We do, no explanation was needed!
And he got cancer from that, so there might be a lesson there.
3 Likes
Because it’s not Al Jolson doing blackface directly, it’s Al Jolson playing a character who is performing in blackface. It’s an ironic motif in a story about Jewish assimilation — Rabinowitz (the titular singer) pretends to be black in order to pretend to be white.
@anon61221983, have you actually seen the film?
ETA: It’s been pointed out that the picture upthread that I mistook for Jolson is Eddie Cantor. Jolson’s character in The Jazz Singer is the son of a cantor, so it’s an understandable mistake!
1 Like
So, are you saying that it’s okay for Jewish people to be exploitative and racist towards African Americans because they themselves faced oppression in American or that even bringing it up in conversation is tantamount to being antisemitic? Blackface was certainly racist and exploitative in nature - although most certainly it’s a cultural form that was neither created nor perpetrated primarily by Jews (contrary to what some antisemites would have you believe - it only underscored and supported white/Christian supremacy and was primarily perpetrated by people with real cultural power, which in the 19th and early 20th century, were white Christians); rather it was a key part in the development of American popular culture and some entertainers of that era happened to be Jewish (mainly because it wasn’t a profession from which they weren’t excluded, like gay men in theater).
6 Likes
It probably boils down to personal experience within the drag scene or of the drag scene (or scenes). Also personal taste.
4 Likes
Sure (it’s been years, and I should probably watch it again) and I understand that aspect of the film. I was speaking to the larger concept of blackface itself within American culture, which was indeed built on a mockery of African Americans and their perceived inherent traits. I don’t think that’s a controversial stance to take.
I don’t doubt that Jolson had the best of intentions and that the film is more about Jewish assimilation rather than racism itself. Nor do I think that Jolson was racist in his intent. But I do find the whole concept that in order to become fully “American” one has to imitate and mock other Americans, specifically black americans, as a deeply problematic one in our society. Again, like the other film we discussed in this thread, Birth of a Nation, it has an important role in being a bellwether of American culture, while still being deeply problematic.
1 Like
I think you’re on to something there. There are many subsets within the drag scene and they’re hardly homogeneous. I’ve only dealt indirectly with the drag community, so my sample is very small. (And even there has been with specific individuals.) We’re back to that broad brush you were discussing earlier, I guess.
3 Likes
With most people I stop reading after those words. Its putting words in the other person’s mouth and inevitably trying to distort what was actually said. For you I give the benefit of the doubt even though the rest of your comment looks like you are doing exactly that.
To get back to your previous comment, whats the point of differentiating prejudice against blacks vs prejudice against Jews to begin with? Or one minority group vs another?
Yeah. I think one example is the Paris is Burning documentary, which deals with a very specific drag scene. That’s not the ATL scene (with Charlie Brown, first at Backstreets, now over at Lips), or the scene that gave us the Cockettes out west, Baltimore, or where ever that the drag performer that won Eurovision a couple of years ago came from (was she from Germany - Choncita Werst, I think her name was).
Maybe it goes back to how localized mass culture with has context and nuance, gets turned into a much more bland, mainstream culture. You have to flatten out the local difference and make the members of each scene who float to the top more alike to make it a genre (in whatever cultural form we’re talking about). But at some level, especially in the modern age, you have to talk in more broad brush terms, because culture spreads and becomes globalized. Members of those who embrace that culture have to understand each other across cultural borders and have a shared language, so it can happen both on the “mainstream” level and on the subcultural level and the two interact and shape one another.
Am I making any sense here?
2 Likes
Huh, hadn’t heard that, thanks, it led me to explore. What a colassal disaster that movie was!
And maybe it did give him cancer, or maybe it was the 100 cigarettes a day.
In 1953, the year before production started, the US Atomic Energy Commission had tested 11 nuclear weapons at Yucca Flats in Nevada - including two exceptionally “dirty” above ground tests with high degrees of fallout. After each detonation, huge clouds of radioactive dust were blown into the atmosphere before floating downwind and accumulating in the funnel of Snow Canyon, 220km to the west. Or more precisely, exactly where The Conqueror would be shot in 1954.
By 1980, 91 of the 220 cast and crew had been diagnosed with cancer. Forty-six then died of it, including John Wayne, Dick Powell and every leading supporting cast member. Pedro Armendáriz would also be diagnosed, but committed suicide after hearing the news, shortly after filming From Russia With Love in 1963. Numerous American Indians who served as Mongolian warriors contracted cancer in later years, and even John Wayne’s son Michael died in 2003 of cancer, after visiting his father on the set at age 22.
