Why films featuring blackface belong in college classes
About 30 years ago I took a film history class in community college. As the films were shown in chronological order, we quickly came upon cinema's stickiest hairball, “The Birth of a Nation.”
To discuss D.W. Griffith's monument to white racism is to run aground on artistic contradiction. On the one hand, it is socially and historically reprehensible. With buffoonish and menacing Black characters played largely by white actors in blackface, and a story that celebrates white hegemony, “The Birth of a Nation” wants the viewer to consider how much better off we'd all be if the Confederacy won the Civil War. Reprehensible.
Then again, “Birth” represented a quantum leap in film editing, cinematography, storytelling and most other elements of filmmaking. It was the first blockbuster. For some reason, the class instructors — there were two of them, both of them white men — chose to focus on these qualities and completely ignore the loud, clear racism. This puzzled me at the time. Yes, it was 1990, and we weren't quite as sensitive to such matters then. But still. How do you teach “The Birth of a Nation” without discussing its violent minstrelsy?
These memories came back to me with the news of what happened this month at the University of Michigan. Bright Sheng, a respected music professor, was starting his course on how to adapt a play into an opera. To this end he decided to show Laurence Olivier's 1965 film adaptation of Shakespeare's “Othello.” Olivier, who was nominated for an Oscar along with three of his costars, played the part in blackface, a decision that raised eyebrows even then. “He looks like a Rastus or an end man in an
American minstrel show,” wrote Bosley Crowther, the New York Times film critic. “You almost wait for him to whip a banjo out from his flowing, white garments or start banging a tambourine.”
Blackface is an ugly historical remnant, and Sheng's students were not pleased. They complained that Sheng hit play on the film on the first day of class without little explanation beforehand.
“I'm saddened by the numbness I feel when I consider professor Sheng's decision and my school's response,” wrote one of his students in an essay on Medium. He goes on to lament a pattern of racism and sexism at the University of Michigan music school and in classical broadly.
Sheng apologized. The students, deeming the apology insufficient, complained some more. Sheng had noted in his apology how many Black students he had mentored, which infuriated his critics, and he then apologized for mishandling the apology. Sheng, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, eventually stepped down from the class, though he continues to teach individual studios and will return to the classroom next semester.
Some have argued that Sheng was “canceled,” a specious if popular concept used primarily by those who defend the willfully offensive. Others would like to kick the likes of Olivier's “Othello” to the curb for good. Their outrage is understandable — especially in the absence of any kind of context or explanation of blackface's problematic history. That was what puzzled me about my experience with “Birth of a Nation,” a far more hateful work than “Othello.” I can do formalism as eagerly as the next person, but you're just going to act like nothing's wrong here? Maybe a mention of how “The Birth of a Nation” brought the Ku Klux Klan back to life? Nope. It's a masterpiece. Move along.
I've always thought the tensions inherent to “The Birth of a Nation” make it all the more worth studying. What does it mean that the first blockbuster in movie history is drenched in racism? That this most popular art form took its biggest leap forward in hate? Those questions have, as it turns out, been the subject of at least three dissertations, one by Melvyn Stokes that was published as a book. All this is to say, you can't study racism unless you look it in the eye.
What would be an ideal introduction to Olivier's “Othello” in 2021? I'll give it a shot: “We're going to look at a version of ‘Othello' that made the unwise and frankly offensive decision to use blackface. We're using this film because of its fealty to Shakespeare's play, not because of Olivier's choice to present the title Moor character as a minstrel character. But we should also discuss the troubling history of blackface and race in Shakespeare. ‘Othello' is largely about fear and torment of the Other, and in subsequent years, Black actors (including Laurence Fishburne, Adrian Lester and Chiwetel Ejiofor) often play the jealous Moor. Blackface is highly demeaning, though the film industry clearly thought otherwise in the '60s: all four primary actors in “Othello,” including Olivier, received Oscar nominations, still the only time this has ever happened for a Shakespeare film adaptation. And if anyone is too offended to continue, we can arrange for you to do a different assignment.”
That's not being woke. That's being thorough. It's expanding the universe within which your lesson lives.
As for students, especially those who would object to showing “Othello” even when properly introduced and discussed, you can't face down what disturbs you without studying it. There are people
out there who disingenuously take your words out of context for political gain and ideas to fit their own beliefs. This gets harder for them when you can call them on it from a place of knowledge. That means knowing the good, the bad and the ugly, which, despite our best efforts to separate them, often coexist. So don't flinch. Don't duck. Look straight ahead. Know the enemy. Despite what opponents of Critical Race Theory would have you believe, to study history is, to a great extent, to study racism.
I feel bad for everyone involved in l’affaire d’Othello .It seems like a chance to learn was lost, as was a chance to teach.