Last night the little neighborhood cafe/cinema near me was screening “His Girl Friday.” I had seen a few scenes, but never the entire film, so decided to check it out.
#AquariumCineCafe turned out to be the closest evocation of a treasured part of my childhood, Seattle’s 1970’s-era #RosebudMoviePalace that I’ve found anywhere. Loved it and will be back! And, Cary Grant’s and Rosalind Russell’s cross-talking, machine-gun speed banter? As delightful as promised.
But you know what? Despite the film’s wit, it left me appalled. Why? Because amidst the celebration of Howard Hawks’s direction, the film’s stellar acting, and snappy dialogue a major flaw is omitted: the film’s casually mundane, yet abundantly vicious, racism.
To recap: the film centers on a divorced pair of journalists who are faced with a ‘story of the century’ about a convicted killer facing hanging. The man’s crime? He shot dead a police officer, but is arguably insane and shouldn’t have been sentenced to death. Fine. A key fact is that the policeman was Black. The film posits that corrupt city pols facing reelection have to go hard and execute the mentally ill (white) killer in order to secure the ‘Colored’ vote.
We’re supposed to believe that Black voters were such a formidable bloc in 1940 (and the original script was from 1929!) that electeds were making life-and-death criminal punishment decisions to appease them? Right.
Then there’s the vicious commentary by a member of the press pool who’s phoning in a story about a Black woman giving birth in a police vehicle:
Boy, that left a sour taste. The Shepcat Chronicles does a good job of breaking down this ‘aside’ and how the punchline could have been achieved without the vile racism.
The 29th of April, SCOTUS published its Callais decision (see Joyce Vance’s analysis here). I went to bed feeling despair: a longed-for aim of white supremacists has now been realized. Swept under the tattered rug of the SCOTUS proclaiming that racial impact isn’t enough to show racism, are the realities of those who died for the right to vote. Many who fought for that right are still here, and telling what they and their comrades endured:
The culmination of their efforts was achieved by passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but Black Americans began working strategically for civic equality as early as the 19th century. Using Ida B. Wells’ 1885 litigation to secure equal access to train transport as a starting point, it took 70 years of arduous litigation, political advocacy, boycotts and other nonviolent protest actions to secure passage of the VRA.
What happened next? It worked and the power to elect representatives who supported rights for Black people and other marginalized groups (like women) led to a range of improved protections. But greater equality was intolerable to too many white people. We as a bloc have not voted as a majority for a Democratic candidate for president since the Act’s passage.
So, 60 years later, Jim Crow 2.0 has finally achieved its aim of decimating a key protection for Black voters. But the harm won’t stop there. As Heather Cox Richardson points out, Callais is a decision that ‘imposes on the United States minority rule.’ That’s not good for democracy. Any white people thinking this decision won’t affect them are in for a rude awakening if the midterms don’t succeed in sweeping out GOP control of Congress.
Circling back to #HisGirlFriday, here’s the parallel for me: our public discourse celebrates the film’s artistic achievement: it’s listed in the United States National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” Yet in our collective fondness for this screwball comedy ‘classic,’ tthere is almost no mention of its racist premises. That omission lays bare our ability as white people to embrace what appeals while ignoring what we frame as relevant only to ‘them’ (ie, Black people or other groups we view as an insignificant irrelevance).
This is a ‘superpower’ that eats away at our society, putting all of us at risk. If the GOP’s cancerous authoritarianism is left untreated, our focus on what appeals to us will be the death of our democracy.