Since a respected professor at the University of Michigan is facing potential firing for showing his class Laurence Olivier's 1965 version of Othello in which, yes, Olivier did perform in blackface; let's talk about the implications of this mindset.
I went to film school and for my first year and we had a lot of film history thrown at us.
You can't talk about film history and ignore DW Griffith's Birth of a Nation. It was the first twelve reel film made at that point. It's a landmark in the history of the art form.
It's also incredibly racist.
Blackface is all over the film and none of the black characters were portrayed in a positive light. The movie is about the foundation of the KKK and the KKK are shown as the good guys.
To have an academic environment in which students can mob teachers and try to get them fired if they dare to show this film is to not address the attitudes of the time honestly. So, what do you want? Do you want us to be honest about racial history in the United States or do you want us to keep the nasty bits out so you feel safe? You can't have both.
If you go through cinema history you're gonna find a lot of stuff that wouldn't be acceptable now.
The Jazz Singer showed Al Jolson in blackface. That's the first movie with sync sound. It's kinda important to cinema history and you should watch the whole film.
We watched plenty of films by Leni Riefenstahl, which were produced with the sole intent of making Hitler's Germany look good.
One of my favorite movies of all time is I Am Cuba, which is a propaganda produced by a communist, racist dictatorship in support of another communist, racist dictatorship. It's just a brilliantly made film.
Neither of my colleges had massive campaigns in place to get faculty fired because they showed us something that offended us. It's not like we suddenly figured out that blackface is wrong (except when Robert Downey Jr. does it) since 2008. We knew that the ideas behind Birth of a Nation were and are disgusting; but, I still have an 8mm print of it.
Why are we doing this to our art? It's one thing to acknowledge that there are certain things from past movies that wouldn't and shouldn't fly today. But, we can appreciate old movies for what they got right and how they moved the artform forward.
If you're going to fall apart because a movie or a play or a piece of literature or the author him or herself doesn't meet your standards of wokeness, you're not being realistic, intellectually rigorous, or brave by any measure.
And, to the point I alluded to above, how do you condemn the people who are opposed to CRT being taught at gospel as a bunch of racist who want to slap a smiley face on the racial crimes committed by this country while you're calling for people to get fired for showing precisely what the racial attitudes of a great many people were back then with full honest?
The whole thought process is hypercritical and self-absorbed.