ORIGINAL: warspite1
ORIGINAL: MakeeLearn
I see nor think anything disparaging about that pic. It's my heritage, my family.
For those that do not know, in this scene, Mammy has just told Scarlett a TRUTH that Scarlett did not want to hear. And Mammy is "UH-HA I told you!"
If the moderator wants to remove it.... he will.
warspite1
Why would anyone object to a picture of the wonderful Mammy?
We're all grown ups we all know (or should know) our histories. It is what it is. Different, less enlightened times sadly. But learning about, and remembering, the bad is how we (hopefully) learn from our mistakes. We shouldn't brush things under the carpet as though we're all a bunch of millenials who can't handle real life.
The saddest thing in the 21st century is that the picture should even warrant further comment.
A small divergence from Covid focus. This is long but I felt it had to be.
A reaction to this image and its origin probably depends a lot on your background and relationship to the history being depicted. Although for many reasons someone from any background could take issue with it's use out of context and without explicit explanation.
I am related through my father's mother's side of the family to the first enslaved black man in colonial America, John Punch. He is also an ancestor to Barak Obama.
The story of John Punch occupies an important place in the history of slavery in North America. When the English imported Punch to the Virginia colony in the mid-seventeenth century, he became an indentured servant. The primary source of labor in the Virginia colony for the better part of the seventeenth century was servitude. The colony imported workers from Europe to work in tobacco fields. They had little interest in utilizing African slaves. African imports were comparatively expensive next to the cheap imports they could scoop off the streets or out of the jails of London. At the time John Punch arrived in the English colony, he was one of a relatively small population of Africans.
But something happened to John Punch in 1640 that signaled a transition in the way colonial officials thought about race and slavery. In 1640, Punch ran away from his Virginia employer with two white servants, one a Scot and the other a Dutchman. They escaped to Maryland where they were apprehended and returned home for punishment. All three runaways were whipped. The two white servants were punished with extended terms of service, but Punch received a far harsher sentence: he was made a servant “for the term of his natural life.” It was the closest thing to a slave the colony had yet known. Virginians would not fully embrace a system of slave labor for at least another four decades, but the willingness of colonial officials to distinguish a lifetime of servitude for Punch and not for his European counterparts suggests the beginnings of racial thinking that would ultimately equate slavery with people of African descent.
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/147577
I do not identify as an African-American, but I do have known African descent through John Punch. I spent some time in the South studying the history of slavery, oral history from the records of UNC Chapel Hill, as well as a specific focus on desegregation. I then worked for four years at a majority African American college in Raleigh, NC, St Augustine's College, which was begun in 1867 as an institution to teach teachers for the African American community after the Civil War.
This is from an Atlantic article going through the entire sequence from publication of the book to releasing the film four years later. There is a lot more there. This is one of the relevant quotes about the character Mammy, played by Hattie McDaniel.
Hattie McDaniel's Mammy was especially loathsome in her love for a family, the O'Haras, "that has helped to keep her people enchained for centuries." The reviewer for the Chicago Defender called GWTW a "weapon of terror against black America."
Black activists responded with actions as well as words. As Gone With the Wind opened in American cities throughout the early 1940s, organized blacks made signs and walked picket lines in front of box offices. "YOU'D BE SWEET TOO UNDER A WHIP!" read one placard outside a Washington theater. "Gone With the Wind glorifies slavery" and "Negroes were never docile slaves," demonstrators shouted in Chicago.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... cs/377919/
Here is quote from an Esquire article that does well to highlight the racism inherent in the film.
This is the underlying reality of the racism in Gone with the Wind: its abstractness. The War is an external force outside of the personal dramas of the players. Slavery, hatred, prejudice — all may well exist but not in any personal way. The crimes of Gone with the Wind all spring from that original sin: the failure to recognize that there's a problem at all. That willful blindness remains the primary source of the stereotypes that still afflict the representation of race on American screens. Unfortunately, Gone with the Wind isn't gone at all. It's still very much with us.
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/m ... nd-racism/
"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." - Winston Churchill
