Representation of Blacks:Gone with the Wind(1939)

This time I went back to the 1930s to find the movie,Gone with the Wind,which tells a story of the American Civil War and Reconstruction era from a white Southern point of view.The main point of view is given from white experiences and opinions of the South and the idea of slavery as being not an important issue and more like a rather ordinary thing.The adaptation is extremely long;3 hours 44 minutes, plus a 15 minutes intermission.The film deals with events before,during and after the civil war and in the meantime we can follow up the path of a real Southern Belle Ms.Scarlett who goes thorught a real change during this time.But since my primary focus is on slavery i will try to cut to the chase.According to an online source the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People tried to arrange a boycott of the film by black audiences and, to a lesser extent, black actors and I do not blame them.Gone with the Wind is one of the worst treatment of blacks after The Birth of a Nation because while the latter is purely racist and shows blacks as stupid cattles,the former paints a rather romanticized picture about the situation,way of thinking and attributes of African-Americans during this swiftly chaning period.This,of course,is manifested in many different way.Ways in which slaves are treated by their masters,ways in which slaves behave and treat each other and their white superiors.

Mammy

The depiction of all African Americans is like they were stupid and childlike.The only characters who manage to escape from this are leading black characters such as Mammy and Big Sam ,who are the so called "Good" blacks but we can also distinguish the so-called "Bad" Blacks, who inhabit a distinctively negative set of attributes. Mammy and Sam call these kind of blacks "niggers" or "black apes" because of their abusive and rapist behaviour toward white women.

"Good" blacks,according to a Southern understanding are content with slavery,committed to serve and loyal to their benelovent masters.Here,they are treated like pets rather than human beings.Here,I am stressing not only the focus on their stupidity -and i do not think the movie wants to focus on that either- but their almost affectionate admittance of their situation as slaves.It is like slavery what they were meant to be born for.It is,in modern eyes,ridiculous but this is what essentially made a southern plantation myth to come into existence for the first place.

Prissy

The worst example of the negative portrayal of blacks is the young house slave Prissy.Perhaps intended as comic relief, Prissy is stupid, squeamish, a liar, and becomes hysterical over the smallest things. She is a caricature of a woman, a living holdover from the slaveholder’s old claim that African Americans needed to be slaves because they weren’t able to function on their own.

All in all,what we can see in this movie is a purely romanticized denial of the clearly evil institution of slavery which probably served a purpose for the Southerners.It might have served -or still serves -to show a place where you can escape into denial, where they can wash their conscience clean and make the rest of the world believe that everything was justified back then.Altogether,the movie is quiet watchable and enjoyable but not a very good source of authentic knowledge about the situation in the South.
 

Sources:

1. https://www.sparknotes.com/film/gonewiththewind/section4.rhtml    Race relations section

2. https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99dec/9912leff.htm  Hollywood's racial politics

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_with_the_Wind_%28film%29