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
serious, "integrated" musicals of stage and film, including "The
Jazz Singer" and "Show Boat." 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.
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