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There are two kinds of racism. There is a deeply hostile racism, a rabid xenophobia typified by the Klan. But there's a different kind, a gentle paternalistic racism where the members of the under-group are loved and yet not respected. They are not treated like trash, but rather like children. Boolie was that kind of racist, and Akroyd struck the tone exactly right. For example, there was a scene in which Hoke asks for a raise, and Boolie offers him a certain amount: "Would this be enough?" And Hoke replies "This much more would be better" and Boolie grins at him in delight, as a parent would grin at a beloved child who had temporarily transcended himself. The Boolie character was not evil; he was hard working and even generous. He treated Hoke well throughout the period that Hoke worked for him, and yet there was never equality there. And that is the point: individual racists are not necessarily evil, even though racism is. Individual racists can be loving and kind, and racist nonetheless. The movie worked so well because it was within the context of racism but not actually about it. It was actually a character story of two people we came to know and care about, who happened to be a white woman and a black man living in a racist time and place. Racism was part of the environment and reflected in everything that they were and did; in that sense it was a necessary part of the story because it was part of the characters. There are no villains in the movie, because it's not about that. By soft-pedaling the racism and yet never ducking it, the movie makes a more profound statement about it than some other films which pound it into the ground and paint all the characters as caricatures. Hostile rabid racism is on the run in the US, and good riddance to it. Forty years of consciousness raising has made it socially condemned even in areas where it used to flourish. And yet that loving, condescending racism is alive and well and prospering on college campuses. It's directed towards the non-European peoples of the world. And the saddest thing is that the people holding these racist views think that they are doing so on behalf of those same non-Europeans. The philosophic justification for the "root causes" argument that we've heard so much about is the idea that the people who attacked us were motivated by what we ourselves had done to them earlier. But it goes deeper than that: if we are responsible, then they cannot be. And that can only be because they are not capable of being responsible. They are not truly adults; they are children or beasts who respond to conditions in predictable ways. We do not hold children to the same standard of responsibility as we hold adults, and these racists don't hold the people of the world to those standards either. If by our acts we brought this tragedy upon ourselves, then had we acted differently we would not have. Which means that we have a paternalistic obligation to control how everyone else in the world behaves, through our acts towards them. They will merely react to us; all responsibility is here. We are the only moral thinking people on earth and thus the only ones who can sin. If we can only bring ourselves to be sufficiently kind and generous to them, then they will live good lives. They are innocent, they cannot know sin, for they are not sufficiently sophisticated to do so. They are less than we are. This is deeply loving and compassionate chauvinistic contempt. It reached its most pathological in Fisk's notorious attempt to explain away his being beaten by a crowd in Pakistan as ultimately being the result of western imperialism. This attitude is racism of the most intense kind. The ironic thing is that there is no group of people more ready to accuse others of racism than those who have these attitudes. (discuss) |
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