POLITICALLY INCORRECT - NO TRUTHS PLEASE

When I was in high school, several of our teachers lamented the depiction of blacks in movies and television. The reason given was that they were always shown as servants or other degrading roles.

Years later, many blacks called The (Bill) Cosby Show, with the title actor’s character an obstetrician/gynecologist and a successful lawyer for a wife, unrealistic. The family lived in a beautiful brownstone in highly fashionable Brooklyn Heights.

Stepin Fetchit billed himself as ‘the laziest man on earth’ and catapulted to millionaire status by the 1930s, the first black actor to do that. His real name was Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry. Civil rights organizations campaigned against his playing on the stereotype of the dim witted, lazy black but if you looked at the plots of his movies, it was a ploy because he was actually outwitting his white supervisors. It was the old thing about him crying all the way to the bank but by 1947, he was he was bankrupt. He later recovered with the help of Muhammad Ali.

Little Black Sambo was a story of a boy who lives in South India with his parents. He outwits four hungry tigers by giving them his brightly colored clothes so they won’t eat him. They cavort around a tree, drop from exhaustion & turn to butter. He takes his clothes back and brings the butter home to his mother.

Some blacks took offense at it because Sambo was so dark complected but people from South India are very dark complected & Sambo saved himself through his wits.

Amos & Andy started as a radio show with two white men playing the title parts. On television, they were portrayed by blacks. The stories often centered around them being two blacks from rural Georgia dealing with the big city in Harlem. Sometimes they were conned but that has been fodder for hundreds of plots over the years.

Song of the South was a 1946 Disney movie that was attacked by civil rights organizations for similar reasons. They felt it depicted slave life too kindly.

The plot involved a friendship between a young white boy who was related to a slave master’s family. His parents were separating and leaving him there. He tried to run away & met an avuncular slave who kept him safe in his peaceful home but returned him to the turmoil of the master’s house. The contrast of the turmoil of the master’s home vs. the placid environs with his slave friend must have escaped the civil rights critics. The movie was a technical masterpiece, the first to have cartoon characters and actors interact. It gave us the great song Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Da.

Hattie McDaniel, the great actress who became the first black to win an Oscar for her work in Gone With the Wind, was emphatic that the movie didn’t demean blacks and that if she had thought for a minute it did, she’d never have accepted her role. That placated no one and today and it is only available on You Tube. The Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Da sequence is uplifting and should bring a smile to anyone’s face. The concerns of critics should have centered around the possible divorce of the boy’s parents which was extremely rare in the America of the time of the movie and the time of its setting.

My sister went to secretarial school right after her high school graduation in 1952 and took a course in shorthand. Her teacher was from the South and reminisced one day about her childhood including her mammy, who was very kind. A black girl in the class excoriated the teacher for it. Sentimentality counted for nothing.

In my brother’s high school music class, in the 1940s, a teacher was asked by a student which voices she preferred, black or white. She replied that she liked the harmonies of the black groups better but for single singers she liked white voices better. A big to do erupted over it.

Al Jolson had a #1 version of Rock a Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody in 1918. Sammy Davis, Jr. sang it often in his live shows. Jerry Lewis did a cover of it in 1956 that reached #10 and Aretha Franklin had what was probably her very first hit with a version in 1961 that reached #37 on the Billboard Chart but hers was especially interesting.

The actual lyrics not only said ‘…just hang my cradle Mammy mine, right on that Mason-Dixon line…’ that hinted at a nice black woman domestic servant but also told her to sing ‘…“old black Joe”, just as though, you had me on your knee.’ But Aretha got around it by changing it to Little Joe. Talk about a minefield for political correctness!

Old Black Joe is about an old man who ‘hears the gentle voices calling Old Black Joe.’ All of his friends are gone & he hears the angels calling his name. He’s waiting to go to the next life. It was written by none other than Stephen Foster, America’s first professional song writer.

