The Birth of the White Nation Narrative

 

Trump’s white supremicist politics were on display yesterday with his showing of a video about “white genocide” in South Africa to the president of South Africa. 
It made me think about the last time the U.S. had a directly white supremacist president: Woodrow Wilson. Who, legend has it, showed Griffith’s The Birth of  a Nation in the White House.  There is more to the Wilson role than that, however. The frame jumps into the picture in this picture. As Paul McEwan reminds us in his book, Cinema’s Original sin, birth of a nation’s notorious second half begins with the presidential seal:
“Opening titles quote Woodrow Wilson’s claim that Reconstruction was an attempt to “put the white south under the heal of the black south” and that the Ku Klux Klan stood up to “protect the southern country.”

The myth of white victimhood is a standby of white supremacist culture – for even white supremicist’s have to have a sentimentalist narrative to make their case.

I read a lot of what I consider to be garbage about how the racist and reactionary moment we are living through is on account of “social media” It is interesting that this discourse – which is a sort of liberal-centrist lamentation – has no concept of the history of media and racism. The Birth of the Nation was not just a racist film; it was also a film that revived the Klan. By the time the film was made, the Klan was dead. But not for long:
“It is easily conceivable that Griffith did not foresee, in 1914 and 1915, that his film would be used to revitalize the long-dead KKK. It is impossible that he did not see the connection by the late 1920s, especially when his own production company and his staff were seeking to work with the organization. He would have known as well that the revitalized Klan, at its peak in the 1920s, was broader in its hatreds than it had been during Reconstruction, and that it had widened its range of targets to include Jews, Catholics, and all immigrants.⁶ In the nativist 1920s, when Ellis Island was closed and the United States was gripped by anti-immigrant hysteria, the Klan would not have been perceived as outside the realm of polite opinion.”
 
Outside the realm of polite opinion. Polite opinion allows so many things – at the moment, polite opinion is busy leaping up and down on the corpse of DEI, which restrained our free speech and insulted our great forefathers! Not, the centrist will say, that there hasn’t been a teenie bit of racism in America, but – we have gone “too far” in the other direction.
McEwan makes an interesting dialectical case of the film. It was, on the one hand, a film that almost surely has blood on its celluloid hands – although no ethnic cleansing riot was directly caused by the film, it was a very stagy part of the atmosphere that lead to the post- World War I massacres of black people in various “riots”, such as Tulsa’s. On the other hand, the film served as “art”, a case that the film industry needed as the result of court decisions that film was not art, but industry, and could be regulated as such.
The film, as McEwan points out, has been in continuous play one way or another for a hundred some years. As part of the canon, it is shown in classrooms. With interesting results:
“This often-unquestioning praise of Griffith had a particularly devastating impact on African American students who found themselves in barely integrated college classrooms in the 1970s. Not only was a film full of horrific stereotypes being hailed as a masterpiece, but there was little place for discussion of its message, and students often found themselves at odds with their professors if they challenged the film. The most famous of these cases was that of Spike Lee, who was shown the film at NYU’s film school in the 1970s. Lee’s first student film, The Answer, was a response to The Birth of a Nation, and it nearly led to him being kicked out of the school at the end of the year. In Lee’s telling, the masterpiece mentality was so ingrained at this point that a rejection of The Birth of a Nation felt like a rejection of the larger film school project of learning by studying the greats. Director Larry Clark also recounts an incident at UCLA in the same period where students interrupted a professor who was lecturing on The Birth of a Nation and physically removed him from the classroom before going back and teaching the class themselves.”
It is an oddness of the historical dialectic that Spike Lee’s answer to the film – an answer that requires that the film be part of the dialogue – culminated in Bamboozled, a film that came out to a critical thumping when it was first shown in 2000. I just saw Bamboozled a couple of weeks ago and I could not believe how good it was: Spike Lee reinventing the comedy of race in the new century, by hauling out in all their gaudy insanity the tragedy of race from the 20^th century.
And now here we go, on speed dial, with the most openly racist president since the heady days of the KKK revival. What an American life we are all leading and bleeding from as we wander clueless through these years!