are imitated while
at the same time their black originators are segregated away and
kept at a distance."

To adapt Milton Gordon ' s terms, stuctural

segregation for racial minorities engendered cultural assimilation

in the racial interactions that constituted the dominant culture. 6
Racial aversion alone cannot account for the American history of
race-based inequality.

American identity was formed as weIl out of

destructive racial desire.

Westward

expansion,

market

revolution,

democratization produced anational

united States.
"emancipation"
insistence
difference,"

culture

and

political

in the antebellum

Ralph Waldo Emerson's demand that intellectual

follow

that
found

"the

political
Declaration

fulfillment

freedom,
of

Herman

Independence

in Jefferson's

dual

Melville's
makes

legacy

of

natural rights and natural, race-based, inequality -- not only in

the

American

School"

literary Renaissance,

of

anthropology

that

but also in the

derived

scientific measurements of the skulle

racial

"American

hierarchy

from

As artists and scientists

were striving for international renown, moreover, the mass public

was devouring sensation novels, reform tracts, domestic melodramas,
gothic stories, captivity narratives, and frontier tall tales.
canonized

writers

. Americanism"
combat

in popular

staid,

produced

themselves

the

genteel
frontier

Leatherstocking.

drew

literature,

European
hero

upon

"a

raw

and

vibrant

writes David Reynolds,

imports.
Daniel

The
Boone,

Age

of

Davy

The

to

Jackson

Crockett,

But when James Gordon Bennett decided in the

1830s to "blacken his face," to attract an audience for the New

York Herald with scandal and sensation, his turn of phrase pointed
to

the

most

Jacksonian
expansion.

popular

period
And i t

was

and

nationalist

marked

by

form

urban

of

as

all.

weIl

as

also gave birth -- in the cities,

For

the

westward
not the

countryside, among the new working class and not the pioneers, in
relation to African not native Americans -- to the first form of
American mass culture: blackface minstrelsy.
classic

American

literature,

minstrelsy

Like Leslie Fiedler's

was

an

all-male

entertainment form, combining racial and gender crossdressing , male

bonding and racial exclusion, misogyny and drag. 7
Actors had blacked up on the English stage since the early
seventeenth century, the dawn of English involvement in the slave
trade.

But there was no effort to root blackface characters in

Afro-American life until the resurgence of American nationalism in

the wake of the War of 1812.

The Age of Jackson, which began a

decade before Old Hickory first ran for president, with the slaveowning General's nationalist military campaigns against English and
native Americans, combined political and cultural democratization.
American blackface is a product of that moment.
Yankee,

minstrel,

emerging

simultaneously in assertions of American nationalism,

were the

first

voices

Europe.

backwoodsman,

of

the

and

American

blackface

vernacular

against

aristocratic

Each proclaiming a regional identity, Northeast, West, and

South, each also came to signify the new nation as a whole. The
Yankee became Uncle Sam. The backwoodsman metamorphosized into the
western hero of the frontier mythe

But both these figures were

surpassed in national appeal by the minstrel.

Edwin Forrest was,

in 1820, the first actor on the American stage to impersonate a

plantation slave.

Three years

later,

T.D.

Rice,

claiming to

imitate a crippled black hostler, began to "jump Jim Crow."

Coming

out of the commercial bustle on the Ohio River, wearing Uncle Sam's
red, white, and blue striped trousers and a blue coat beneath his
black face, the enormously popular "Daddy" Rice combined Yankee,
frontiersman, and minstrel into a single national icon.

Dan Emmett

introduced the blackface minstrel troupe in New York in 1842, and

minstrels performed at the White House two years later.

For the

next half century "our only original American institution," as one

minstrel called it, remained the most popular mass spectacle in the
united States. 8
The "cry was that we have no NATIVE MOSIC," proclaimed the

10
preface to an antebellum book of "plantation songsters ," "until our
countrymen found a triumphant vindicating APOLLO in the genius of
E.P. Christy, who was the first to catch our native airs as
they floated wildly, or hummed in the balmy breezes of the sunny
south."g
turned

Among the most popular of the early minstrels, Christy

black

to

white

advertising _himself.

(advantage).

He

America

by

Burnt cork, so the minstrel claimed, gave

Appolonian form to the Dionysiac African,

nature.

promoted

making art from his

The Apollo who turned the sounds of slaves into music

supplied the united states with its original national culture.

Minstrelsy's successors,
pictures,
blackface.

and

radio,

vaudeville,

tin pan alley,

did not .so much displace

as

motion

incorporate

It also spread to the urban nightlife that, at the turn

of the twentieth century, drew the. respectable working and middle

classes out of their homes and into places of public entertainment.
Only in "the world of commercial amusements that straddle4
the social divisions of class and ethnicity," writes David Nasaw,
"could [urban dwellers] submerge themselves in a corporate body, an
'American' pUblic."

The blacked up white body unified the body

politic and purified it of black physical contamination.

Public

sites signified their respectability by barring or segregating

African Americans in the audience as they presented "darkey shows"
and "coon songs" on stage.

Occasional African Americans,

like

Billy Kersands and Ernest Hogan, performed in blackface or wrote

coon songs for whites.

Hogan's "All Coons Look Alike to Me" swept

the country in the 1890s.

"The experience of white solidarity

11
inside

every

performance,"

as

Warren

Goldstein

describes

the

vaudeville show, "forge[d] a newly American id.entity while

building and reinforcing.

the unbreachable wall separating

whites from African Americans." 10

Ethnic stereotypes performed in blackface were a vaudeville
staple.

Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, white men with black

voices,

invented the serial form that established a distinctive

niche for radio.

Their Amos 'n' Andy became the most popular radio

show at the end of the jazz age and the beginning of the New Deal.'
Show Boat, the first Broadway musical play (where the story was
more than a pro forma excuse for the songs), premiered the same
year as The Jazz Singer, 1927.

