Is This Racist? Objective Facts v. Explosive Feelings in Allegations of Racism

Is This Racist?

Objective Facts v. Explosive Feelings in Allegations of Racism

BLM activists and their supporters allege that America is "systemically racist" and must undergo a cleansing purge in order that a new Utopia may be established. This Utopia will not eliminate white people's racism; their racism is "timeless and immutable." Whiteness studies, according to columnist Barbara Kay, teaches that to be white is to be "branded, literally in the flesh, with evidence of a kind of original sin … you can't eradicate it. The goal ... is to entrench permanent race consciousness in everyone – eternal victimhood for non-whites, eternal guilt for whites." The taxpayer-funded Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture offers explanatory material, and a Smithsonian poster on whiteness provides a handy summary. Bestselling race guru Robin Diangelo says that no white person should ever be allowed to say "I'm not racist." Unlike previous leftist Utopias, this post-BLM Utopia will not create a "new man," in the way that communists attempt to create a "New Socialist Man." Indeed, evidence suggests that at this very moment Communist China is brainwashing Uighurs to turn them into "New Socialist Men." Rather, the BLM Utopia will not cleanse white people, it will merely permanently blame, shame and cow them.

A bulldozer is ploughing through American history and culture and unearthing more and more "evidence" that America is "systemically racist" and must be cleansed and purged. Are objective facts being marshalled to support these charges and this purge? Or are emotions, or even mass hysteria, ruling the day? Is it the case that all non-whites agree with these charges of racism, and is it only whites, psychologically handicapped by "white privilege" and "white fragility" who disagree? Is American history being told accurately, or is it being distorted to serve a master narrative of systemic racism under every rock, behind every door, and in every white man's heart? Below I will consider three different sets of allegations of racism, and conclude with a discussion of a classroom exercise that both educated and disturbed me.

Nikole Hannah-Jones is the recipient of both a MacArthur "Genius" award and a Pulitzer Prize. America's current purge has received significant inspiration from her 1619 Project at the New York Times. Charles Kesler in the New York Post called recent riots the "1619 riots" In reply, Nikole Hannah-Jones tweeted, "It would be an honor. Thank you." Hannah-Jones took credit for riots that burned cities, looted businesses, and resulted in numerous deaths, including of African Americans. The 1619 Project argues that America is founded on white supremacy and slavery. In 1995, Hannah-Jones wrote that, "the white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world." Hannah-Jones' mother, Cheryl Novotny, is of Czech and English descent, that is, Novotny is very white, as are both the owner and the CEO of the Times. "Oprah Winfrey is partnering with Lionsgate to turn The New York Times's 1619 Project into feature films and television programs," The Federalist reported on July 14, 2020. The project has already been folded into school curricula. "As of February 2020, five public school systems had adopted the 1619 Project's curriculum district-wide, and its free teaching materials had reached 3,500 classrooms," writes Prof. Carole M. Swain.

"I helped fact-check the 1619 Project. The Times ignored me," wrote historian Leslie M. Harris. A central claim of the Project, Harris writes, is that "the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America." Harris refuted that claim. In public statements, Hannah-Jones defied her.

Harris is not the only African American scholar publicly to take issue with the 1619 Project. 1776 Unites is an initiative by prominent African American scholars, including Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Jason D. Hill, Carol M Swain and Glenn Loury. These luminaries write that their project will "uphold our country's authentic founding virtues and values and challenge those who assert America is forever defined by its past failures, such as slavery. We seek to … celebrate the progress America has made on delivering its promise of equality and opportunity and highlight the resilience of its people … We do this in the spirit of 1776, the date of America's true founding." These African American scholars have not received a fraction of the attention, awards, or funding that the 1619 Project has.

The rewriting of American history as systemically racist extends to common household items, like cinnamon crumb cakes, previously perceived as harmless. Briones Bedell self-identifies as a "Youth human rights activist. California high school senior," and an "Intersectional Feminist for Human Rights." On July 8, 2020, Bedell tweeted, "The carefully-crafted facade of your friendly neighborhood hipster grocery store belies a darker image; one that romanticizes imperialism, fetishizes native cultures, and casually misappropriates … Trader Joe's branding is racist because it exoticizes other cultures. It presents 'Joe' as the default 'normal' and the other characters falling outside of it." Calling a puttanesca sauce "Trader Giotto's" rather than "Trader Joe's" is an "insidious" "micro-aggression" that will "inevitably escalate" to violent assault, Bedell says.

An example of Bedell's version of a racist atrocity can be found in this image. A beige and white cardboard box includes a picture of cinnamon crumb coffee cake on an ornamental cake-plate. Perhaps since many associate baked goods with Mitteleuropa cities like Vienna and Prague, rather than being "Trader Joe's" cake mix, it is "Baker Josef's," that is, a version of the name "Joseph" found in Central Europe.

Commenters on Facebook, Twitter, and at the Washington Post disagreed with Bedell. Albert Qian tweeted, "I'm Chinese and found the names of the products very endearing … Did you ask people of color how they felt?" Another wrote, "Thank you for speaking over my family and me. We are Italian & Hispanic & loved Trader Joe's products just the way they were." And another, "If Trader Joe brings me all this exotic food then he's the white explorer going out and bringing back the bounty. But if the Asian food comes from Trader Ming, and the Mexican stuff from Trader Jose, that speaks to these things provided by a trader of the place in question." This commenter argues that it is Bedell's approach that is the racist one.

An Asian-American began a counter petition in support of Trader Joe's ethnic food labeling, as did a Mexican. White liberal savior complex has run amuck, these petitions argue, and white liberals should not presume to speak for others. An Asian-American signatory wrote, "Briones Bedell kept deleting my comments on her ridiculous petition along with other voices of POC that she claims to care about. That petition does NOT speak for me as an Asian woman. I am not offended by Trader Joe's playful variations of its name. I would be MORE offended if all the names changed to appease this entitled white fake 'human rights activist.''' A Mexican-American woman wrote, "As a Mexican-American woman, I am in NO WAY offended by the use of José. It simply is a translation of JOE!! The non-POC supporting the other petition & trying to be white saviors & speak FOR US, without truly taking us into consideration. Now even small things honoring our culture, are trying to be erased, because they THINK they are saving us."

Clearly, there is no objective metric to determine that "Baker Josef's" is racist and "Trader Joe's" is not racist. Too, we see two cases, the 1619 Project and the Trader Joe's controversy, where "white saviors" (the Times owner and CEO are white) spoke for people of color, and people of color objected to being patronized. In any case, as with the 1619 Project, it is those leveling the charge of racism who ruled the day. Trader Joe's caved and announced that it would change its packaging. Bedell was not satisfied. She demanded that Trader Joe's immediately purge existing "racist" products from store shelves.

