The black man suffering at the hands of whites, the white woman sexually
threatened by the black man. Both images have long been burned into the
American conscience through popular entertainment, and today they exert
a powerful and disturbing influence on Americans' understanding of race.
So argues Linda Williams in this boldly inquisitive book, where she
probes the bitterly divisive racial sentiments aroused by such recent
events as O. J. Simpson's criminal trial. Williams, the author of Hard
Core, explores how these images took root, beginning with melodramatic
theater, where suffering characters acquire virtue through
victimization.
The racial sympathies and hostilities that surfaced during the trial of
the police in the beating of Rodney King and in the O. J. Simpson murder
trial are grounded in the melodramatic forms of Uncle Tom's Cabin and
The Birth of a Nation. Williams finds that Stowe's beaten black man
and Griffith's endangered white woman appear repeatedly throughout
popular entertainment, promoting interracial understanding at one
moment, interracial hate at another. The black and white racial
melodrama has galvanized emotions and fueled the importance of new media
forms, such as serious, "integrated" musicals of stage and film,
including The Jazz Singer and Show Boat. It also helped create a
major event out of the movie Gone With the Wind, while enabling
television to assume new moral purpose with the broadcast of Roots.
Williams demonstrates how such developments converged to make the
televised race trial a form of national entertainment.
When prosecutor Christopher Darden accused Simpson's defense team of
"playing the race card," which ultimately trumped his own team's gender
card, he feared that the jury's sympathy for a targeted black man would
be at the expense of the abused white wife. The jury's verdict, Williams
concludes, was determined not so much by facts as by the cultural forces
of racial melodrama long in the making. Revealing melodrama to be a key
element in American culture, Williams argues that the race images it has
promoted are deeply ingrained in our minds and that there can be no
honest discussion about race until Americans recognize this predicament.