Show Boat's subplot featured one

major trope in racial mixing, the tragic mulatta who tries to pass;
the

play

subject),

utilized

the

other,

blacking

since Tess Gardella,

Queenie in blackface.

up

(The

Jazz

Singer's

billed as "Aunt Jemima," played

As Show Boat also testifies, white Americans

created anational popular music

~y

capitalizing black roots, from

Stephen Foster's "Oh! Susanna" and "Old Folks at Home," performed

by minstrels in the age of Jackson, to Irving Berlin's "Alexander's
Ragtime Band," George Gershwin's "Swanee," and Jerome Kern's "Old
Man

River"

during

the

blackface

revitalization

of

the

early

twentieth century, to Elvis Presley and his 'successors, who took

off from black music and performance styles after literal blackface
had lost national legitimacy.

Most important of all in the first

half of the twentieth century were motion pictures. 11

12
The Old Hollywood
Hollywood's importance in making Americans, in giving those
from diverse points of class,

ethnic,

and geographic origin a

common imagined community, is by now a commonplace.

What is not

normally noticed is that four race movies -- Uncle Tom's Cabin

(1902), Birth of a Nation (1915), The Jazz Singer (1927), and Gone
with the Wind (1939) -- provide the scaffolding for American film
history.

They instantiate the transformative moments in American

film -- combining box office success,

critical recognition of

revolutionary significance, formal innovations, and shifts in the

cinematic mode of production. 12
Whereas theracialized character of mass entertainment appeared
on the blackface surface in the decades surrounding the civil War,
motion pictures in classic Hollywood normally buried their racial
foundations in white over black.

Romances, melodramas,

social

problem pictures, westerns and other adventure stories, historical

epics,' gangster and detective films, comedies -- it is rare to find
black and white (in the racial sense) at the center of these genre
films.

But the transformative moments go beneath the marginal,

every-day, African American presence on screen -- as servants,

entertainers, and buffoons.

When American film took its great

leaps forward, it returned to its buried origins.

Then it exposed

the cinematic foundations of American freedom in American slavery.

with Edwin S. Porter's trilogy of 1902-03, encompassing the
West in The Great American Train Robbery, the city in The Life of
an American Fireman,

and the South in Uncle Tom's Cabin,

the

13

history of American movies begins.

It begins with race.

introduced national narratives and formal

weIter

of

actualities

(real

and

innovations

staged),

foreign

Porter
into the
imports,

cinemographic tricks, and unmotivated short scenes of comedy and

violence that comprised primitive cinema.

At the dawn of the

twentieth century the artisan-director shot three brief movies that

together lay cinematic claim to the entire American landscape.
filmed,

successively, The Life of an American Fireman,

He

semi-

documentary about the modern city, Uncle Tom's Cabin, an entirely

familiar drama set (as his subtitle announced) "in slavery days,"
and The Great Train Robbery, the first important movie western and
the first blockbuster film.

The overwhelming majority of early

motion pictures, whether real or staged documentaries or filmed

vaudeville routines, did not tell stories; each segment of Porter's
trilogy did, for Porter was initiating the shift to the cinematic
narratives that would shortly dominate the industry.

Porter was

not just telling any stories, moreover, but those that composed
national mythography.

He was bringing into. the new century and the

new medium the three figures who had long defined American regional
identity, Yankee (modernized as urban-dweller), frontiersman, and
minstrel. 13
Porter

chose

techniques

regional synlbolisms.

that

matched

the

already-existing

Although the most lavish and expensive film

to date, and the first to use intertitles, Uncle Tom's Cabin was
formally the least innovative of Porter's three breakthrough films.
Nothing that happens

in Uncle Tom' s

Cabin

(with the

possible

14

exception of slaves picking cotton) had not already happened in

stage

productions

of

the

play.

The

close-up,

fundamental

departure from the stage, shows a hand pulling down the fire alarm
in Life of an American Fireman; there are no close-ups in Uncle
Tom's Cabin.
Fireman's

The outdoor feel of modern life is made visible in

documentary

shots

of

city

streets,

not

on

the

plantation 14
Set in the past and in the South,

Uncle Tom' s

Cabin is

static; set in the metropolitan present and on the moving frontier,

the other two films are dynamic.

For excitement about modern speed

and the camera's ability to capture it,

one must turn to the

speeding train and racing horsemen in the western,

riding

to

the

rescue

in

the

urban.

Perhaps

the firemen

displaying

the

heterogeneity of modern urban life and the absence of a singular

bourgeois subjectivity, Fireman shows the rescue of its woman and
child from more than one perspective. 15

Uncle Tom's Cabin has,

by contrast, a single point of view, and it is not an abolitionist

one.

The conflict in the film occurs not between anti-slavery

heroes and pro-slavery villains, but rather between the plantation

and the outsiders who threaten it.
intrude

into

the

happy,

Those menacing the slaves

interracial,

plantation

home.

The

plantation features emotional, physical contact among Tom, Little

Eva ("Tom and Eva in the Garden"), and st. Clair, and (in several
scenes) happy, dancing, slaves.
would reach the
shirley

screen again

Temple/Bojangles

(The combination of the two modes

in the enormously popular

Robinson

southerns.)

1930s

Whether

as

15

entertainers
blackface;

or

the

protagonists,
prefilmic

form

all
of

the

blacks

popular

are

whites

entertainment

in

most

organically incorporated into Uncle Tom's Cabin is minstrelsy.

The two meanings of plantation domesticity -- interracial
intimacy and blackface entertainment -- come together around death.
Loyal slaves are gathered around Little Eva as angels carry her
away.

Tom sees when he is dying visions of his

heavenly home.

earthly and

Porter filmed adventure in the city and on the

frontier; his love and death on the American plantation dramatizes

domestic loss.

Uncle Tom's Cabin imagines American community in

the historical and personal past -- the lost child, Little Eva, and
the maternal, sacrificed, Uncle Tom.

These figures had such a hold

on the American imagination -- coming as they did from the most

popular novel and set of touring theatricals of the nineteenth
century

that seven more silent film versions

would

follow

Porter's in the next quarter-century.16

Porter

filmed

three,

separate,

regional

identities;

Griffith combined them into a single, national epic.

Nation (1915)

D.W.