Disagreement about how to interpret the facts of America's history is not limited to labels on packaged food. A weightier example: the mobility of poor Southern whites in the antebellum South. Poor whites, historians say, moved around a lot. They can agree on that fact. The 1619 Project's Matthew Desmond states that the slave system "allowed [white workers] to roam freely and feel a sense of entitlement." Desmond positively spins objective facts. Victoria E. Bynum, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of history at Texas State University, interprets the same fact entirely differently. "The old stereotype repeated by Desmond, that poor white Southerners 'roamed freely,' in fact reflected their need to be mobile and flexible simply to make a living. Sporadic short-term work contributed to an unstable, violent world in which such men literally fought over menial jobs or headed West in an elusive search for prosperity." Bynum sees transience as an element in a hungry, rootless life for poor, Southern whites, who could never underbid slave labor.

Facts v spin, and facts v feelings, played a large role in an exercise I used to do with students. Several years ago, I was teaching a university folklore class. Disney has never marketed home video in the US of its Academy-Award-winning, folklore-based, 1946 film, Song of the South. Disney does market home video of SOTS in the U.K. and Japan. Clearly, Disney's stance has less to do with principles and more to do with expedience. In response to America's recent purge, Disneyland has announced changes to its "Song-of-the-South"-themed "Splash Mountain" amusement park attraction.

Song of the South is a ninety-five minute, color musical. In 1870's Georgia, seven-year-old Johnny's parents are unhappily separating. He is sent to live on his grandmother's plantation. His mother and grandmother exert excessive feminizing influence by, for example, forcing Johnny to wear a lace collar. Fatherless Johnny needs an older male role model in his life. He has heard much of Uncle Remus, an elderly storyteller, and cannot wait to meet him. Uncle Remus mentors the young boy. Poor white trash children, Joe and Jake Favers, menace Johnny. Uncle Remus repeatedly rescues the boy, teaching him, through African-American folklore, how to navigate life's shoals and rapids.

James Baskett, who stars as Uncle Remus, was the first African American male to win an Academy Award. Gregg Toland, the Academy-Award-winning cinematographer of Citizen Kane, did his first color work, and some of his final work ever, on SOTS. The film advanced the combination of live action and animation, a technique that would highlight 1964's multiple Academy-Award-winning Mary Poppins.

Are Song of the South and Splash Mountain yet further proof that America is systemically racist and in need of a purge? What do the facts say? The answer is complex, and will not be obvious to anyone lacking knowledge of folklore. The short answer is that, yes, it's easy to spin SOTS as a racist film, and it is easy to understand those who are offended by it. Look deeper, and the real story is very different. The problem is, when emotions and intimidation suppress facts, history ends up sacrificed to the power narrative, and today that power narrative is "America is systemically racist."

Media studies professor Jason Sperb alleges, in his book's title, that Song of the South is Disney's Most Notorious Film and "one of Hollywood's most resiliently offensive racist texts." A sample of Sperb's prose: "Reaganism brought into relief a particularly potent form of whiteness that invariably shapes most defenses of Song of the South. 'Whiteness' does not mean the same as 'white people.' Rather, it evokes a hegemonic cultural logic that consciously and unconsciously reinforces white attitudes, beliefs, positions as the dominant, unquestioned way of life … every American negotiates the norms of whiteness – equally capable of either uncritically reproducing or self-reflexively questioning them … As with Reaganism, race was there by not being there, and the history of racial conflict and tension was there by not being there." The film's critics are "on the losing end of a battle with the invisible ubiquity of whiteness."

Book reviewer John Lingan makes a fascinating observation about Sperb's criticism of Song of the South. "Sperb spends relatively little time with the movie itself." Note: a scholar spends little time discussing the actual facts of the film he condemns as racist. Rather, he relies on academically trendy concepts of "whiteness" to buttress his position.

Not just white academics like Sperb, but also Many African Americans condemn the film. When the film first came out, a reviewer at The Afro-American wrote that he was "thoroughly disgusted … as vicious a piece of propaganda for white supremacy as Hollywood ever produced." African Americans picketed. Activist and politician Tyrone Brooks said that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference used SOTS "as an example of the indoctrination of white hatred of black people." Alice Walker accused Joel Chandler Harris, author of the material on which SOTS is based, of "stealing a good part of my heritage."

Sperb makes an almost self-parodying statement. Song of the South's "offensiveness was hard for some to see." Those who do not see the film's offensiveness include African Americans. Herman Hill, born in 1906, was the first black player on USC's basketball team. As editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, he "utilized his pen and typewriter to promote equality" for his fellow African Americans. After SOTS premiered, Hill wrote that "the truly sympathetic handling of the entire production from a racial standpoint [will] prove of inestimable goodwill in the furthering of interracial relations." He dismissed criticism as "unadulterated hogwash symptomatic of the unfortunate racial neurosis that seems to be gripping so many of our humorless brethren these days."

"As a person of color, I am proud of this film … Song of the South is not racist. It is a tribute to our proud African-American heritage … Uncle Remus is clearly admired in this movie more than any other character," wrote an Amazon reviewer in 2003. In 2007, a New York Times reporter encountered another black booster of Joel Chandler Harris at the Wren's Nest, his historic home in Atlanta. "Nannie Thompson, the housekeeper on Mondays and a docent otherwise, led a tour … Ms. Thompson, who is black and 76 years old, grew up hearing the Br'er Rabbit tales, and she speaks lovingly of Harris."

Floyd E. Norman, born in 1935, is a former Disney animator and member of the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame. Norman writes that, as a youth, he read critical comments about SOTS in Ebony shortly after the film came out in 1946. " I regretted not having the writing chops to respond. Even though I was just a kid, I took issue with the editors for their unfair characterization of the film and Walt Disney in particular. I had recently seen Song of the South at our local theater and found the movie delightful. Had they even seen the same film, I wondered?" After Norman became a Disney illustrator, and gained access to the vault, he arranged for a SOTS screening at a church. "The African American audience absolutely loved the movie and even requested a second screening of the Disney classic."

Norman says that Disney was no racist, with no intention of making a racist film. In fact, as historians note, Disney did extensive groundwork pre-production. He brought in Maurice Rapf as an anti-racism script doctor. Disney invited NAACP head Walter White to consult. The script was sent to Dr. Alain Locke, the first African American Rhodes scholar. Disney further solicited comments from Academy-Award winning actress Hattie McDaniel.

Joel Chandler Harris, a Southern white man, collected and published the Uncle Remus tales. Whiteness studies inform us that all whites uniformly enjoy white privilege and all whites are racist. Harris must have had a racist agenda, and anything connected with his work must be tainted. That's what whiteness studies say. The facts say something very different.

Joel Chandler Harris was the illegitimate son of an Irish laborer who abandoned him and his seamstress mother before Harris was born. He grew up in a one-room shack, a shack donated by wealthier neighbors. He was a charity case, an undersized child, teased by others. He would retaliate with cruel practical jokes. At one point, he wrote in his school notebook, "Which is most respectable? Poor folks or n------?" He suffered, lifelong, from crippling and isolating social anxiety and a stutter. He described his life as "without sympathy … bleak and desolate as winter." He went to work at age 14 as a printer's devil and spent his free time imbibing literature, printed and oral. He sought out slaves, and, later, freed black men, learning their dialect and their stories. He died at 59, probably of alcoholism.

