Over on the review site I had some things to say about the documentary Booker's Place. Watching the film put several things in my mind, so I may be going on about it all week. The primary things I'm working through are how white America denies black America a voice, even when celebrating one of it's speakers. Another is the hidden face of white supremacy in modern politics. The story of N'r Henry came to mind, which is a story known to some of my readers but certainly not all. I thought as well how careful white America has to be when speaking to itself. You cannot approach issues of race directly, there must be hand holding. Lots and lots of hand holding. Only with the right combination of hand holding and truth can progress be made. Because we don't have to listen. Until the recent election, white America slept secure in the knowledge that we could simply speak over anyone speaking words we don't care to hear. There is a scene in Booker's Place where a man says he was a segregationist. His friends were segregationists. Everyone was a segregationist and they thought all the blacks were segregationists too. Boy were they wrong.
It takes a lot of work from a lot of people to get to a place where a man can say he was wrong. Even in the context of the film. Showing it to a mixed audience, the few white people immediately seek to assert their own supremacy and their own lack of blame. Faced with a tale where black families labored from dawn till dusk (yet always come up short), a well dressed white man* launches into the emotional tale of his black mother. Every Southerner knows this story. In this man's particular case some of his best memories are spent in the cotton fields, being cared for by his Mammy. She lovingly puts him down to nap on cotton bales. Those halcyon days are interrupted by a black man holding back strong emotion. He is angry that this man is romanticizing the neglect black children faced when their mothers were forced, by societal and economic constraints, into parenting white children instead of their own. The white man doesn't spare a moment for this truth, for this man's emotion. He is sorry for it, of course. (Is there a more useless emotion than being sorry, of course?) but he knows the truth of his own life and wouldn't change it for anything.
This is an important moment in the film for white viewers. He wouldn't change his past for anything. Not to benefit the black children, not to address racial inequality, not for anything. He had a need and she filled it. That must remain primary. The man goes on to defend himself against an attack that wasn't made. He insists that because he remained close to the woman for life that it invalidates the pain of the black man. He, the white man, being loved by the black woman, is the most important part of the tale. This is the Mammy Myth. It is a deep and enduring part of how we, as white Americans, view the black experience. There cannot be two truths - that she loved the white children she cared for (as she might well come to do) and that her humanity meant limited resources. A full time job and the care of the white children mean the inevitable neglect of her own, whom she deeply loved as well. The third truth (of so many) is that being the white man's Mammy gave her social status in the white world. This is status she may have desperately needed to hold. Rather than confront any of this, the man became defensive and claimed the truth of the black woman's life for his own emotional needs alone. We do this everyday. This is one of our best tricks as white Americans. There is only one truth, and we own it.
Later in the film a white woman, having viewed the 1966 documentary and heard the story of Booker Wright, sighs. She talks about having loved the white men shown in the film and having known Booker as well. He reflection is that all of these men, every one, was a good man. All of these people, every one, were good people. They were just caught in a broken system and doing the best they could. She is talking about a time when black men were being lynched in large numbers. She is talking about men who stood by while black churches were burned, who in fact probably participated. This is another myth of white America. The Good Person. In our collective narrative everyone is good. Things just happen. It isn't anyone's fault. Everyone does what they can and gosh, it's a shame that so many people die but what can you do? (I'd argue you could not join the KKK, but what do I know? Obviously not what she does.)
What Booker's Place throws into focus not even the most mypoic white viewer can deny. The past, as someone famously said, isn't past. We carry it in our lives. Jim Crow is alive in the bodies of so many Americans. It colors our views, it informs our speech. When we examine the response to Hurricane Katrina or the death of Rekia Boyd or so many other events, Jim is there to tell us we're all good people doing the best we can do in a broken and terrible system that is still so much better than the past. Sharecropping was better than slavery. The 1970's were better than the 1950's. Today is better than 1965. Like the Mammy Myth, we choose one truth and hold it, ignoring all the other truths it contains.
*I realize that the people depicted in Booker's Place have been edited and that conversations contained within may well have gone longer or contained more depth than the filmmakers revealed. There can be many truths in any situation.
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