Birth of a

originated Hollywood cinema in the ride of the Ku

Klux Klan against black political and sexual revolution.

"The

longest, costliest, most ambitious, most spectacular American movie

to date," its technique, expense, length, mass audience, critical
reception, and influential historical vision all identify Birth as
the single most important movie ever made.
Porter at the camera,

Uncle Tom's Cabin, with

derived from the artisanal mode of film

production; Birth confirmed the period of directorial control.!7

16

Both Porter and Griffith line up the plantation with loss and
defeat, but unlike Porter, Griffith brings white supremacy into the
modern age.

Griffith's new nation is not born from northern

victory in the civil War,

but from the ride

(derived from The

Battle of Elderbush Gulch, his own western movie) of the Ku Klux

Klan.

The Klan rides to rescue not a mother and child threatened

by fire but a white woman menaced by a black rapist.

As if .to

underline the status of the black menace as white fantasy, Birth's

two rapists and mulatto seductress are whites in blackface.

White

sheets smash blacked-up faces in the climax of Birth of a Nation.

Griffith's fundamental contribution to full-length motion pictures
was to join "the intimate and the epic,,18; he linked the personal
and the historical through racial fantasy.
material birth pangs of immigrant,

Transcendentalizing the

industrial America,

Griffith

supplied the postbellum united states with its national myth of

origins.
Just as Griffith emancipated cinema from its dependence on
pre-filmic entertainment, so he rose above the film audience of
which Porter was a participant part.
man,

editor,

projectionist,

and

Porter was aworking camera-

bricoleur.

division of labor in a Porter production.

There was
Griffith,

little

the first

director as star, attracted mass media attention and presided over

massively capitalized projects.

Film historians argue over whether

films before Griffith actually spoke for their immigrant working

class audiences and not just to them.

What is certain is that the

period in film history that followed Griffith brought immigrants to

17
Hollywood power.

By the 1920s men like Porter and Griffith had

lost out to immigrant Jews, whose rise to the top of the motion
picture business coincided with the development of the Hollywood
studio system. 19
The men creating mass production studios were rising from their
working class and petty entrepreneurial roots to positions as
captains of

industry.

They were transforming local scenes of

maker/distributor/audience interaction into centralized hierarchies

that revolved around producer power, mass markets, and star fame.
As was not the case with the artisanal mode of film production (and
with the exception of certain directors and stars), a clear line
now

separated owners and executives

from workers.

Given the

importance of the immigrant working class as an audience for early

cinema, that immigrant Jews should come to dominate Hollywood only
once they

left the ghetto behind

included the middle class as weIl)

paradox.

(and once the

film audience

is from one point of view a

From another -- that of Louis B. Mayer when he changed

his birthday from the day of his first birth to July 4 -- i t

exemplifies the American dream.
That dream of ethnic Americanization, the moguls' own story, is
the sUbject of the first talking picture, the founding movie of
Hollywood sound, The Jazz Singer (1927).

The Jazz singer was a

pure product of the studio system, a production assembly line that

turned out film after film.

Alan Crosland directed The Jazz

singer, but Warner Bros. was in charge.

system,

But if the genius of the

in Tom Schatz's phrase,20 produced The Jazz Singer, the

18

film celebrated an individual genius, Al Jolson.

The blackface

performer Jolson was the most popular entertainer of his day, and
The Jazz singer turned his success story into a generic family
melodrama of immigrant generational revolte
Cabin and Birth of a
innocently

exposing

Whereas Uncle Tom's

Nation used blackface unselfconsciously,

the

white

stake

in

possessing

imaginary

blackness, The Jazz Singer makes the blackface method its sUbject.
Burnt cork is the magical substance and transitional object that
catalyzes the jazz singer's American family romance, his wish to
replace his natural parents, give birth to himself, and -- singing
"My

Mammy"

to

his

immigrant

Jewish mother

negotiate the resulting breach.

--

emotionally

Reborn in blackface,

to

the jazz

singer acquires an American wife as he makes melting pot music for

his new American home.

Burnt cork initiates him into intense

expressive states -- the melancholy of loss, the agony of conflict,

and the ecstacy of paradise regained.
new product that is American"

To make himself over into "a

(in the urban version of Turner's

frontier) the jazz singer puts on the mask of the black American
who, as the condition for ethnic mobility, must remain fixed in
place.

Intermarriage

between Jew and gentile

symbolizes

the

melting pot; there is no intermarriage between black and white. 21

Birth of a Nation was the most widely seen movie of the silent
period, The Jazz Singer broke all existing box office records, and
Jolson's blackface sequel,

The Singing Fool

(1928),

became the

leading money-maker between Birth of a Nation and Gone with the

Wind

(1939).

That David O.

Selznick production was the first

19

example of the producer unit system, the method of making films

that

would

come

to

dominate

the

new

Hollywood,

where

entrepreneur assembled the team for a single blockbuster.

an
Gone

with the Wind remains in constant dollars Hollywood's all-time top

box office success. 22
By the time Selznick made Gone with the Wind,

the racial

formula for cinematic breakthrough was fully in place.

Gone with

the wind established the future of the technicolor spectacular by

returning to American film origins in the plantation mythe
sang

"My Manuny"

Selznick

hired

in blackface to his
Hattie

McDaniel

Jolson

immigrant Jewish mother.

because

he

could

"smeIl

the

magnolias" when the actress came dressed for her screen test "as a
typical Old Southern Mammy."

critics of the racial politics of the

Selznick production were overwhelmed by the film's popular success

and McDaniel' s best-supporting-actress Academy Award.

Although the

producer compared the objections to Gone with the Wind to the

campaign against Birth of a Nation, Selznick also insisted he had
"cleaned up"

Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

Turning the book's black rapist into a poor white, having a black
man

run

to

rescue

Scarlett

instead

of

to

rape

her,

Selznick

portrayed his black characters as "loveable, faithfuI, high-minded

people" who, as he put it, "would leave no impression but a very
nice one."

Black sexual aggression menaces white freedom in Birth;

black loyalty supports white freedom in The Jazz Singer and Gone
with the Wind; it perhaps even allows, Diane Roberts has suggested,
a safe sexual darkening of Scarlett and Rhett.