Mark Twain offers a poignant description. "He was … undersized, red-haired, and somewhat freckled … He was said to be very shy. He is a shy man. Of this there is no doubt. It may not show on the surface, but the shyness is there. After days of intimacy one wonders to see that it is still in about as strong force as ever. There is a fine and beautiful nature hidden behind it, as all know who have read the Uncle Remus book; and a fine genius, too, as all know by the same sign … in the matter of writing [African American dialect] he is the only master the country has produced."

Dialect scholar Sumner Ives writes, "the more one examines the speech of Harris' folk characters, the more one admires the skill with which he worked … a shy man himself, he must have listened keenly and sympathetically, for he caught the various patterns of folk speech in great detail … he handled the dialogue of his folk characters with skillful discrimination."

Historian Wayne Mixon writes that Harris' childhood poverty and fatherlessness "did much to engender his sympathetic understanding of the plight of blacks" Mixon concedes that Harris had to write some half-hearted "Lost Cause" material to keep his newspaper job, but the more his success with the Uncle Remus materials freed Harris to speak his own mind, the more critical Harris became of the Confederacy and white supremacy, and the more openly Harris supported racial equality. Mixon places Harris in historical context. White supremacy became most virulent around 1890, Mixon writes, when "someone was lynched, on average, every other day." Mixon emphasizes the courage it took for a pathologically shy, low-born white man to, in print, as Harris did, criticize Jefferson Davis, laud Abraham Lincoln, and work for equality. Mixon concludes that "a major part of Harris' purpose as a writer was to undermine racism." In 1908, Harris spelled out the goal of his own, new publication: to "dissipate all ill feelings and prejudices that now exist between the races … the obliteration of prejudice against blacks, the demand for a square deal, and the uplifting of both races so that they can look justice in the face without blushing." This is a remarkably courageous stand to take in 1908. What is variously called "Social Darwinism," "Eugenics," and "Scientific Racism" were sweeping the land, with charismatic and influential champions like Margaret Sanger, founder of what would become Planned Parenthood, and Carl Brigham, creator of the SAT. Indeed, in 1906, the Times published support for keeping an African, Ota Benga, in a display at the Bronx Zoo.

Harris, through his own, intimate, face-to-face contact with black slaves before the war and freedmen afterward, gathered the largest collection of African American folktales published in the nineteenth century. Scholars have determined that two thirds of the tales are rooted in African folklore. The remainder have European and Native American roots. Harris displayed a folklorist's obsession with accuracy. He was determined to convey to the reader the dialect he learned from the slaves he spent time with as a child.

Before I showed YouTube clips from SOTS to my students, I told them none of this. I merely said, "I'm going to show you a video. I want you to do three things. First, I want you to report what you saw. Provide objective facts. Tell me colors, materials, number of people, what they are wearing, their facial expressions, what they say – as many details as you can get down. After that, I want you to report how you felt while you were watching this video. Then, I want to you tell me what role this film should or should not play in our modern culture."

This assignment was informed by previous experience. My students displayed a, to me, frightening inability to differentiate fact from opinion. My students were like opened water taps when they thought the assignment was to express opinions, to pontificate, to denounce America, or to declare something "racist." "Racist" was used profligately. When we discussed a Supreme Court case, some students labeled Jack Phillips, the Christian baker who declined a commission to design a wedding cake for a same-sex wedding, "racist." To these students, "racist" was synonymous with "bad," and "bad" was synonymous with "conservative."

When I asked students for facts, though, the water tap suddenly hit a drought. I would suggest potential facts: Give me a date, a year, a name, a school of thought, an event. Who, what, when, where, why, how. Before my students expressed an opinion about Song of the South, I wanted to know that they could provide facts about the film they just watched.

The clips I showed included James Baskett playing Uncle Remus singing Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, Br'er Rabbit escaping a tar trap, and a scene where Uncle Remus comforts a distraught white child.

Semester after semester, a pattern repeated itself. Most students carried out the assignment. They offered fact-based descriptions of the scenes. "An old black man tells a story to a little white boy. The white boy looks on, fascinated." They said that this was a typical Disney movie and, while they had outgrown it, they could see their kid brother or kid sister liking it.

Again, semester after semester, about ten percent of the students more or less ignored the assignment, and wrote angry screeds. They provided no facts whatsoever. They denounced the film as racist and offensive. Some had heard of it, and said it should remain "banned."

Only after the written portion of the assignment was finished did classroom discussion begin. It was during this discussion that the ten percent of the students who hated the film were vocal and emphatic. The majority of the students who had carried out the assignment as given, that is, to describe concrete details of the scenes, would look on, confused and silent. They were suddenly unsure. Were they also supposed to be outraged? Would they lose points for their failure to do so? Their eyes scanned the room. They stared at their papers, already collected and on my desk – beyond their ability to retrieve and edit. Would I lambaste them for not hating the movie? Would they fail a class, yet again, for expressing the wrong opinion, or failing to express the opinion deemed correct? Students would later tell me that they were afraid that I was about to do what other teachers had done – instruct them in why their opinion was wrong, and mold their response to one more palatable to me.

I would ask the outraged students, what concrete details from the film convince you that it is racist? My request for concrete facts seemed to anger them more. "I'm offended by this. I want you to respect my feelings." Some students, both black and white, would say, "You don't know what it's like to be black. You can't speak for black people."

This exercise's predictable outcome always troubled me. Racism is a serious, career-ending, riot-sparking charge. As well it should be – racism is toxic and deadly. It troubled me that ten percent of my students, with complete, unassailable conviction and outrage, would rush to this charge without being able to marshal a single concrete fact to support it. It also troubled me that the outraged students silenced and cowed the majority of the students who saw the film as innocuous. I cannot help but fear that this classroom exercise is reflected in the wider culture, for example in the recent assault on Trader Joe's.

Again, it's easy to see why many find SOTS offensive. Accusations against it focus on the following: it depicts African Americans as being too friendly with whites, and too happy. SOTS does not depict harsh realities like lynching and Jim Crow.

To that last point, one must contrast the double standard by which SOTS is judged with treatment of Disney's 1964 film, Mary Poppins. Mary's friend Bert is an impoverished day laborer, yet he is treated warmly and respectfully by his class superiors. This is unrealistic. One of Bert's jobs is as a chimney sweep. Chimney sweeps were often children, literally sold into the trade, who risked hideous death by suffocation. Chimney sweeps typically suffered from stunted growth and spinal deformities, and they succumbed to cancer of the scrotum, also known as chimney sweep cancer. They were subject to blindness. Surgeon Percivall Pott described their fate, "They are treated with great brutality…they are thrust up narrow and sometimes hot chimnies, where they are bruised burned and almost suffocated; and when they get to puberty they become…liable to a most noisome, painful and fatal disease." William Blake famously bemoaned the horrible lives of chimney sweeps in poetry.

In Mary Poppins, of course, chimney sweeps are depicted, in the "Step in Time" number, as dancing joyfully to entertain upper class children. There is no significant movement to ban Mary Poppins. The suffering glossed over in Mary Poppins is the suffering of poor whites.