Investigations since have questioned whether the Snow Canyon radiation was wholly to blame – instead arguing that the heavy smoking habits of the cast (John Wayne smoked five packs a day) could have been equally responsible. Even so, the idea that Wayne, the living embodiment of US superpatriot militarism, could have died as a result of military testing is ironic to say the least. Commenting in a People Magazine article on the deaths in 1980, a spokesman from the Pentagon Defense Nuclear Agency was moved to say: “Please, God, don’t let us have killed John Wayne.”
6 Likes
Thanks for at least giving me the benefit of the doubt.
I don’t think that it’s a good or healthy thing for that to happen - I’m not saying it’s a good thing or that it’s not harmful to BOTH Jews and African Americans. You’re from the US, right, so you know that antisemitism in American is a real thing, especially towards those who refuse to assimilate (visibly orthodox Jewish communities). I don’t want it to happen or think it’s good for either African Americans or Jewish Americans. However, my point was that the structures of white supremacy in America have made that happen, especially in the period we are discussing (the early days of the culture industries). The cost of being assimilated into the mainstream culture tends to be an embrace of the white supremacist attitude based on skin color - groups at one time not considered white (those from Catholic majority countries or from Jewish communities in Eastern Europe) eventually became assimilated into whiteness, in part by pitting themselves against African Americans (my specific ethnic group, Irish Americans, tends to be the classic example of this process and you can find plenty of examples of Irish American ethno-centrism and racism).
However, you’re right on that one should not differentiate antisemitism or antiblack sentiment. It shouldn’t be forgotten that, while African Americans bore the brunt of racism in south during the nadir of race relations, that Jews and Catholic Americans were often also targeted (the canonical example being the lynching of Leo Frank, which the local Jewish museum, the Bremen, has a focus on, since it happened up in Marietta, north of ATL). That doesn’t mean we can’t say that blackface isn’t racist because some Jewish people participated in it. Some black people also participated in blackface as an art form. That doesn’t make it less racist nor less supportive of white/Christian (protestant especially) supremacy. Nor does that mean that I think we should completely condemn those who worked in blackface, because it was a job and it paid the bills. But that also doesn’t mean we can’t note how the form itself was indeed racist.
I see it as complicated set of relationships between different people at a point in the past. But if someone showed up, seriously, in blackface today, I doubt any of us would be on board.
2 Likes
Yeah, I’m thinking the fact that he already had a lung removed. Even though he believed he was “cancer-free,” doctors are careful these days to use the phrase “in remission.”
It could have been the residual fall out and/or his cancer returned. Like most men of his age and generation, he didn’t exactly treat his body like a temple.
1 Like
He went through the making of that movie with one lung?!
2 Likes
Sorry, I was using the word already meaning that Wayne already fought cancer once before he had stomach cancer, from which he ultimately died. But yes, it (lung cancer) was after the filming of The Conqueror. He did continued to work between cancers (the first surgery was mid-sixties?).
2 Likes
You have that the wrong way around.
He was a performer who did blackface routines that also happened to later star in a movie about a performer that did blackface, likely using elements from his own life and career.
The role he was playing wasn’t meta-ironic, it was sincere minstrelsy.
1 Like
Maybe pretending to be “black” also helped him be more accepted as “white.”
By donning blackface, immigrant Jewish performers could distance themselves from perceptions of ethnicity and position themselves as “more white” or “American” in a racist culture that viewed “whiteness” as the presumed goal of assimilation.
That’s from a review of this book:
4 Likes
Since I’m in the US for a family crisis right now, I’ve been reminded of that almost daily.
Not sure if “embrace” is the right word but I’ll give you that once those of us who “pass for white” or actively assimilate can end up in the environment which creates strong negatives for Black people for sure.
Again not entirely sure on this as per above.
A leaf on my family tree was nearly lynched by the KKK in Tennessee way back in the day. They had him strung up on the tree but due to some circumstances I can’t reveal in detail without potentially doxing myself they let him live.
I didn’t claim anything of the sort.
Its not even in the past unfortunately.
Do you honestly think that white people dressing up to be POC is okay?
Yes I do. Some of it may be in bad taste but lots of humor is in bad taste. In general, I think the harm done by political correctness is greater than the harm done by a few overly sensitive people feeling insulted (especially since so many of the insulted people are feeling insulted on behalf of someone else).
Which harm is that? Loss of these national advertisement treasures? Freedom to speak your mind?
6 Likes
Did you read anything I said? I don’t. [quote=“BdgBill, post:179, topic:82295”]
I think the harm done by political correctness
[/quote]
I would say that the greatest harm here was the enforced second class citizenship for a number of our fellow citizens for much of our history.
8 Likes