Manuny is Scarlett' s

20

foundation; she is the ground for the jazz singer's mourning, for
his losing and finding a home.

Although Selznick replaced Jolson's

blackface mammy with the putative real thing,

far from playing

themselves in Gone with the Wind, black actors and actresses were
assigned roles minstrelsy had already defined. 23
In the foundational movies of classic Hollywood, then, as in
the routine studio product, black Americans swing between positive
and

negative

poles,

guardianship ,

from

"benevolence,

and endless

love,"

harmless

and

in Toni Morr ison ' s

"insanity, illicit sexuality, and chaos.,,24

servile

words,

to

The first movies to

attack race prejudice, made in the wake of World War II, challenged
Hollywood's

imaginary

blackface.

But such films as Body and Soul, Pinky, Gentleman's

Agreement,

and

Horne

white

of

Negroes

the

in

Brave

literal

bore

an

or

figurative

unacknowledged

indebtedness to the tradition they wanted to repudiate. 25

civil

rights

political

revolutionary,
equality

since

victories

took

the

most

the

end

of

of

irnportant

the

1960s,

strides

Reconstruction.

The

far

The
more

toward

racial

civil

rights

movement failed to reshape the united States, however, producing in

reaction

not

imagine

with

the

multicultural

horror

but

rather

regime
a

that

politics

many
of

commentators

binary

racial

polarization.
The two Declarations of American Independence always enjoyed
relations of mutual support -- racism justifying the exclusion of
peoples of color from Jefferson's apparent universalism, popular
culture supplying the low bodies dematerialized in high-principled

21

abstraction.

Blackface represented in culture those denied self-

representation in politics.

Discrediting literal burnt cork did

not shatter the deep structure of American history, in which the

black role must serve whites.

The defeat of

supremacy did make a difference, however.

legalized white

Whereas Jim Crow made

radical the extension of the first Declaration of Independence to

African Americans,
responsibility

for

current invocations of "civiI rights"

the

open

racial

demonology in color-blind wrappings.

secret

by

clothing

avoid
their

As long as pervasive material

inequality between whites and peoples of color coexists with formal

legal equality, racialized representations will shadow the language
of individual rights to dominate American politics and culture.
Whereas the

exclusion of blacks from American politics had

permitted cleavages among whites, the entrance of African Americans

onto the political stage in the 1960s introduced a
regime

into national two-party competition.

race-based

A majority among

whites has voted against a majority among peoples of color in every

Presidential election since 1964, and racial codes dominate public
discourse .

Moreover,

just as

blackface Americanized

European

immigrants by underlining the line between white and black, so the

new immigration (that also dates from the civil rights era, from
immigration law changes of the 1960s) has intensified the divide
between model minority members on the one side, "illegal aliens,"
"welfare queens," and violent black men on the other.

The New Face of America

22
From one point of view the civil rights victories and the new
immigration have extended the melting pot to the peoples of color
excluded from the old face of America, blackface.

In November 1993

Time magazine published aspecial issue, The New Face of America,

on

the

problem

of

race

in

the

united

States.

The

cover,

visualizing the new immigration, placed aseries of nationalities "Middle

Chines,e,
cover,

Eastern,

Italian,

African,

vietnamese,

Anglo-Saxon,

Hispanic" -- across the top and down the side of the

women

along

the

chromosome-linked graph.

and

men

along

the

axes

of

the

The software, "Morph" (for Metamorphosis,

2.0), produced at the meeting points of the lines on the graph a

computer simulation of the results of intermarriage.

Time's cover

girl, her large image superimposed on forty-nine small ones (adding

up to the number of states in the Union),

comprised the all-

American synthesis. 26
What might seem a bold depiction of miscegenation in the new
melting pot was, however, doubly contaminated.

For one thing, the

pictorialization of distinctive national origins was a throwback to

nineteenth-century theories of pure racial types.

Just as earlier

scientific racism gave precise numerical values to brain size and

facial bone angles, so Time produceda "new face of America" that
was "15% Anglo-Saxon,

17.5% Middle Eastern,

17.5% African,

Asian, 35% Southern European, and 7.5% Hispanic."

7.5%

This mathematics

was doubly imaginary, since the percentages bore no relation to any

actual or projected distribution of minority groups in the United
States.

23

Time's

foray

into computer dating might seem to

indicate

approval of the miscegenation that scientific racism condemned, for

the magazine's art directors confessed to falling in love with the
cover girl they had created.

However -- second problem -- the

price of the attraction was a similar look across the supposedly

different nationalities.

In the enlarged living color chart inside

the magazine, all 49 faces, even those born before computer sex,
are

rendered

in polite,

pastel

shades

of

light

yellow-brown.

(Choosing original pure types of the same, youthful age intensifies'

the sameness displayed in the name of variety.)

Not only are the

two photographed "Africans" close in color to the unmorphed Asians,

Hispanics, and Anglo-Saxons, but their features are Caucasian as
weIl.

The Time table not only whitens its Africansj it blots out

the two largest racial minorities in the United states by subsuming

(dark-skinned)

Latinos

under

"Hispanic"

and

including

no

one

labelIed African American at all.

The intermarriage chart purifies

African-Americans

calling

in

words

(by

eliminates the dark majority in images.

them

Africans)

as

it

(They would return in the

infamous darkening -- blacking up -- of O.J. Simpson's face on the

Time cover a year later.)27
Celebrating the melting pot by whitening its blacks, Time is
inadvertantly faithful to the historic character of assimilation.
Since weIl before the classic intermarriage play, The Melting Pot
(1908) and The Jazz Singer, marriage across ethnic and religious
lines has symbolized the making of Americans.
were

excluded

from that process,

however,

African Americans
legally as weIl

as

24

symbolicallYi

twenty-four

states

forbad

white

and

intermarriage until the 1967 Supreme Court decision,

Virginia. 28

black

Loving v.