SOTS's critics adopt this same double standard regarding the film's antagonists, Joe and Jake Faver. Joe and Jake are stereotypical, poor, Southern, white trash. They are so vile that they threaten to drown a puppy. Jake is analogous to Br'er Fox, and Joe is analogous to Br'er Bear. That is, they are like the bad guys in Uncle Remus' stories. Br'er Rabbit always defeats his folkloric enemies, and Uncle Remus defeats Joe and Jake, and teaches Johnny folkloric methods of combat. Johnny is small, and he must use Br'er Rabbit's tricks to survive Joe and Jake.

Joe and Jake, with the white trash antagonists of Gone with the Wind, Deliverance, Prince of Tides, and countless other films, are an ethnic, cinematic, stereotype. Horror-movie scholar Carol J. Clover writes that the "redneck has achieved the status of a kind of universal blame figure, the someone else held responsible for all manner of American social ills … anxieties no longer expressible in ethnic or racial terms have become projected onto a safe target" – safe, she says, because white. At the movies, poor, white Southerners are bad. That bit of stereotyping in SOTS gets a free pass.

Another accusation against SOTS: Blacks speak in dialect. Upon reflection, we realize it is not just dialect that troubles the film's detractors.

On Juneteenth, 2020, Rutgers University's English Department announced that it would no longer emphasize writing in standard English. Black students would not be encouraged to master standard English, because such encouragement was racist and imperialist. Rap songs and tweets by Charlamagne tha God are not written in standard English. "I bust Stupid Dope Moves," he tweets. The problem is not that Uncle Remus does not speak standard English. The problem is that he speaks, accurately, like a poor, Southern, former black slave. Rather than appreciating this speech, some are ashamed of it, and want it silenced.

SOTS is a racist film, the online magazine Slate insists, and it should be banned, because its "smilin', Massah-servin' black folk are embarrassingly racist … still completely subservient, and happily so … James Baskett plays Remus as a preternaturally jolly companion, buoyant and beatific." In other words, SOTS is racist because it shows black people smiling and being nice to white people. I wanted my students to know that if they understood those smiles as a depiction of "happy slaves," they were totally misreading the film, Uncle Remus, Joel Chandler Harris, and a good part of African American strategies for survival.

I showed some pictures to my students. The first was a poster of rapper and former crack dealer Fifty Cent. He is muscular, bare-chested and pointing a gun at the viewer. "For many of you, this is the ideal of black man. Flamboyantly defiant, violent, and threatening. A black man like this would risk lynching in the Old South."

Then I showed them a series of images: Aesop, Petronius from the book and film Quo Vadis, Semar, from Javanese shadow play, The Good Soldier Svejk, from Jaroslav Hasek's novel, and Janosik, a Slovak folk hero. The Janosik image is gruesome. It depicts a naked man, bound hand and foot, hanging by his rib on a meat hook. I explained to my students that, around the world, people live under oppression and deal with it in different ways. Janosik was the Slovak Robin Hood. When he was 25 years old, I was taught in oral stories, our oppressors captured him and hung him up on a hook to die a slow, lingering death. That's what happens to defiant heroes in oppressive settings.

Again, around the world, most people are not active resisters. Rather, they deploy the weapons of the weak, and one of those weapons is to adopt the stance of the "wise fool." This character is smarter than his or her oppressors, and knows enough to adopt a mask of innocence, and to speak the truth through fables, often involving animals. Aesop, an ugly slave, did this over 2,000 years ago. Petronius, a character in Quo Vadis, lives under the heel of Nero, and stays alive by speaking in clever riddles. Semar is, again, an ugly character in Javanese shadow play. He is often the subject of fart and penis jokes. But Semar hides great power and wisdom, so much so that he has been used to tilt at power even in modern politics.

I told my students that when I visited my mother's natal Czechoslovakia, I was astounded at how many images of Svejk I saw. Svejk is a fictional character. He's fat, sloppy, unshaven, and often drunk. Why would people so esteem such a loser? I was in Czechoslovakia when it was under severe Soviet oppression. Our visit felt, at times, like a visit to a real life production of Orwell's 1984. Svejk, fat and sloppy as he is, knew how to resist oppressive power without being crushed by it.

Uncle Remus is immediately understandable to me. He is a very smart man living under terrifying white supremacy. He is good enough to share his wisdom with an effectively fatherless white boy. He is wise enough to share his wisdom behind the curtain of an ingratiating smile, and through the antics of "critters," Br'er Rabbit, Br'er Bear, and Br'er Fox. And there's more. Joel Chandler Harris was himself a wise fool. He was a low-born, socially handicapped loner who wanted to eliminate race prejudice. He knew he couldn't do it head on. He chipped away at racism through clever folktales recounted by a lovable black storyteller. "Vengeance for wrongs, retaliation against power, recompense for betrayals that is what Harris recognized in his deepest reaches … remaining in the shadows, he mastered his literary art," writes historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown.

If that is crystal clear to me, why can't SOTS's detractors see it?

Maybe they do see it and they don't want to. Maybe they want black men to be like Fifty Cent: flamboyantly defiant, violent, hyper-macho. Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson has argued as much – that America wants black men to act out gangsta fantasies. As one Amazon champion of SOTS puts it, people choose to ban SOTS but not violent rap. "Instead of portraying black people as profane, volatile, and thuggish … Song of the South shows the black characters to be gentle, benevolent, and even role models for white children. A poignant moment in the film shows a close-up of Uncle Remus' black hand interlocked with the little white hand of the boy. Remember, this was in 1946, before Brown v. Board of Education … Even if you walked into the theater in 1946 hating black people, you would not walk out feeling hateful … The NAACP would rather kids grow up listening to some gangster rapper glorify crime, violence, and sex with prostitutes than grow up singing Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah with Uncle Remus."

In researching this article, the most poignant sentence I read appeared in an Amazon review. "The black or white man from the South cannot understand himself apart from the other," wrote Pastor C. R. Biggs.

How will future generations understand SOTS, its creators, and, indeed, their very selves? How will a future Prof. Briones Bedell present the film to her students? Systemically racist America produced systemically racist Joel Chandler Harris and Walt Disney and this film are proof of America's systemic racism. The End.

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery

You can also see this essay at Front Page Magazine here 

The Case for "Gone with the Wind" in an Era of Cultural Revolution

The Case for Gone with the Wind in an era of Cultural Revolution

 I'm Going to End Up in a Re-Education Camp for Something – Let It Be For GWTW

I've read Gone with the Wind three times, all 418,053 words, or 1,037 pages of it. I saw the four-hour movie for the first time when I was nine years old. Since then I've seen it in American theaters, in a student dormitory in Poland during the fall of communism, and on home screens. I last watched it with my sister five years ago as she lay in bed dying of a brain tumor.

If I meet someone who is a GWTW fan, I like that person more. Such people are not hard to find. The book won the Pulitzer Prize, and it has sold an estimated thirty million copies. In a 2014 Harris Poll, Americans named GWTW their second favorite book, after the Bible. An Amazon review posted on July 6, 2020, 84 years after it was published, begins, "This novel is beyond belief excellent and after 1000 pages this reader wants more." People are still urgently asking the book's inevitable question. In 2019, Quora readers needed to know, "Does Scarlett get Rhett back?" Wikipedia claims that GWTW "became the highest-earning film made up to that point, and held the record for over a quarter of a century. When adjusted for monetary inflation, it is still the highest-grossing film in history."

