There is a scene in 1974’s underground blaxploitation-era film The Spook Who Sat by the Door where a group of black militants comically mock the ubiquity of Gone With the Wind-like imagery that is so embedded within American culture. As the others laugh out loud at the performative racism essential to this historical representation, the film’s main character, Freeman, expounds on the larger meaning of such things: “You have just played out the American Dream. And now we’re going to turn it into a nightmare.”
The nightmare that Freeman spoke about is upon us. As the streets pulsate with protest following the killing of George Floyd and numerous other acts of police violence and racial hostility, those restless souls, having been cooped up due to Covid-19 in recent months, have found their voice. Demands for structural and institutional change abound. Corporations, professional sports leagues, brands, and other business and cultural entities have been issuing statements left and right, while others have taken actions that may have been unimaginable in previous times.
One of those actions involves HBO temporarily pulling Gone With the Wind from its recently launched HBO Max lineup. With a statement which articulates that the film’s “depictions are certainly counter to WarnerMedia’s values” HBO said the civil war epic is not gone forever but that it will return with new material added for the purpose of providing context and addressing the film’s historical shortcomings.
For years now activists have been attempting to cancel the Confederate flag and eliminate other monuments to the fallen Confederacy, along with removing the names of former slave owners and white supremacists that continue to adorn buildings on various school and college campuses, among numerous other attempts to destroy the legacy of the slaveholding south that was supposed to have died with the end of the civil war. We can now add films celebratory of this defeated legacy like Gone With the Wind to the list as well.
Of course there will be those who cry foul, who suggest that this is nothing more than politically correct censorship. Once again though such voices will simply be doing what James Brown once described as, “talkin’ loud and sayin’ nothing”. Removing those things that honor and celebrate racists is not erasing history. Instead this is holding history accountable, while providing necessary context.
The south supposedly lost the civil war. There is an overused cliche which suggests that the winners write history. Is this true? If it is, then why do all these relics of the losing side still circulate in this society so many years after the civil war ended? The point is, films like Gone With the Wind should have been held accountable a long time ago. Further, Hollywood’s role in disseminating such demeaning, dehumanized, stereotypical images can no longer be ignored.
Gone With the Wind is a descendant of DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation from 1915, the foundation that American cinema is built upon, a film that screened at the White House, prompting President Woodrow Wilson to declare it “history written in lightning”. It was celebrated for its technological mastery of visual storytelling, yet its narrative is nothing more than racist propaganda. The heroes of the film are the Ku Klux Klan who ride in at the appropriate climactic moment to save the day. The Birth of a Nation is at the root, so if racism is at the root, the fruit that emerges from this tainted root can only be the fruit of racism.
Further, American cinema helped to spread the fictional “lost cause” narrative that has attempted to rewrite history while transforming the terrorism of slavery into something much less real, though much more palatable to certain white audiences. The idea of a “lost cause” originally emerged in the period after Reconstruction. An overt attempt to erase the savage brutality of slavery during the age of Jim Crow white supremacy, a revisionist history began to emerge which suggested that though the south had lost the civil war, the fight itself had been a noble cause that was predicated on an attempt to preserve a cherished way of life. That “way of life” might also be known as slavery.
One can see the resonance of the ahistorical propaganda of films like The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind in the current popularity of a more contemporary version of the lost cause narrative as represented by 2011’s The Help, a film that became the most watched title on Netflix as the recent backdrop of street protests dominated the news. Viola Davis, who received a best actress nomination for her role in The Help, stated in 2018 that she regretted doing the film, while Bryce Dallas Howard, who appears as the cartoonish racist villain in The Help, responded to the film’s renewed popularity by describing it as “a fictional story told through the perspective of a white character” which was “created by predominantly white storytellers”. While The Help is not Gone With the Wind, it is another in a long line of more recent films where the trope of the white savior is celebrated, while the black characters on screen are used as racial props so as to bolster themes of benevolence, generosity and overall white goodness.