The Time cover responds to the changed legal and

moral climate by homogenizing all its peoples of color and making

the black man and woman invisible.
Nonetheless, the repressed returns in the title Time gave to
its new melting pot,

"Rebirth of a Nation."

The magazine was

invoking (without, one assumes, full consciousness of its meaning)

the original Hollywood Birth of a Nation.

In Rebirth as in Birth,

moreover, the inclusion of some is built upon the violent exclusion

of others, for even after restricting marriage partners by age,
color, and aesthetic ideal of facial beauty, Morph still produces
monsters.

Only now, in keeping with homophobie demonology, they

are sexual instead of racial.

a

black. rapist beast,

Just as Birth invented and lynched

so Morph generated and

i ts programmers

destroyed a grotesque alterego of the cover girl, "a distinctively

feminine face -- sitting atop a masculine neck and hairy ehest."
Time's jokey, eugenic-inflected elimination of the monstrous birth
stands in for the unacknowledged racial cleansing.

The New Hollywood

Racialized political discourse,

taking on new life

in the

1960s, has intensified in recent years -- as is evident simply by

listing

the

names

Clarence Thomas,

(in

chronological

Rodney King,

order)

of Willie

Jimmie Ray Rector,

Jocelyn Elders, and O.J. simpson. 29

Horton,

Lani Guinier,

Polarization masquerading as

25

multiculturalism,

Time's 1993 Thanksgiving issue introduces the

racial politics and culture that climaxed in Simpson's year, 1994.

Gaining control of both houses of Congress for the first time in
forty years, Republicans initiated the Contract with America to
which the attack on affirmative action belongs.
1994 political science: California governor Pete Wilson, who

favors denying citizenship to children born in the united States of

"illegal

aliens,"

successfully

promotes

astate

initiative

depriving undocumented immigrants of health, education, and welfare

benefits

and

requiring

nurses,

doctors,

teachers,

and

social

workers to turn suspects (identifiable by their color and accent)

in.

He also sponsors an initiative requiring life sentences for

all those convicted of three violent crimes, a law supported at the

national level by President Bill Clinton.
bill

extends

exceptionalism

the

death

from

penalty,

other

fatal

western

Clinton's 1994 crime

evidence

democracies,

numbers of convicts and categories of crimes.

strikes

initiative,

along

with

the

extended

of

to

American
increasing

California's three
prison

sentences

mandated in other state and federal laws, will require shifting

billions of dollars in scarce state resources from the higher
education to the prison system.

The main cause of the expansion of

the prison population so far lies in drug policy, where enormous

racial disparities in conviction and sentencing for comparable
offenses have helped produce a disproprionately black and Latino
prison population.

"The negro" is no longer the "model prisoner"

of early social science, celebrated for his "cheerful"

adjustm~nt

26

to slaverYi all the more reason to confine him to jail. 30

In California as in other states a prison industrial complex is
replacing both the military industrial complex and the public
education

system.

California

blacks

and

Latinos,

heavily

overrepresented in the prison industrial complex (people of color

are incarcerated at six times the rate of whites),

are greatly

underrepresented in higher education, a disproportion that will

increase with the Wilson-initiated end of affirmative action in the
state

university

system

and

passage

of

the

Wilson-supported

"California civil Rights Initiative" prohibiting consideration of

race in hiring and educational admissions.

Whites, who will soon

be a minority in California, still comprise a large majority of the

voting

population.

Although

Governor

Wilson

is

racializing

California politics to regain lost popularity at home (successfully

winning reelection as governor but failing in his campaign for the
White

House),

"diverse

the

New

multiracial

Republic's

population"

editor
for

praises

supporting

the
the

state's
governor

against racial divisiveness and in favor of "equality before the

law."

Also acting in the name of constitutional color blindness,

the Supreme Court follows the 1994 election returns by ruling out
race

as

apredominant

consideration

in

drawing

congressional

district lines (now that racial gerrymandering is, for the first
time, being used to elect representatives of color).31
Even were the death penalty

(disproportionately applied to

black men) used with the frequency its supporters relish, it would
not end prison overcrowding.

Moreover,

another state carcerel

27
i

institution,

the orphanage,

is proposed by Newt Gingrich,

new

Speaker of the House of Representatives after the 1994 elections,

to house the offspring of unwed mothers whom the Contract with
America would deprive of state aid to dependent children.
parental tie may be severed for Gingrich,

as

The

in the original

peculiar institution, because the condition of these children would

follow that of their mothers.

(The Speaker of the House did not

reference slavery, of course, but the 1938 Mickey Rooney movie,

Boys' Town.)

The sins of the mothers for which the children are to

be punished -- ending Jefferson's restriction of desire to black

men -- are sexual.
science would
unequal.
Negro

Jefferson had suspected that the evidence of

find that blacks were

"by nature"

separate and

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, author of the report on "The

Family"

"matriarchy,"

that

first

blamed

racial

inequality

on

black

is one of only eleven Senators to oppose ending

welfare entitlements for the children of unwed mothers.

Moynihan

nonetheless offers the opinion in 1994 that the rise in out of

wedlock births "mark[s] such a change in the human condition that
biologists would talk of a 'speciation' -- the creation of a new
species."

Speciation is the Darwinian word for the evolution of a

population that (the Jefferson/Moynihan wish?) cannot interbreed

with the species from which i t developed.- 32
Speciation is merely Moynihan's free association.
Richard Herrnstein/Charles Murray best-seIler,

The 1994

The Bell Curve

providing full

scientific apparatus,

racially-based,

genetic differences in intelligence.

claims to have discovered

The Bell

28

Curve received in the fall of 1994 the New York Times Book Review
seal

of

approval,

along with

J.