Do I confess my love for GWTW because I have a death wish? America is undergoing a cultural revolution. GWTW is in the censor's sites. John Ridley, screenwriter of Twelve Years a Slave, demanded that HBO shelve GWTW. Within days, HBO did just that. The New York Times, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Aljazeera, Queen Latifah, Trevor Noah, The Young Turks, and The View have all debated whether or not people should be allowed to watch GWTW. Bollywood News is one of many overseas publications weighing in. "Narratives have helped ingrain, romanticize and condone discriminatory behaviour," argued Ruchi Narain. Shekhar Kapur countered, "Can we erase Aurangzeb from our history just by changing the name of a road? Can the US change its history of slavery by erasing a film from HBO?" "A work of creative art supersedes issues of morality," concluded Pritish Nandy.

Would that our betters would debate, with equal intensity, whether or not filthy, violent, misogynist, and exploitative rap lyrics should be allowed. But who am I to demand integrity from the exalted personages staffing the Revolutionary Council at the Bureau of Banned Art.

In recent days, Black Lives Matter activists have defaced statues, including one to Miguel de Cervantes, often praised as "the inventor of the modern novel." Cervantes was also the actual slave of a Muslim slaver. BLM activists spray painted the word "Bastard" across Cervantes' statue, and spray painted his eyes red. They also spray painted red gun sites on the backs of Cervantes' fictional creations, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. We live in an era when fictional characters are slated for assassination.

BLM activists have physically assaulted Catholics praying near the statue of St. Louis, and an LA BLM protest involved so much damage to Jewish property that it "became a pogrom." Wouldn't it be so much more noble for me to be sent to the re-education camp for my religious beliefs rather than for my tastes in novels? No. If off to the rice paddies I must go, I will go for GWTW.

GWTW, both book and film, are accused of being racist. Here's the deal: this accusation is 100% accurate. Gone with the Wind is the most racist novel I've ever read. Its racism is not incidental or subtle; rather, it's central, cruel, and unforgiveable. Why, then, am I ready to go to the mat for racist art? The answer, like life itself, is long and complicated. As Louis Adamic once wrote, "Life is like licking honey off of a thorn."

It is in that very complication that the personal – my taste in novels – becomes political. People draw various lines between "us" and "them." For some, conservatives are the good guys; leftists, the bad guys. For others, it's my country v. other countries. Those lines don't work for me. Here is a line that works: I am utterly opposed to those who demand that art be pure. I believe that those who would assassinate fictional characters would happily arrange living enemies before a firing squad. I insist on my right to commit thought crimes.

For those who have not read the book, here is a plot summary. Scarlett O'Hara, the belle of her county, is the daughter of a Georgia plantation owner. She's in love with Ashley Wilkes, the heir apparent of a neighboring plantation. Life is perfect, till the Civil War. Scarlett loses everything. Ashley marries his cousin, Melanie Hamilton. After burying two husbands, Scarlett marries, but does not love, Rhett Butler. In the end, he leaves her.

GWTW, like Genesis, depicts the universal, timeless human experience of exile from Eden. We all grow up, we are all disillusioned of childhood fantasies, and we all come to recognize how harsh the world can be. GWTW contrasts how humans react. Scarlett and Rhett are amoral, Darwinian animals. They claw their way up from ruin and end up rich and powerful, but their souls are scorched earth. Ashley and Melanie are poetry-lovers, too good for tooth-and-claw. They are nice people, but they needed Scarlett to put a roof over their heads and food on their plates.

I saw GWTW for the first time in the Colonial Theater in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey. I was with my mom, my sister, and family friend Mrs. Manning. My mother and her peers survived the Depression and World War II and, being working class immigrants, they had lived through more, including one family lynching of an immigrant relative, the deaths of several children before their parents, overwork in coal mines, Paterson's dye vats, and our own town's factories that coated their sons who worked there with silver dust. Many of those sons would die young of cancer.

My strongest memory of this first viewing of the film was the car ride home. I can feel myself in that claustrophobic space where parental control was most palpably oppressive. In those days, the windows were always rolled up, because the outside world was scary. Every adult was smoking. You did not question your parents, even as you suffocated on their carcinogenic fumes.

From the back seat, I said, "That Scarlett was so mean! She did so many bad things! I hate her."

The two friends up front looked at each other as if they shared some deep truth that must not be spelled out, lest it crush me. Even now, decades later, I can feel the weight of Mrs. Manning's and my mother's nods, so heavy, so ancient. They were both in their early forties, practically as old as the earth itself.

"Wait till you get older," one or both of them said. "You will understand Scarlett, and why she had to do what she did."

I was as horrified at that moment as I was when I first discovered droplets of blood on my older sister's undergarments. Life was rank with scary mysteries I could not reach, any more than I could reach the top shelf. Were these women, who defined my reality, suggesting that they, who attended Catholic mass weekly if not daily, had committed crimes equal to Scarlett's? Flirted with men they didn't love just to get a better price on washing machine repair? Been so hungry that they had to eat a dirty carrot – wait. I already knew that they did that. I could taste the meals of rancid, government-issued "surplus food" we had to eat when my mother's pay as a cleaning woman was not enough to feed all nine of us. I already knew from experience that they could sew clothes from old curtains. My God. My mother was Scarlett O'Hara!!! I shrank back into silence, and waited till the car door opened, and I could escape, and exhale.

I vowed never to be like Scarlett O'Hara. It was a vow I would, of course, break. In time, I would come to kill my own Yankee soldiers, because Mrs. Manning and my mother were right.

I remember three other things about that first viewing of the film. Nowadays, there are allegedly dozens of genders. I am the sole inhabitant of this gender: I was repulsed by glorified lounge lizard Rhett Butler. I loved Ashley Wilkes. Ashley, who loved poetry and honor. Ashley, who fought for the South though he planned to free his slaves. Ashley who, after the war, retreated from reality and surrendered to the opiate-allure of nostalgia. Women love bad boys. Nice guys can't catch a break. The ladies all choose Rhett. Not I.

Scarlett is almost devoid of any fellow-feeling, including for her own children, but it's clear that she adores her selfless and aristocratic mother. Scarlett flees from Sherman's advance on Atlanta and returns to Tara. She runs toward the house, crying, "Mother, I'm home." Vivien Leigh, at 25 years old, is such a virtuosic actress that she can convince the audience that she'd butcher, cook and eat a Union soldier. In this scene, she is equally convincing as a little girl crying out for Mommy.

The soundtrack veers from exultation to dread. A drum thuds out the sound of a heartbeat. Scarlett enters a room and there, eerie and green-skinned, is her mother's corpse. The drumbeat abruptly gives way to Scarlett's scream. I don't think anything I've ever seen on film has ever hit me harder.

