Belle: The Real Story

Posted on May 8, 2014 at 8:00 am

“Belle,” expanding to theaters across the country tomorrow, is based on the real-life 18th century story of Dido Elizabeth Belle, the illegitimate daughter of a titled British Naval officer (played in the film by Matthew Goode of “A Good Wife”) and a slave from the West Indies. Her father brings her to live with his uncle, the British equivalent of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. In the film, directed by a British woman of African heritage, Amma Asante, the themes of gender, money, class, and race are explored with sensitivity and insight reflecting some of what we have learned in the nearly 400 years since Belle appeared in a famous portrait with her cousin.

There was a real Belle, and as in the film she was known to her family as Dido, born around 1761. She lived with her great-uncle, the Earl of Mansfield. He and his wife and unmarried sister raised her with her cousin, Lady Elizabeth Murray. The girls were around the same age, as shown in the portrait, and raised as sisters. Dido was, as shown in the movie, loved by her family but was subjected to restrictions based not just on her race but on her illegitimacy. A contemporary report from a visitor to the home suggested that she was more of a companion to her cousin than an equal. She had some responsibilities over housekeeping, but so did her unmarried aunt. A fascinating historical account noted that she served as a kind of secretary to her great-uncle, which suggests that she had a level of respect for her intellectual ability that was unusual for people of her race and gender at the time.

The move toward abolition of slavery in Great Britain is as gripping and complex a story as the movement in the United States. There were two big differences. First, since slavery was offshore and unseen by most citizens, it was more difficult to make its fundamental immorality clear to the population. Once it was made clear, it led to the first ever populist political movement. This story is very well told in the film “Amazing Grace.” Second, the abolition of slavery was accomplished in 1833, decades earlier than in the United States, and without armed conflict.

One reason for that was a crucial decision made by the courts in England in 1772, a decision by none other than Belle’s great-uncle, Lord Mansfield. While the facts of that case are very different from those described in the film, the decision was the first acknowledgement by the court of the inherent offensiveness of slavery and was an important precedent for framing the arguments over slavery that followed. We will never know whether Belle influenced her great-uncle explicitly or by the example of her intelligence and character, as the movie has it. But it is fair to wonder whether he would have ruled differently had he not had the unquestioned affection for Belle that has been documented.

For more about Belle, read this scholarly article by Henry Louis Gates and Belle: The Slave Daughter and the Lord Chief Justice.

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Race and Diversity The Real Story

White Actors Cast In “The Gods of Egypt”

Posted on April 6, 2014 at 10:10 pm

I’m in favor of race-blind casting except when race is a part of the story. And that seems to be the case in a $450 million epic film called “The Gods of Egypt” that takes place in Egypt. But instead of casting people of Middle Eastern ethnicity, the parts of the gods Set (Gerard Butler) , Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldeu), and Ra (Geoffrey Rush) plus Brenton Thwaites as a “common thief” are played by European white actors. As Rebecca Cusey wrote about the casting in “Noah,” it would be nice to see the actors reflect the breadth and diversity of humanity.

Scott Jordan Harris wrote about a related issue on rogerebert.com, casting non-disabled actors to play disabled characters.

Consider “Glee”, a TV show unmistakably self-satisfied with its inclusiveness. Its makers would never have considered having Rachel, the female lead, played by a man in drag. They would not have considered having Mercedes, the most prominent black character, played by a white actress in blackface. But when they cast Artie, the main disabled character, they chose an able-bodied actor and had him sit in a wheelchair and ape the appearance of a disabled person….the most important reason for casting disabled actors as disabled characters does not concern how films will be viewed in the future. It concerns how they are made now. Every time an able-bodied actor plays a disabled character it makes it harder for disabled actors to work. Indeed, if we are okay with disabled roles being played by able-bodied actors, we are okay with disabled actors being prevented from acting at all. Able-bodied actors can play able-bodied roles. Disabled actors cannot. If disabled actors cannot play disabled roles, they cannot play any roles at all—and they are excluded from film altogether.

Anita: Speaking Truth to Power

Posted on April 3, 2014 at 5:31 pm

It was a galvanizing moment. A divisive moment. An iconic moment.

President George H.W. Bush had just nominated Clarence Thomas to be the second black man and the first black Republican Supreme Court justice. The Senate Judiciary Committee was conducting a confirmation hearing. It was spirited and at times partisan, but nothing out of the ordinary.

And then a law professor from Oklahoma named Anita Hill appeared before the committee to testify that when she worked for Thomas he frequently made crude, offensive, and humiliating comments to her. While she had never filed a formal complaint and had indeed accepted a second job working for him, she said that she had to answer the committee’s investigators truthfully to allow them to make an informed decision about a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.

This was in 1991. Most Americans were not familiar with the rules on sexual harassment. The all-white, all-male, all-old members of the committee clearly had no clue on how to evaluate Hill’s testimony, or even how to treat her. This documentary, more than twenty years later, looks at what happened and what has and has not changed.

