Is Spike Lee Racist?: And other inanities from the anti-stereotype police - Bush administration considering the recommendations of movies that do not promote racial stereotypes

National Review, Sept 3, 2001 by Jonah Goldberg

If Goethe was right when he said that "a clever man commits no minor blunders," then someone in the Bush White House may be poised to go down as one of the most brilliant men in the history of the Republic.

It was just one of several ideas attached to the White House's Communities of Character initiative-but it was an idea so stupid, so rich with the potential for shot feet, so pregnant with the promises of stuttering Republicans, and so devoid of an upside as to make Mrs. Lincoln's night at the theater look like a truly enjoyable evening, that it is difficult to imagine that anyone meant it seriously: The White House wants to get into the movie-reviewing business. More specifically, it wants to promote movies that (in the words of the Washington Post) "do not further racial stereotypes."

Of course, in today's culture, being against negative racial stereotypes is like being against abused children and crippled puppies. So it's no surprise that few in the liberal media thought twice about the idea. But lest the White House equate public silence with tacit approval of the idea, let's explore how this might work.

Now, if the White House simply wants to leak the word that "the president really liked the latest LL Cool J movie," or perhaps have Laura Bush suggest to Katie Couric that Martin Lawrence uses too much profanity, that's fine. But, according to the Post's report, this initiative involves "executive actions and legislative proposals." So what form might these actions and proposals take?

Well, the most obvious recent example would have to be the Clinton administration's initiative to get more antidrug messages onto network television. In early 2000, Salon magazine broke the story that Clinton's office of drug policy was letting TV networks off the hook when it came to running "free" antidrug public-service announcements (PSAs) if, in exchange, they inserted antidrug messages into the scripts of shows like ER and Touched by an Angel (we all know that crack addicts are huge followers of Touched by an Angel). Because the PSAs were bumping paid advertisements, the networks were delighted to open ad space by inserting the "positive messages" into their programming.

Of course, First Amendment purists decried the potential for, in the words of the New York Times, "censorship and state-sponsored propaganda." The St. Petersburg Times declared, "None dare call it censorship, but in some ways it poses an even more invidious threat to the First Amendment. . . . The mass media shouldn't be used to deliver government propaganda under the radar screen. That's a violation of the public trust."

It's doubtful the Bush administration would follow that particular model. But whatever route the White House chooses would inevitably lead into a ditch. Just look at the grief monolithically liberal Hollywood gets, for not being liberal enough. Even Spike Lee, when he was making Malcolm X, came under intense criticism from the likes of black nationalist Amiri Baraka, who derided him as "a petit bourgeois Negro" who portrayed African-Americans in demeaning ways. When Mississippi Burning, about the KKK's murder of three civil-rights activists, was released, it was denounced for making the white FBI agents the heroes.

Television is even more contentious. The Cosby Show, perhaps the archetype of positive-black-role-model TV, was regularly denounced by liberal critics for not highlighting the plight of the black underclass, though there's little doubt that a network show about the black underclass would be even more vilified. Indeed, that's exactly what happened to Eddie Murphy's Claymation sitcom, The Hughleys. Donald Bogle's book, Primetime Blues: African Americans on Network Television, is the definitive cri de coeur against black stereotypes on TV; and in this book it is almost impossible to find a black actor in the history of TV who hasn't set back the cause. Bogle doesn't like strong black characters, like Dr. Benton on ER, because they fit the stereotype of the Angry Black Man. But he doesn't like easygoing blacks on TV, like Robert Guillaume's Benson, because they have sold out to Whitey.

In recent years Hollywood has responded to criticism by going overboard with positive stereotypes. For example, it's hard to find a courtroom drama on film or TV from the last few years in which the judge isn't played by a black man or, more frequently, a black woman. This cliche probably began when Brian De Palma feebly adapted Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities for the big screen. According to Julie Salamon in her book on the making of the film, De Palma ran into the "problem" that the only truly redeeming character in the script was the Jewish judge, Myron Kovitsky. De Palma came under pressure, according to Salamon, and eventually cast the judge as a black man, played by the always virtuous Morgan Freeman.

A similar dynamic has forced the creation of the Anachronistic Black Man. This is the African-American character who is wildly out of place in the time the film depicts. Slaves who talk like Harvard grads and black cowboys whose ethnicity seems trivial can be found in a host of films. Perhaps the best recent example was in the film U-571, in which a black galley cook on a (segregated) World War II submarine not only bellows orders to the white crewmen and hobnobs with the officers, but is also an expert submariner himself. He even knows how to drive a German U-boat without instruction.