My final memory was even more terrifying. During the war, Scarlett, experiencing hunger and terror for the first time in her life, develops a persistent nightmare. She is running through blinding mist, trying desperately to grasp – something. She doesn't know what the mist is, and she doesn't know what she's trying to reach. The mist always swallows her up.

I may have been nine years old, but, on a visceral level, in my atavistic chakra, where all my Slavic ancestors bemoaned their countless invasions and genocides, I grokked that dream completely. The mist was, of course, life itself. The desideratum Scarlett chased in a frenzy was all the good things we try to place between ourselves and death: love, accomplishment, relationships, material possessions, security, meaning. Eventually, life will strip everything from every one of us. If you are tough, like Scarlett, you can claw the goodies back, but only temporarily, and you lose your soul in the process. If you are good, like Melanie, you live like a church mouse, and die young, but admired.

My older sister Antoinette read the book. I always inherited her hand-me-downs, so I read the book, too. I took Melanie as a role model, one I have never lived up to.

My overwhelming reaction to the book was to wish that I could write prose as compelling as Mitchell's. I had read many other books that never impregnated me with the sense of lived experience that GWTW did. This wasn't just true of world-famous set pieces, like Rhett carrying a struggling Scarlett up a staircase to her orgasmic apotheosis, or his subsequently leaving her with the words, "My dear, I don't give a damn." The vividness of Mitchell's prose was most striking in unimportant scenes.

Scarlett is escaping marauding Yankees. She's on a purloined wagon dragged by a pitiable horse she eventually whips to death. She wakes one morning from sleeping on bare boards. She's racked by thirst; the sun beats down on her dirt-smudged face. I felt the wagon's boards against my back; my throat parched. It's a throwaway scene. The book would not be changed by its removal. And yet it came alive in my mind as I read it.

Mitchell knew her every character intimately. If I ran into any of them on the street today I would know exactly who they are, no matter how small a role they played: Mrs. Meade, Archie, Uncle Peter. A ten-year-old literary critic was born. I asked, "What is this author doing that she can make me feel, and compel me to turn pages, and read past my bedtime with a flashlight under the covers?"

If someone had told me, over the next fifteen years of my life, that GWTW was a menace to society because of its racism, I would have responded, "Huh?"

My obliviousness may sound strange to anyone who, unlike me, has never led a classroom discussion on a work of art. Everyone sees through blinders. People see not at all what their betters think they should see. Misogyny, antisemitism, and racism can go right over a viewer's head, if that viewer is focused on a character they've fallen in love with, or a plot point that grabs them.

Female audiences often imagine an otherwise non-existent romantic relationship. See the reams of fan fiction exploring the "sexual tension" between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, or FBI agent Clarice Starling and serial killer Hannibal Lecter. Male students are, often, just about oblivious to any female character who isn't overtly sexualized, and if they can find a way to sexualize female characters, they do. Amy Adams plays a squeaky-clean version of Amelia Earhart in the child-friendly movie Night at the Museum: Battle at the Smithsonian. Still, half the threads on the old IMDB discussion board were X-rated encomiums to Amy Adams' derriere as seen in her tight, flesh-colored jodhpurs. Under one video compilation saluting Amy Adams' assets, a viewer wrote, "i've seen night at the museum 2 about 10 times. I have no idea what its about." The actress called the film "An Amy Adams butt show."

Like Night at the Museum viewers, I was too focused on GWTW's plot, and its writing, to pay attention to the racism, which my mind skipped over.

I read GWTW for the second time by candlelight, on a bed made of raw lumber planks and thin cotton batting. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the Himalayas. By that time in my life I had attended Twelve Step meetings, to deal with issues arising from growing up in a home where both fists and alcohol were overused. Twelve Step deprograms codependents. It quashes vocabulary that romanticizes sick behavior, and replaces it with clinical terms. Dad was not a "poet … too good for this world;" he was an "alcoholic." Your girlfriend is not "intriguingly unpredictable;" she has "bipolar disorder."

In this Twelve-Step-inspired reading, I realized that Scarlett and Rhett are psychologically unbalanced. They do everything they can to sabotage their relationship. This, to me, was suddenly not a romantic tragedy, but a case for therapeutic, and perhaps pharmaceutical, intervention. I wasn't alone. In a 2011 blog post, professional therapist Jeannie Campbell outlines why she diagnoses Scarlett as suffering from histrionic personality disorder. Dr. Barton Goldsmith, in a 2020 Psychology Today piece, calls Scarlett and Rhett "the poster children for dysfunctional couples."

In that second reading, I realized something else. GWTW is a racist book. Mitchell romanticizes the Klan and insults her black characters. In spite of all this, I could not help but think, man, this is one hell of a read. The pages are propulsive and pushed me forward. I thought, you could take an X-Acto knife, and slice out the racist garbage, and be left with a book deserving of the title, "Great American Novel."

My big sister Antoinette succumbed to a brain tumor in 2015. I had spent my life stepping into footsteps that she had trod first. I inherited her clothes, her toys, and her books. After she died, I decided it was time. I read GWTW again. I read it in the autumn, under a feather quilt she had lent me during a previous cold snap. Once she got her diagnosis, I realized I'd never have to return it.

On this third read, I loved Ashley, again. I wished, in vain, to be as good as Melanie, again. I was repulsed by Rhett and aghast at Scarlett. None of this was new. My mind had time to realize: this book is racist, and you could never snip out its racism with an X-Acto knife.

The straw that broke the camel's back came close to the end. Mammy has loved and nurtured the family for three generations. After Bonnie, Scarlett's child, dies in an accident, Mitchell writes that Mammy's "face was puckered in the sad bewilderment of an old ape." I hated Margaret Mitchell. She betrayed Mammy. I threw the book across the room. I would not allow myself to be defiled by any connection to it. I ranted on Facebook.

A Facebook friend educated me about Mitchell's philanthropy. I suddenly felt ashamed. Mitchell had done things for black people that I could never come close to doing, yet I was setting myself up as her judge, jury, and executioner.

Mitchell formed a friendship with Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, the son of a slave and president of Morehouse College. Mays is "credited with laying the intellectual foundations of the American civil rights movement. Mays taught and mentored many influential activists, including Martin Luther King." At Mays' request, Mitchell made significant, anonymous donations. These donations were inspired by her efforts to get adequate health care for her own beloved African American servants. This quest turned her into "a driven visionary who accurately predicted Atlanta's future as a black metropolis and quietly but fiercely fought racial inequities." Mitchell's activism was prematurely cut short when she was fatally injured by a drunk driver. But her family carries on. "In March of 2002, Eugene Mitchell, the nephew of Margaret Mitchell, donated $1.5 million to Morehouse College establishing the Margaret Mitchell Chair in the division of humanities and social sciences. This donation is one of the largest individual gifts in the history of Morehouse College."

Mitchell carried on a decade-long correspondence with Academy-Award-winner Hattie McDaniel. McDaniel initiated the correspondence, writing to Mitchell to thank her for creating Mammy. She praised Mitchell for the book's "'authenticity' that echoed stories of the Old South she'd heard from her own grandmother, and, especially, for creating the character of Mammy and making her 'such an outstanding personage.'" Later, McDaniel would write, "'in grateful recognition of the many fine things that have come my way since you created in your book the lovable character Mammy which enabled me to gain a measure of success in the field of cinema arts.'" Mitchell wrote to McDaniel, "Every time I see Gone with the Wind (and I have seen it five times) my appreciation of your genius in the part of Mammy has grown … I have felt ungenerous that I have not written you fully about how wonderful I think you were."

