February is Black History Month, but recent moves to eliminate DEI policies may have allowed that to slip your mind.
Despite Google removing Black History Month from its calendar, the commemoration continues. You didn’t forget that, did you? Many people who happen to not be Black question why we need such a month. Yet many of those same people continue to treat people of color with enough hatred and disrespect that they could answer their own question if they’d stop and actually use their brains for a second.
I think it’s important to reflect on how far we’ve come as a society. But I think it’s just as important to ponder how much further we need to go. If you allow yourself a few moments of empathy, you can get a glimpse of someone else’s struggle.
An unlikely film choice for Black History Month
I recently rewatched the 1939 film Gone With the Wind. I know that some might consider that a strange choice during a month commemorating Black history. The truth is, I didn’t watch it because it’s February. I watched it because it came up as a suggestion in Amazon Prime.
The film has been heavily criticized for its depiction of the “Old South” and slavery. Specifically, the film, according to critics, masks the horrors of slavery in the pre-Civil War days. Well, that’s certainly true. The slaves in the film are mostly depicted as being satisfied with their place in society. There’s almost no depiction of how slaves themselves lived or were treated. Slaves largely appear for comic relief or as simple devices to tell the story.
But there is one scene in the movie that stops me. It always has but it wasn’t until recently that I stopped to think about why. There’s a scene that takes place during a barbecue when the young white girls are all upstairs napping. The scene essentially serves as a transition as the film’s heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, defiantly gets dressed and sneaks downstairs to search for her beloved Ashley Wilkes. The camera pans across a bed of young sleeping debutants and then to a young Black child who is fanning them as they sleep.
It’s a short shot that could easily go by unnoticed. An Esquire article that heavily criticizes the film’s depiction of race describes the scene this way:
During a nap before the war, white girls sleep while black girls fan them with peacock feather fans. Whether those black girls have any feelings whatsoever is a matter of the strictest irrelevance to this movie.
For some reason, I didn’t find her feelings so irrelevant.
In fact, it made me think about how we ever got there
We can watch a film like Gone With the Wind and be caught up in the Technicolor splendor of the film. It is a beautiful picture cinematically. It is a horrible picture in documenting slavery. You can argue that it wasn’t a movie about slavery. It’s a love story set during the Old South before and after the Civil War.
But you can’t deny that the Civil War was about slavery. So to try to “whitewash” the evils of slavery seems tone deaf, especially today when we tell ourselves how long we’ve come.
As most people gloss over the scene and wonder what the young O’Hara is up to, I noticed.
Years ago, a colleague of mine attended a Civil Rights event and spokes with an attorney who was active during the early days of the Civil Rights movement. He told her something she’d never heard about bussing back in the days of Rosa Parks. Imagine a bus back then makes its very first stop of the day: there’s a single passenger to pick up, a person of color. That passenger, at least until the second stop, has the entire bus to themselves.
But even being the only person on the bus, he or she still can’t sit up front. This person, based on the color of their skin, falls into the “second place” even when no one who’s in the “first place” slot is present.
If I were a child during the pre-Civil War days, would it have bothered me that this child was forced to fan me? If I were an adult during Jim Crow, would it bother me that someone would have to give up their seat for me if they weren’t white?
Our conditioning matters
I would really like to think that both would have bothered me. I would like to believe that I could not have found peace with that.
But then I would have been a product of the times in which I was raised, as all of us are, even today. Maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t have even noticed, since I would have been conditioned to just accept, not question. Any attempt to do otherwise would likely have been met with scolding or worse.
So people back then — even some who might truly have been bothered by it — said nothing. People of both races just accepted it and went on about their lives.
There are plenty of people who speak out today. In fact, sometimes there’s too much speaking out. At least, there’s too much speaking out without wisdom. Take a look at social media these days and look at some of the petty arguments that break out. Here in South Carolina, a few law enforcement agencies had to change how they posted — or whether they posted at all — about Black History Month because of the negative, inappropriate comments their posts received.
These angry commenters — and to be sure, there were commenters of both races — aren’t out to solve a problem or build unity. They just want to yell and be angry.
It’s hard to find unity on social media. It’s harder still to build any.
Unity shouldn’t be so elusive at this distance
I’d like to believe that the majority of people are tired of the endless hate. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. reminded the world about the importance of using one’s voice:
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
We still find ourselves in that “period of transition” because we still have too much clamor and too much silence.
We need to scream less and listen more. Even a film criticized for glossing over racism can open our minds to a little self-reflection if we allow it to. But we have to want to stop screaming. We have to want to put ourselves in someone else’s place rather than pounding our chests about who we are.
Maybe if the louder among us would stay quiet a little more often and try to understand each other, we’d be a lot better off. And maybe if the quieter among us would speak out more to encourage that, we could move forward a lot faster.