Philip

Rushton's

revival

of

nineteenth century scientific racism's theoretical core (in the

enterprise that provided elaborate scaffolding for Jefferson's
original musings and for the science of the "American School"), the
fantasy

that

evolution had

created

three

separate

races,

the

Mongoloid, the Negroid, and the Caucasoid. 33

1994 Hollywood: The year's major motion pictures pay homage to
The Jazz Singer and Birth of a Nation.
twice,

The Jazz Singer returns

once .in Woody Allen's Bullets over Broadway,

set in the

1920s, which opens with The Jazz Singer's "Toot, Toot, Tootsie" and
features a grotesque mammYi and once in Whoopi Goldberg's Corrina
Corrina, set in the 1950s, in which Corrina Washington cares for
Manny Singer' s motherless daughter and gets her to talk again,
saves his advertising agency job by jazzing up his singing jingles
(here the specific source is Louise Beavers' mammy role in Mr.
Blandings Builds His Dream House),

and,

in the film's climax,

finally overcomes Manny's emotional rigidity as he buries his head

in her arms.

Remembering Time's "New Face of America," we expect

Manny Singer, unlike the jazz singer, to wed his mammy; remembering
The Jazz Singer, we also count on the amalgamation of girl friend
and mammy so that the hero can retain both female halves.
Corrina is a black culture donor, in Cecil Brown's phrase; her
relationship to Manny offers the now ubiquitous Hollywood promise
that

personal

bonds

(usually

between

historically-rooted racial inequality. 34

men)

can

overcome

African Americans are

29

also culture donors in the two movies that achieve the greatest
combined critical and popular success of 1994, the films that bring
Birth of a Nation up to date.

Pulp Fiction is energized, following

Birth, by an imaginary black underworld (to recall Toni Morrison's

words)

of

violence,

"insanity,

illicit sexuality,

and

chaos."

Linguistically, libidinally, and politically, blacks govern this

reconstruction world turned upside down; Pulp Fiction's interracial
buddies live in terror of the black crime boss and stud for whom
they work.

In one of the major stories that comprise the film, the

two hit men must dispose of the spattered remains of the "nigger in
the car" whom they have inadvertently blown away.

Another episode,

the central one, climaxes when the intimidating black boss is cut
down to size in a graphically-depicted anal rape.
Pulp Fiction was one of two films
Academy Award nominations.
buddy movie

Dole,

(best picture, director, actor,

running

for

1994

It lost out to another interracial

adaptation, visual effects), Forrest Gump.

Bob

to monopolize the

president

editing,

screenplay

Senate majority leader

against

the

"nightmares

of

depravity" in Hollywood and rap music, offers the "family fare" of

Forrest Gump as an alternative. 35

And one traditional mode of

family entertainment on which that movie draws is blackface, for a

repeated joke makes harmless good fun (or so the film makers and
senate

majority

protruding
minstrelsy.

lower

leader

seem

to

think)

of

black

soldier's

lip -- the classic grotesque black mouth of

The film's idea of fellowship is to bond its feeble-

minded hero with this slow-speaking,

bewildered-looking,

Stepin

30

Fetchit and, after he dies, with a double amputee.

Creating a community of the afflicted, Forrest Gump imagines
i tself

speaking

Independence.

for

equality ,

the

first

Declaration

of

In the film's myth of origins, however, the second

Declaration of Independence gives birth to Forrest Gump.

months before Forrest Gump's release,
repressed what J.

A few

the Library of Congress

Hoberman calls our national

"birth rite"

by

excluding The Birth of a Nation from its collection of "Cinema's

First Century. ,,36

Not to worry.

Just as Bullets over Broadway

opens with the sound of The Jazz Singer, so

i ts beginning the image of Birth of a Nation.

Forrest Gump offers at

As Forrest teIls the

story of his own birth, what appears on screen is a Ku Klux Klan

scene lifted (or simulated)

from Griffith's film.

Cutting from

Birth's hero masking his face to the massed, white-sheeted men on

horseback

("they

dressed

up

as

ghosts,

or

something"),

the

interpolated footage illustrates the work of the founder of the

Klan, "the great civil War hero, " Nathan Bedford Forrest, for whom
the 1994 Forrest was named.

(The visual quotation stops before

Birth's Klan goes to work, lynching a blackface rapist.)

The Birth

of a Nation thus takes its place at the head of the other newsreels
from American history

John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy,

and John

Lennon assassinations and the Wallace, Reagan, and Ford attempts,

Nixon resignation, LBJ speech -- through which Forrest will move
(in the award-winning visual effects) and that will fail to touch
him.

Forrest Gump passed star Wars in 1995 to move into third

place among the top grossing movies of all time. 37

31

"You can I t defend practices that are based on group preferences

as opposed to individual opportunities," says Connecticut Senator
Joseph Lieberman that same spring.
American.

because.

about averages or groups.,,38

Affirmative action "is un-

America is about individuals, not

One need not endorse the remedy of

affirmative action to see that Lieberman is calling upon the first

Declaration of Independence to make the second one disappear.

His

falsification of American history, however, speaks the'truth it is

intended to bury, for the accusation of un-American activities
(once the stock in trade of the House Un-American Activities
committee) turns opponents of white supremacy into aliens in their
own land.

Innocent of the history that has named him, Forrest Gump

is not alone.

32
1. The present essay is adapted from my Blackface. White Noise:
Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley and Los
Angeles,

1996).

The

Turner

quotation

is

in

Frederick

Jackson

Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920), 4.

2. Abraham Lincoln, speech at Chicago, June 10, 1858, in Abraham
Lincoln:

Selected Speeches. Messages. and Letters, ed.

T. Harry

Williams (New York, 1957), 91-92.

3.

Thomas Jefferson,

"Autobiography," in The Life and Selected

Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Adrienne Koch and William Peden eds.

(New York, 1944), 25-26; James A. Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave
Trade: A History (New York, 1981),311-19,342-46; Stephen Hopkins,
"The Rights of Colonies Examined [1763]," in Tracts of the American
Revolution. 1763-1776, ed. Merrill Jenson (Indianapolis, 1967), 4162.
4.

Thomas

Jefferson,

Writings, 256, 262.

Notes

on Virginia,

in Life

and

Selected

See also Winthrop Jordan, White over Black:

American Attitudes toward the Negro. 1550-1812 (Chapel HilI, N.C.,

1968), 429-81; James Campbell and James Oakes, "The Invention of
Race; Rereading White over Black," Reviews in American History 21
(1993): 172-83.
5. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery. American Freedom: The Ordeal of
Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975).
6. James Snead, White Screens/Black Images (New York, 1994), 60;
Milton Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race.
Religion. and National Origins (New York, 1964).