In a key scene, Mammy walks up a flight of stairs toward the room where a grief-stricken Rhett has secluded himself after the death of his child, Bonnie. Mammy explains to Melanie (Olivia De Havilland) the tragedies of the household. Mitchell wrote, "I do not weep easily but now I have wept five times at seeing you and Miss de Havilland go up the long stairs. In fact, it's become a joke among my friends – but they cry, too!"

This staircase scene has 122,000 hits on YouTube. Post after post under the video praise McDaniel. They call her "brilliant," "perfect," "awesome," "powerful," "legendary," "raw and real" "towering," and "thirty years ahead of the rest of the cast." "Nothing beats Hattie's acting." "Anyone else want to hug Mammy?" "As a person of color, I'm proud of her." "I've watched this scene a hundred times, but it's still heartbreaking." "Of all the great scenes from GWTW this one's my favorite … One of the most deserved supporting Oscars ever awarded." "I get chills." "I don't see how anyone can watch this scene without choking up." "One of the best acted scenes in all of movie history." "She was the moral center of the story! I know people criticize her for playing a slave but she stole every scene she was in." Fan praise for McDaniel goes on and on. Clearly, like the man watching Night at the Museum II and focusing so much on Amy Adams' attributes that the rest of the movie flies over his head, these fans are so focused on Hattie McDaniel's' talent that they cannot focus on the film's racism.

In the book, amidst all the casual use of derogatory language, Mitchell produces prose that beats with real love. After the war, Yankees come south. Some Yankees say that they would never "trust a darky." Scarlett is apoplectic. "Not trust a darky," the paragraph begins. "Scarlett trusted them far more than most white people, certainly more than she trusted any Yankee. There were qualities of loyalty and tirelessness and love in them that no strain could break, no money could buy. She thought … of Mammy coming to Atlanta with her to keep her from doing wrong…But the Yankees didn't understand these things and would never understand them."

I understand any African American choosing to reject this love from Margaret Mitchell. It is too interlarded with condescension and racist cant. But no one can deny that what Mitchell expresses in this paragraph is real love, and given what we know of her efforts to help her own black servants, that love was, however flawed, entirely real.

I realized a few more things on my third read of Gone with the Wind. There is a category of people that Mitchell denigrates far more savagely than African Americans. Poor, Southern whites, people Mitchell invariably refers to as "trash," are, with Yankees, the novel's monsters.

There are many good blacks in GWTW: Mammy, Dilcey, Pork, Big Sam, to name a few. When a "big, ragged white man" tries to rape Scarlett, it is Big Sam who saves her. The would-be rapist has torn her clothing and her breasts are exposed; Big Sam discreetly averts his eyes. After Sherman, Pork keeps the family fed. Uncle Peter raised orphaned Melanie and Charles Hamilton. Aunt Pittypat is "a grown up child," "a helpless soul," who "can't make up her mind about anything." Black Uncle Peter treats white Aunt Pittypat like a child, and makes up her mind for her. He is her surrogate spouse.

Yes, these black characters are good because they are supportive of white characters. The book is about Scarlett, and it sees the world through her eyes. But these characters are no less well-rounded than any white characters. They have their own distinct personalities and every one of them defies a white person and gets their own way at least once if not several times when their idea of decorum is violated.

There are no such positive poor white characters in GWTW. The closest Mitchell gets is Will Benteen, a Civil War veteran who marries Careen, Scarlett's sister. But Will is, in Mitchell's own excruciatingly caste-conscious worldview, not "trash," but rather something higher, namely a "cracker." For more on this distinction, see here.

No. Poor white trash, not black slaves, are the lowest form of life in GWTW. White trash kill Scarlett's beloved mother, Ellen. White trash sabotage Scarlett's attempts to recover from the war, by demanding taxes she must prostitute herself to pay. Scarlett, at the sight of poor, white trash daring to set foot on Tara's sacred earth, feels a "a murderous rage so strong it shook her like the ague." "All her nerves hummed with hate." Scarlett defies her Southern belle breeding and spits at the "dirty, tow-headed slut," this "overdressed, common, nasty piece of poor white trash," this "trashy wench," this "lousy poor white." Worse than Yankees burning Tara over her head, Scarlett knows, would be this: "these low common creatures living in this house." Indeed, Mitchell lists "contempt for white trash" as a sine qua non of Southern identity. In the hierarchy, slaves are their superior. "The house negroes of the County considered themselves superior to white trash." No less an authority than Mammy declares that white trash are beyond the reach of charity. "It doan do no good doin' nuthin' fer w'ite trash. Dey is de shiflesses, mos' ungrateful passel of no-counts livin'."

It's interesting that The Young Turks, John Ridley, Queen Latifah, and other would-be censors voice no objection to the hatred expressed for poor, white trash in GWTW. The 2020 film Emma enjoys an 87% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. As in other Jane Austen adaptations, with the notable exception of Roger Michell's 1995 take on Persuasion, poor and working class British people, especially servants, are objects, not humans. Here's the difference: the slave-like servants of Emma are white. A 2020 film treats white servants like objects, and that is okay. This double standard hints at a greater truth: BLM's obsession with race is a cowardly and hypocritical smokescreen for those who describe themselves as "leftists" and even "Marxists" to avoid talking about class. Queen Latifah, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and LeBron James can posture as convincing revolutionaries as long as they are bashing GWTW or the police on social and mainstream media. Turn the lens toward the vast gap between their luxurious lifestyles and those of the poor of any race, and the revolutionary mask slips. BLM, "supported by capitalists, is disguising the class divisions that Marxism highlights," wrote Paddy Hannam.

I realized one more thing when I read the book for the third time: it contains some stunningly sophisticated writing, and flashes of beauty.

"Spring had come early that year, with warm quick rains and sudden frothing of pink peach blossoms and dogwood dappling with white stars the dark river swamp and far-off hills … the bloody glory of the sunset colored the fresh-cut furrows of red Georgia clay to even redder hues. The moist hungry earth, waiting upturned for the cotton seeds, showed pinkish on the sandy tops of furrows, vermilion and scarlet and maroon where shadows lay along the sides of the trenches. The whitewashed brick plantation house seemed an island set in a wild red sea, a sea of spiraling, curving, crescent billows petrified suddenly at the moment when the pink-tipped waves were breaking into surf."

One of GWTW's most famous set pieces is Rhett bidding, as at an auction, to buy the right to dance with the recently widowed Scarlett. The scene is meant to be naughty and taboo; the obvious comparison is to a slave auction, or prostitution. It's also meant to be titillating, and it is.