It begins with a 2010 phone message from Thomas’ wife, Ginni, left on Hill’s voicemail, asking her to apologize, and ending with a chirpy “Okay?” Hill is not apologizing. As she appeared 23 years ago, she is still utterly dignified and unruffled, though understandably less formal and more relaxed.

Hill is the youngest of 13 siblings, born on a farm in Oklahoma. Her parents moved there to escape a lynching. Her older siblings attended segregated schools and six of her seven brothers went into the military. Her parents told her she would have to be twice as good to get half as much as her white classmates. She was willing to be twice as good. She was class valedictorian.

The film takes us through the hearing, with the Senators’outrageous questions (“Are you a scorned woman? Are you a martyr?” asked Howell Heflin) and insulting comments (Alan K. Simpson refers to “sexual harassment crap”). She took and passed a polygraph test. Witnesses recalled her telling them about Thomas’ behavior at the time, but no corroborating witnesses with similar stores were permitted. Issues of race and gender are forthrightly explored. Law professor Charles Ogletree, who represented Hill, talks about how no other black man stood up for her. “You don’t do that to a brother,” he quotes. Implied in his decision: “You don’t do that to a sister.” Hill says, “People had a tendency to think that he had a race and I had a gender.”

“There was no way we were going to win,” Ogletree says. “It was a charade.” And yet, with much still left to do, this movie shows how much has been accomplished. Hill did not want to be a public figure and hoped to go back to her work on commercial law. She promised herself to talk about it for just two years. But “If I am not public, there will be a sense of victory over me.” She understood that sexual harassment was not about flirting or seduction but about power and control and humiliation. And it was just one part of the larger issue of gender inequality. The film shows us her work, especially with young women, to teach them what is “okay and not okay.”

It will itself serve as a teaching document to carry the story forward, not just the story of a woman objecting to demeaning treatment from her employer, but the story of a woman who told the truth with “honesty, dignity, and courage.”

Parents should know that this film includes very explicit sexual terms and references including pornography.

Family discussion: What has changed most since 1991? What has changed least? What is the best way to educate young men and women about sexual harassment?

If you like this, try: “Not For Ourselves Alone”

All Children Need Books About All Children

Posted on March 20, 2014 at 8:00 am

Author Walter Dean Myers, former Library of Congress National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, wrote about a troubling issue in the New York Times: the lack of diversity in books for children. “Of 3,200 children’s books published in 2013, just 93 were about black people, according to a study by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin.”

Myers speaks very personally, about the impact on him as a child who loved books but sought in vain to find some semblance of the world he knew in them.

I needed more than the characters in the Bible to identify with, or even the characters in Arthur Miller’s plays or my beloved Balzac. As I discovered who I was, a black teenager in a white-dominated world, I saw that these characters, these lives, were not mine. I didn’t want to become the “black” representative, or some shining example of diversity. What I wanted, needed really, was to become an integral and valued part of the mosaic that I saw around me.

Books did not become my enemies. They were more like friends with whom I no longer felt comfortable. I stopped reading. I stopped going to school. On my 17th birthday, I joined the Army. In retrospect I see that I had lost the potential person I would become — an odd idea that I could not have articulated at the time, but that seems so clear today.

And he makes it clear that it is just as important for children to read about characters of other races as it is to read about their own.

Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books? Where are the future white personnel managers going to get their ideas of people of color? Where are the future white loan officers and future white politicians going to get their knowledge of people of color? Where are black children going to get a sense of who they are and what they can be?

The same day Myers’ essay appeared, the Guardian announced a new policy for reviewing books intended for children. If the book is marketed only to one gender, they will not review it. Literary editor Kay Guest wrote:

I promise now that the newspaper and this website will not be reviewing any book which is explicitly aimed at just girls, or just boys. Nor will The Independent’s books section. And nor will the children’s books blog at Independent.co.uk. Any Girls’ Book of Boring Princesses that crosses my desk will go straight into the recycling pile along with every Great Big Book of Snot for Boys. If you are a publisher with enough faith in your new book that you think it will appeal to all children, we’ll be very happy to hear from you. But the next Harry Potter or Katniss Everdeen will not come in glittery pink covers. So we’d thank you not to send us such books at all.

As Myers said, books give us an idea of who we are and what we can be. They also teach us empathy for others. They can do this best when they reflect the world as it is, made up of people with many differences and many connections.

Trailer: Get On Up — The James Brown Story

Posted on March 14, 2014 at 4:15 pm

Chadwick Boseman (“42”) looks electrifying as James Brown in this biopic directed by “The Help’s” Tate Taylor, produced by Ron Howard, and co-starring Viola Davis, Jill Scott, and Octavia Spencer. It will be in theaters this summer.