Race and Racism in American History

The President’s military D.C. parade on June 14—which was sparsely attended versus the millions who turned out for the No Kings Day throughout the nation—was missing an honorary contingent of marching Buffalo Soldiers who helped “Win the West.” Given the current President and his administration’s attack on DEI, it was no surprise that the Black regiments of the 9th and 10th were not represented. 

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), applauded by General Colin Powell, began with Democratic president Harry Truman in 1948 when he issued Executive Order 9981, which desegregated America’s armed forces. Truman was emotionally moved to make this decision once he learned that Isaac Woodward, a young Black WWII veteran, in uniform, was so severely beaten about his head by a white supremacist South Carolina police chief that he was blinded for life.

The vicissitudes of racism have a strange career that invites itself into the individual lives of both white and Black and all other Americans, such as Mexicans, Native Americans, Asians and others of the darker hue.

However, Black and white are front and center because of the cataclysmic American Civil War that ushered in a new, amended Constitution which, before the law, guaranteed equality and due process for all.

It is the dialectics of Black versus white and the social movements therein that are the locomotion of American history. This central point does not diminish the significance of the genocide of Native Americans.

Although this history is unpleasant, it must be studied and remembered. Attacking historical memory based on eliminating the historical record and DEI will only create a Plato-like scenario of the cave where Americans see shadows on the walls and think they are reality.

In addition, too many Americans will cling to the coldness of the cave and therefore not seek the vaccination of the critical study of real history rather than propaganda such as this administration’s attack on the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture. 

When one examines a few historical moments and individuals within those moments, one can best come out of the cave of illusion into the daylight of reality. Hollywood, then and now, is the new cave that creates an illusion in popular consciousness today.

Many American moviegoers became aware of the Mexican Revolution, 1910–1920, and were brown-faced when they saw the 1952 film Viva Zapata, starring Marlon Brando as Zapata. 

When viewing the film, one can see how Hollywood’s make-up artists “darkened” Brando’s skin while not doing anything to his revolutionary muchacho Anthony Quinn, who was a Mexican American, nee-Manuel Antonio Rodolfo Quinn Oaxaca.  

White actress Jean Peters played Josefa, the Mexican wife of Zapata. Brownfacing of white skin began as early as 1929 when the lead white actor, Warren Baxter, won Best Actor for portraying the Cisco Kid.

However, brownfacing white skin was almost comical when white actress Jennifer Jones played Pearl Chavez in the 1947 film Duel in the Sun. But the pinnacle of brownfacing came when Greek-American George Chakiris played the Puerto Rican lead, Bernardo Nunez, in the Oscar winning 1961 film, West Side Story.

The most famous example of blackfacing in Hollywood films is in the 1959 Imitation of Life, starring Lana Turner. Turner’s Black maid-servant, played by Juanita Moore, has a daughter whose skin color is “white” who is portrayed by white actress Susan Kohner.

She passes for a white woman with disastrous consequences when it is revealed that she is Black, per the one-drop rule. Ironically, the original version of the film, made in 1934, starring Claudette Colbert, had the famous Black actress, Fredi Washington, playing the tragic mulatta.

The vicissitudes of racism of skin color are the base of America’s hierarchy of caste and therefore racial capitalism. Frederick Douglass called this social system “the aristocracy of skin.”

One example involves the life of Black medical doctor Albert Johnson, whose life of passing for a white man was made into a 1948 Hollywood film called Lost Boundaries. The movie starred white actor Mel Ferrer, who was a leading man at that time.

Whitefacing was embedded in this film in that the good doctor and his wife and their two children, a boy and a girl, were all played by white actors. The Johnson family lived in Keene, N.H., for 20 years as the most prominent white-skinned but Black family.

Two scenes in the film reveal the race dynamics. With the start of WWII in 1941, blood donations were crucial for wounded soldiers. On a medical call one evening, a white nurse asked Dr. Johnson what she should do with a vial of blood drawn from a Black man. Dr. Johnson told her to place it with all other blood vials, but the nurse said she could not mix white and Black blood. Dr. Johnson demanded that she follow his instructions, and the nurse quickly dropped the glass vial of blood, which crashed to the floor. Dr. Johnson angrily scolded her with the words, “A brave soldier may lose his life,” looking forlornly at the spilled blood.

The nurse’s behavior demonstrated that racism drives people mad, a madness that befuddles the mind. Madness could explain why GOP voters elected a convicted sexual assaulter.

The other scene happened when the college-attending son returned home on break and brought his new Black college chum. His younger sister said in disappointment, “Of all the nice guys he could have brought home, why did he bring home a nigger?” 

Overhearing his daughter’s use of the racial slur, Dr. Johnson raised his voice and sternly told his daughter, “Never use that word in this house again,” causing the daughter’s cry as she raced up to her room. Both the son and daughter were so white skinned that the parents never told them of the Black blood running through their veins.

Hollywood today and its cave have been, for many, superseded by social media platforms that search engines such as Google Search send them to. A former Fresno State student, Safia Umoja Noble, wrote the definitive book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (2018). A classic example at that time, which supported her thesis, was when she Googled the topic “black girls,” and the search engine brought her to “Black Booty on the Beach.” 

One recent example of actual racist capitalist marketing is American Eagle’s advertisement that features Sydney Sweeney wearing the brand’s jeans while saying, “Genes are passed on from parents to offspring, often determining traits such as hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue.”

The pre-geneticists were called eugenicists, who claimed the importance of determinant, biologically inherited genes that created a phenotype of beauty, morality and intelligence.

Based on this false pseudo-science, state public-policy makers, in the 1920s, began to sterilize Black and other minority women as well as Eastern and Southern European immigrant women. That is why there was a backlash against American Eagle and the infantile ad man who created the ad.

Juxtapose this ad to Beyonce’s Levi’s jeans advertisement, and one will hum a song by Sir Mix-a-Lot, “Baby Got Back,” which is genetics of a different hue. Yes, the vicissitudes of life when race is in play.