33
7. F.O. Matthiesen, The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in
the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York, 1941); Stephen Jay Gould,
The

Mismeasure

of

Man

(New

York,

1981),

42;

Michael

Rogin,

Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New

York, 1983),15-23,70-76; David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American
Renaissance (New York, 1988), quoted 170,174,205; Lawrence Buell,
"American

Literary

Emergence

as

Postcolonial

Phenomenon,"

American Literary History 4 (Fall 1992), 411-42; Leslie Fiedler,

Love

and

Death

in the American Novel

(New York,

1960).

The

indispensable studies of nineteenth-century minstrelsy are Robert

Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America
(New York, 1974); William W. Austin, "Susanna." "Jeannie." and "The
Old Folks at Home": The Songs of Stephen C. Foster from His Time to
Ours, 2nd ed. (Urbana, Ill., 1989); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and
Fall of the White Republic:
Nineteenth-Century America
Roediger,

Class Politics and Mass Culture in

(New York,

The Wages of Whiteness :

1990),

119-80;

David R.

Race and the Making of the

American Working Class (London, 1991); Eric Lott, Love and Theft:
Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
1993).

(New York,

A full discussion of minstrelsy would have to address what

Lott and Roediger (from different perspectives) make central, the

origins of blackface in the northern white working class.
8 W T Lhamon,

Jr "Constance Rourke' s Secret Reserve," intro.

Constance Rurke, American Humor, 2nd ed. (Gainesville, Fla., 1989),

xxxii, xxiv; Rourke, American Humor. 95-104; Lott, Love and Theft,
56; Toll, Blackinq Up, 1-30 (quoted, 1); Saxton, Rise and Fall of

34

the White Republic, 118-23.

9. Quoted in Saxton, Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 166.
10.

Lewis Ehrenberg,

Steppin' Out: New York Night Life and the

Transformation of American Culture (Chicago, 1981); Michael Rogin,

"The

Great

Mother

Oomesti.cated:

Sexual

Oifference

and

Sexual

Indifference in O.W Griffith's Intolerance," critical Inguiry, 15

(Spring 1989), 525-30;

David Nasaw, The Rise and Fall of Public

Amusements (New York, 1994), 1-2,45-61,91-94,115-16 (quoted 45);

Warren Goldstein,"Coming Together," Nation, September 5/12, 1994,
224-26.
11. Melvin Patrick Ely, The Adventures of Amos 'n' Andy: A Social

History of an American Phenomenon (New York, 1991); Ethan Mordden,

"'Show Boat' Crosses Over," New Yorker, July 3, 1989, 94; Austin,
"Susanna," "Jeannie," and "The Old Folks at Home"; Gary Giddins,
Riding on a Blue Note: Jazz and American Pop (New York, 1981), 517.
12. I first made this claim in "Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish

Jazz Singer Finds His Voice," critical Inguiry 18 (Spring 1992),

417-420.

The following pages expand on and modify that argument.

13. The definitive treatment of Porter is Charles

the Nickelodeon:

Edwin S.

Company (Berkeley, 1991).

Musser~

Before

Porter and the Edison Manufacturing

See also on early cinema (among many

other sources, some cited below) Nasaw, Going Out, 134-53, 166;
John

Fell

ed.,

Film Before Griffith

(Berkeley,

1983);

Miriam

Hansen, Babel and BabyIon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film

(Cambridge, 1991), 23-125.

35
14. William L. Slout, "Uncle Tom' s Cabin in American Film History , "
Journal of Popular Film,

2 (Spring 1973), 137-52; Donald Bogle,

Toms. Coons. Mulattoes. Mammies. and Bucks (New York,

1973), 3;

Thomas R. Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film.

1900-1942 (New York, 1977), 12-14; Edward D.C. Campbell, Jr., The
Celluloid South: Hollywood and the Southern Myth (Knoxville, Tenn.,
1981),12-14,37-39; Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in
the Reception of Amerian cinema (Princeton, 1992),101-23; Musser,
Before the Nickelodeon, 242-44; David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and
Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and
Mode of Production to 1960 (New York, 1965), 183; Eileen Bowser,
The Transformation of Cinema. 1907-1915 (Berkeley, 1990), 96.
15. Compare Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 212-30; Tom Gunning,
"Weaving a Narrative: Style and Economic Background in Griffith's
Biograph Films," Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 6 (Winter 1981),
12-25; Tom Gunning,
Spectator,
cinema

"The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film,

and the Avant-Garde," in Thomas Elsaesser ed.,

(London,

Threshhold,

1990),

56-62;

Limits," Screen

Noel Burch,

Its

Early

"Narrative/Diegesis:

(July-August 1982),

16-33; Staiger,

Interpreting Films, 101-23; Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 90-125.

16.

Richard

Koszarski,

An

Evening's

Entertainment.

1915-1928

(Berkeley, 1990), 184.

17.

J.

Hoberman,

"Our

Troubling

Birth

Rite,"

Village

Voice,

November 3, 1993,2-4 (quoted 3); Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson,

The Classical Hollywood cinema, 90-142, 183.

The discussion of

Birth of a Nation here is derived from my "'The Sword Became a

36
Flashing Vision': D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation," in "Ronald
Reagan."

the Movie and other Episodes

in Political

Demonology

(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987).

18. Koszarski, An Evening's Entertainment, 214.
19. BordweIl et al, Classic Hollywood Cinema, 87-112; RobertSklar,
"Oh! Althusser!: Historiography

~nd

the Rise of Cinema Studies," in

Robert Sklar and Edwin Musser eds., Resisting Images:

Essays on

Cinema and History (Philadelphia, 1990), 19-32; Neal Gabler, An

Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York,
1988).
20. See Tom Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Fillmmaking
in the Studio Era (New York, 1988).
21. I discuss The Jazz Singer in "Blackface, White Noise."
22. William K. Everson, American Silent Film (New York, 1978),37374; "'Gone with the Wind' Champ Again," Variety, May 4, 1983, 5;
BordweIl, Staiger, and Thompson, Classical Hollywood Cinema, 32029.
23.