Long before Viola Davis’s Oscar nomination in The Help, though, Hattie McDaniel would be the first black actor in Hollywood to be nominated and win in 1940 for her role as the dutiful servant Mammy in Gone With the Wind. McDaniel was not allowed to attend the film’s 1939 premiere in Atlanta because of her race. And though she would make history at the 1940 Oscars ceremony at the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles she was forced to sit in a segregated “colored section” separate from the white actors in an area created specifically for her during the evening’s event. McDaniel’s role in the film was such a fundamentally stereotypical representation of white society’s desired way to see black women that her character’s name, Mammy, came to be descriptive of that particularly pervasive stereotype. The sassy, cantankerous, asexual Mammy was a caricature of black womanhood and McDaniel was made to endure the implications of this caricature in the racist treatment she received on and off screen.
As we reconsider so many things in this moment of reflection on the debilitating legacy of white supremacy, movies cannot escape our critical focus. Many mistakenly assume that because numerous actors and other creative figures in Hollywood are vocally liberal that Hollywood itself is liberal by default. This is not now, nor has it ever been the case. There are liberal people in Hollywood for sure, but Hollywood itself is far from liberal. The history of Hollywood is filled with examples of racism, perhaps none more lethal than consistent toxic stereotypes like Mammy and others that have polluted the minds of those who accept Hollywood fiction as historical fact.
It was also The Birth of a Nation that introduced the image of the violent, threatening black male beast and the menacing black thug. This was a caricature that would appear for decades throughout numerous movies – like Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry franchise, for instance – and on television – pick your favorite cop show. The black thug was not the protagonist and in many cases he may not have even had a name. Yet the sheer volume of these beast-like images over time created the impression that black masculinity and violence were inherently linked and this needed to be put in check. In these instances, the black man is often represented as an out of control animal intent on wreaking havoc. Meanwhile the LAPD, in collaboration with Hollywood, had a hand in shaping its own image and the overall image of cops in the larger culture by assisting in the production of a television show like Dragnet, the blueprint for future cop shows. Many of the ideas that society holds about heroic cops came from fictional media representations like this. In real life, though, figures such as Rodney King, Michael Brown and numerous others have often been described in a beast-like manner whenever a police officer explained why it was necessary to brutally beat, shoot or choke to death another unarmed black man. The legacy of this brand of Hollywood racism can also be heard in statements about “super predators” as well as quotes like “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”. In a time when the washing of one’s hands has taken on added significance, it is Hollywood’s hands that are dirty.
With all of this in mind, when we consider the role that streaming plays in the contemporary media landscape, perhaps it is time for a ratings system when it comes to older movies such as Gone With the Wind? What if a movie like this granted an “O” rating – “O” for offensive – when the film in question is steeped in the kind of racism that Gone With the Wind projects? “O” seems appropriate only because the “R” that could signify “racist” is already taken. This way no one could say that the film had been banned, but anyone who chose to watch it would at least potentially have to contemplate what it means to consume such inherently racist material.
That said, these older images from Hollywood’s past do represent an actual history. And this is a history that should not be suppressed. Yes, America’s business is “all out in the street”, as they say, currently exposed for the world to see. There is value in people seeing just how overtly racist Hollywood was at one time so as to understand what that means both then and now. Attempting to erase the past is never a good thing. On the other hand, hiding behind weak arguments about how the film can be enjoyed without indulging the racism of its time is especially disingenuous. Films like Gone With the Wind – and to be clear there are decades of racist films maybe not as popular but which have also contributed to America’s especially problematic depiction of black people – need not be banned, but these images do not need to be elevated either. To watch Gone With the Wind without this knowledge is to miss the necessary context that is needed to properly understand the film’s reprehensible role in furthering racism far beyond 1940. To add important information about the racial legacy of this and other films is a step in the right direction.
Dr Todd Boyd is the Katherine and Frank Price endowed chair for the study of race and popular culture at the USC School of Cinematic Arts