In the book, this scene's construction and meaning prove false any accusation that GWTW is a simple-minded potboiler veering twixt torn bodices and cheerleading for Jefferson Davis. At first, the omniscient narrator describes Southerners aflame with devotion to their glorious cause. These paragraphs could be propaganda from the Confederate government. Then, without any real break, the scene is viewed from Scarlett O'Hara's POV. She is blind to the idealism. The entire event is meaningless to her, except as an opportunity to wear pretty dresses and flirt with desperate soldiers. Then, while she and Rhett dance, he describes the entire scene in a cynical, dystopian way. He sees himself trapped in a room full of deluded sleep walkers dancing toward a cliff off which they will inevitably fall. They exist only to provide him with an opportunity to batten off the wreckage of a civilization. Mitchell offers the reader no reason to disagree with Rhett's jaundiced take on the entire Confederate project as an exercise in pathetic, delusional, national suicide.

Then, just after the bazaar, Scarlett reads a letter from Ashley. Ashley is asking himself why he is at the front, watching his childhood friends mangled and killed. "Not for honor and glory, certainly," he answers himself. "War is a dirty business … we have been betrayed, betrayed by our arrogant Southern selves, believing that one of us could whip a dozen Yankees, believing that King Cotton could rule the world. Betrayed, too, by words and catch phrases, prejudices and hatreds coming from the mouths of those highly placed, those men whom we respected and revered. 'King Cotton, Slavery, States' Rights, Damn Yankees.'" Ashley concludes that "nothing is worth it--States' Rights, nor slaves, nor cotton." Win or lose, Ashley reports, the South that he and his fellows are fighting for is already gone. Both winning and losing will, in different ways, destroy everything they thought they were fighting for.

GWTW is sophisticated enough of a work that it can present four different assessments of the Confederacy's Lost Cause myth, back-to-back. Most astoundingly, Mitchell offers no commentary. In effect, she says to the reader, "This is what the crowd thinks; this is what Scarlett thinks; this is what Rhett thinks; this is what Ashley thinks. I'm not going to grant any of these points of view my imprimatur." Mitchell does insist that you look down on white trash as unforgivingly as she does. But her book is too complex to be understood as ordering you to admire the Confederacy. I never took it that way, not on three separate reads.

The GWTW I saw in a student dormitory in Poland in 1989 wasn't about the South at all. During the screening, I could feel the electricity in the room. As soon as the lights came up, Poles were cheering and crying. They didn't see Tara; they saw Warsaw. The beasts crouching in the mist were Nazism and Communism. They knew what they were reaching for: self-determination. "Tomorrow is another day" was not Scarlett's survival ploy; it was their resolve. They would, and eventually did, see the end of Soviet communist hegemony that year.

John Matrixx, an African American YouTuber, saw a different GWTW. He didn't much like it, but he insisted that he didn't require HBO to serve as nanny to his reaction to the film. "The thing is," he said, "this is not a movie about slavery. This is a movie about a conniving woman in some kind of complicated love story That's what this is. I don't think this movie was denying the horrors of slavery. It just wasn't focusing on it. This is about Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh's weird romance. She actually wants somebody else and she's doing all these crazy things to get this other guy that she's been in love with forever to leave his wife. I didn't see this movie as glorifying the old South. You gotta remember. The movie is being told from a Southern woman's perspective. Not from someone today, not from someone in the north. This is their story. Let the movie be what it is."

Jacqueline Stewart from Turner Classic Movies delivers a new introduction to GWTW. She tells viewers that the movie does not depict slavery accurately. Under this intro on YouTube, other African Americans respond. "I'm a black man who has always loved this film." Others concurred. " I'm a black woman who also loves this movie despite its faults. I also own this movie." "As someone from overseas, I learnt about slavery as a teenager because of this movie. It led me to watching Django and The Colour Purple and now I have made connections to current child slavery in the middle east and Asia." "I'm a black woman, and I will always love this amazing movie! I'm even thinking about a tattoo! I already saw it like a hundred times, and I don't feel uncomfortable, 'cause I know that it's just a past that we overcome."

Life is complicated. The enemy crouching in the mist of my nightmares are neither Democrats nor Republicans; the enemy who must be defeated are those insisting on purity. Right now the armies of the pure are on the left. Their attack on GWTW reveals their hypocrisy. The left announces itself as the champion of the common man, and in its drive for purity it reveals its contempt for the common man. The common man, numbers show, loves GWTW. The left insists that it wants power sharing, and yet the left insists on monopolizing power and dictating how the masses respond to art. The left says it is all about diversity, but it insists that there is only one right way to view GWTW.

The top "Times Pick" comment on New York Times coverage of GWTW makes my blood run cold. A woman says that she read the book three times. At first, she "swooned over the exciting writing." She "strategized alternative endings" to reunite Scarlett and Rhett. Reading it for a third time, she realized that Rhett was a "rapist," that the book is all about white "privilege" and reflective of "the mentality of the Trump souther supporter." (sic)

It gets worse. She made her teenage kids watch the movie. They immediately "got it" and were "furious."

A girl read a book about people unlike herself, and was able to feel empathy with others. Years later, she realized those feelings were wrong, and she cut them off. Her children have been so indoctrinated that they are incapable of seeing any artistry in what is widely assessed, by friend and foe alike, as one of the most aesthetically significant films of all time. In their hearts, where they might have hosted an avenue to empathy, there exists only politically correct judgment and condemnation. This is no victory, except for the self-christened purity police.

Monday, March 16, 2015, I was sitting by my sister's bedside. I had my computer in my lap. I knew we might never have another conversation. I actually transcribed our words as we spoke.

"Antoinette, did you like Scarlett?"

"Oh, yeah, I loved her!"

"Disgusting."

"Why?"

"She was a horrible human being! She married two men she didn't love!"

"Women do that all the time. They're very self-centered. I've never been a real fan of women."

"Melanie was very kind," I said.

"I really didn't think of Melanie much."

"But you loved Scarlett!"

"Well, I loved her at first," Antoinette said. Then she paused. "But then ... you know who was really my favorite character?"

"Who?" I asked.

"Actually," Antoinette said, "my favorite character was Mammy. I thought she had a lot of grace and dignity."

"I think she let Scarlett push her around too much," I said.

"Well, what could she do?" Antoinette shot back. "She was black. That was then. Scarlett was her boss. Mammy was the only one who actually showed any dignity. She was the only one who impressed me. She was a very nice person. She took things in hand that needed to be taken in hand. She loved Scarlett and would do anything to help her out. And she was graceful in doing it. She was a lovely person. She was a rare gem."

My sister died three weeks later. This was the last coherent conversation we had. That's my Gone with the Wind. One in which my hero, my sister, reveals to me that her hero is a black enslaved woman. A woman who, if she had met the poor Goska kids of blue collar New Jersey, would no doubt have written us off as "Yankee white trash." I do not begrudge Mammy this. My allowance of her prejudice against poor whites like me is the most minor of my thought crimes. If I must be made a non-person, this is the thought crime I want to be convicted for. I demand my own GWTW, which has nothing to do with glorifying the Confederacy, or misrepresenting slavery, but everything to do with compelling writing about complicated characters facing issues I face myself. That's art, and I will defy the metaphorical firing squad for it.

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery

You can also read this at Front Page here