Carleton Jackson,

Hattie:

The Life of Hattie McDaniel

(New

York, 1990), 35, 46-51 (quoting Selznick); Patrice Storace, "Look

Away, Dixie Land," New York Review of Books, Dec. 19, 1991, 24-27;
John D.

Stevens,

"The Black Reaction to Gone with the Wind,"

Journal of Popular Film 2 (fall 1973),367; Diane Roberts, The Myth

of Aunt Jemima:

Representations of Race and Region

(New York,

1994), 171-81.
24. Toni Morrison, "Introduction: Friday on the Potomac," in Toni
Morrison ed., Race-ing Justice. En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita

37
HilI, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (New
York, 1992), xv.
25. See my "'Democracy and Burnt Cork': The End of Blackface, the
Beginning of civil Rights, " Representations 46 (Spring 1994), 1-34.
26.

Time,

"The New Face of America," 142

(Special Issue,

Fall

1993), 2, 66-67.
27. Ibidj "The Bloody Odyssey of O.J. Simpson," Time 143 (June 27,
1994).
28. Ibidj A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., "An Open Letter to Clarence
Thomas from a Federal Judicial Colleague," in Morrison, Rac-ing
Justice,

21-25.

29. Dramtis Personae for the visitor' from Mars: George Bush won the
Presidential

election

of

1988

by

teaming

his

opponent,

Massachusetts governor Michael DUkakis, with Willie Horton,

the

black man who had raped a white woman while on furlough from a
Massachusetts prison.

Clarence Thomas, whose only qualifications

were his far-right Christian political associations and the color

of his skin, won confirmation to the Supreme Court by accusing
those who believed Anita Hill's accusations of sexual harrassment
of engaging in a "high-tech lynching."

After the white policemen

whose beating of a black man, Rodney King, was recorded on video

and played repeatedly on national television, were acquitted by an
all-white suburban
flames.

jury,

Governor Bill

South Central Los Angeles erupted in

Clinton

revived his

1992

presidential

campaign by flying back to Arkansas to witness the execution of

Jimmie

Ray

Rector,

brain-damaged

convicted

black

murderer

38
Clinton withdrew his

nomination

of

Lani

Guinier

as

assistant

attorney general for civil rights after the Wall Street Journal
called her a " quota

queen"

for

proposing

alternatives

effective disenfranchisement of black voters who,

to

the

in a racially

polarized electorate, occupy permanent minority statuses.

Clinton

fired Jocelyn Elders, the first'black woman surgeon general, for

refusing to condemn masturbation as a form of safe sex.

O.J.

simpson -- complete the sentence yourself.

30. Alexander Cockburn, "Beat the Devil," Nation, Nov. 27, 1995,
656; Alfred Holt Stone, "Is Race Friction Between Blacks and Whites
in the united states Growing and Inevitable?" American Journal of
Sociology (1908), 692, quoted in Stephen steinberg, Turning Back:
The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy
(Boston, 1995), 160.
31. Mike Davis, "Hell Factories in the Fields," Nation, Feb. 20,
1995, 229-33; Richard Walker, "California Rages Against the Dying
of the Light," New Left Review 209 (1995), 60-61; Fox Butterfield,
"Political Gains by Prison Guards," New York Times, Nov. 7, 1995,
Al,

A15; Andrew Sullivan,

"Affirmative Action is Dead,

Even If

Clinton Doesn't Know It," International Herald Tribune, July 25,

1995,

6.

The Supreme Court decision is Shaw v.

Reno.

For Bob

Dole's version of "civiI rights," co-authored with the freshman

black congressman from Oklahoma elected in 1994, see Bob Dole and
J.C. Watts Jr., "A New civil Rights Agenda," Wall Street Journal,
July 27, 1995, 6.

39
32. "The Fight Over Orphanages," Newsweek, Jan. 16, 1995, 22. Lee
Rainwater and William Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Polof
Controversy

(Cambridge,

Mass.,

1967)

reprints

Daniel

Patrick

Moynihan, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," by the
then

assistant

secretary

of

labor

in

the

Lyndon

Johnson

administration, now the senior senator from New York. See also Todd
S. Purdom, "The Newest Moynihan, " New York Times Magazine, Aug. 7,
1994,

36;

New

York

Times,

Sept.

3,

1994,

A22;

Robert

Pear,

"Moynihan Promises Something Different on Welfare ," New York Times,

May 14, 1995, A13; Robin Toner, "senate'Approves Welfare Plan That
Would End Aid Guarantee, " New York Times, Sept. 20, 1995, Al, A17.
33.

Richard J.

Herrnstein and Charles Murray,

The Bell Curve:

Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York, 1994);

J. Philip Rushton, Race. Evolution. and Behavior: A Life History
Perspective (New Brunswick, N.J., 1994); Malcolm W. Browne, "What
Is Intelligence and Who Has It?" New York Times Book Review, Oct.
16, 1994, 3, 41, 45-46.
34. On the role of black culture donors in the major 1994 movies,
see Cecil Brown, "Doing That 01' Oscar Soft Shoe," San Francisco
Examiner, Image Magazine, March 26, 1995, 25-27, 38-41.
the irony,

friendship

as

am borrowing from his discussion.

Hollywood's

Benj amin DeMott,

solution

to

the

race

Aware of

On interracial
problem,

see

"Put on a Happy Face: Masking the Differences

between Black and White, " Harper's (Sept. 1995), 31-38.

35.

Bernard Weinraub,

"Senator Moves to Control Party's Moral

Agenda," New York Times, June 1, 1995, Al, B10; Bob Dole, "To Shame

40
an Industry," New York Times, "Letters," June 8, 1995, A15.
36.

Hoberman, "Our Troubling Birth Rite," 2-4.

37. "The Top Money Makers, for Now, " New York Times, May 14, 1995,
H22.
38. Todd S. Purdom, "Senator Deals Blow to Affirmative Action," New
York Times, March 10, 1995, A10.