My Old Kentucky Home, which is sung every year at the Kentucky Derby & is the Kentucky state song was also written by Stephen Foster. Its lyrics were updated in 1986 from ‘…’tis summer the darkies are gay…’ to the more acceptable ‘…’tis summer the people are gay…’

A similar fate befell the sentimental reminiscence of When It’s Darkness on the Delta with its lyrics ‘…darkies singing sweet & low…’ becoming the more genteel ‘…people singing sweet & low…’

Darktown Strutters’ Ball was written in 1917 and has been covered by dozens of artists. Darktown was the term for the black areas across the country. A guy was going to take his girl to the Darktown Strutters’ Ball and they were going to have a great time dancing. He warned her not to be late. Mary Tyler Moore, Ted Knight and some other members of the cast of The Mary Tyler Moore Show sang it together as part of a joke by Knight’s character, Ted Baxter. That was the last time I even heard about it. I’m not sure it could even get air time today and not simply because it’s 99 years old.

The 1947 song Mañana (Is Soon Enough For Me), written by Peggy Lee and her husband Dave Barbour was sung with a Spanish accent and played with a Latin beat. With these lyrics: ‘The window she is broken and the rain is comin' in If someone doesn't fix it I'll be soaking to my skin But if we wait a day or two the rain may go away And we don't need a window on such a sunny day’ among others, it would likely be regarded as demeaning to Hispanics today.

Hispanics did become offended at Bill Dana’s Jose Jimenez, a Bolivian. He introduced the character on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1959. The most famous skit was Jose as an astronaut. It became a huge hit but then Hispanics and Hispanic-Americans began objecting to the portrayal of the slow-witted Jose. Dana ‘killed’ the character off at a Los Angeles Mexican-American Pride celebration, declaring him dead, to the cheers of the Hispanic participants.

And so now we’re here today with the politics of Political Incorrectness. It’s so broad that anyone can feel demeaned over just about anything, so a significant part of American culture has had a large Off Limits sign placed in front of it. No more minstrel shows with blacks doing the skits and routines that helped them develop a tradition of great entertainers. No more whites in blackface mimicry. No one is permitted to display a happy nature in circumstances other than those approved for it. No playing on stereotypes. The variations, permutations & corollaries continue ad infinitum.

We are forbidden from artistic exploration and even historical mention of many things. Look what happened to Jimmy the Greek, the Las Vegas oddsmaker, when he said that slaves had been bred for strength & other physical assets when that was the case.

On one hand, we have this legacy and history which as far as I know cannot be changed sitting as we are in the present. As we “deal with it” and “address it” (one of my top three most hated expressions in the English language) the race baiters pick these scabs and pick these scabs and pick these scabs because they have been taught this SJW ritual of always assuming the superior moral position. As a result the afflicted minority gets more and more irritated and offended and angry and revengeful upon people who had nothing to do with those expressions we of the non-minority can do nothing about....except act like we have been acting, which in overwhelming numbers is with equanimity. EVEN IF we have to consciously work at it. Meanwhile; the more “activist types” keep stressing revenge and payback and reparations.

This race-baiting activist PO(tu)S with his Al Sharpton sidekick have set back the cause of race relations 70 years. It’s my belief that this is no accident. He and his minions know how Blacks vote and he knows, like the Stalin and the chicken story, he can abuse them to no end and they will still vote for liberal Democrats who destroy their cities and obliterate Black potential for the sake of their raw lust to stay in power. All they know is; Blacks will never figure it out.

And the result is that a handful of disaffected types come to think it’s a good idea to shoot a bunch of cops.

It wasn’t worse, the way it was before. This isn’t “progressive”.

Absolutely not true. It's been aired on TCM within the last few weeks.

I think you misunderstood, and thats understandable because that part was written awkardly. Hattied McDaniel won an oscar for Gone With the Wind. However, he is speaking here of her role in "Song of the South". The author is speaking of her role, and what she said about the role, in Song of the South, and that you can only find that movie on YouTube.

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