Morgan Freeman calls Black History Month "ridiculous"

Certainly Morgan Freeman knows that Morgan Freeman History is already so volatile that it cannot be restrained by temporal means.

So does Black History Month marginalize/trivialize what it purports to bring to wider attention? Or is it a necessary corrective to standard histories?

I don't think we can answer this without looking at the sort of history curriculum being taught in schools. And I suspect that sort of thing varies pretty widely.

Certainly the way B.H.M. was used in my elementary school (we pretty much ignored it in my high school, where we were mostly taught a revisionist social history that incorporate black experiences in the narrative of American history) it did seem to trivialize the contributions of Carver et al (Carver seems the emblematic figure of B.H.M. for whatever reason).

Yeah, I mean I don't drive or anything but I sorta assumed everybody's car smells like vomit.

I think they're referring, or attempting to refer, to his demeanor.

xpost

this analogy doesn't seem very useful to me.

i don't think i did anything of the kind.

xpost woops yeah i meant to take out the "everyone". this is just such a typical ILE "omg what a stupid celebrity, i am so much smarter than them" response.

while i agree that language is performative, i don't think the parameters that we use to address racial difference is really the main issue. not yet. the main issue, rather, is the pitifully shallow level of discourse that actually passes for proper, meaningful dialogue on racism in america (see: crash). we've basically given ourselves blanket permission as a culture to label what are essentially surface-skimming flyover discussions as cathartic and meaningful. we've entitled ourselves to feel like we're doing a level of work that we're really not. (which is maybe ethan's so-called 'devil's advocacy' always strikes a nerve.)

also, correct me if i'm wrong, but it seems like black history month is still by and large an instructive thing to the vast majority of americans. if that's true, how does eliminating it help to absorb it?

mad xposts.

When's the last time you attended public schools?

i graduated from a public high school in 1994, and graduated from a public university in 1998. have things changed?

my us history classes in high school used a 'revisionist' approach but the origins of the civil war were always identified as being numerous, with slavery the most important among them.

he's just bitter because he's rich and he thinks his being a successful movie star is because of anything other than pure luck.

Still waiting on that list of African American US Presidents.

toni morrison to thread!

still waiting on that list of female US Presidents
still waiting on that list of African American Presidential candidates
still waiting on that list of African American corporate execs oh wait

Deep Impact to thread

otm

Maybe it's guilt?

I don't really mean this as a larger point about anything, I just went to a weird high school.

http://www.virginia.edu/topnews/07_30_2004/images/header_3_image_1b.jpg

but socrates didnt know anything!

but lotsa white kids have life-threatening peanut allergies, so maybe the peanut is our revenge on whitey

from his IMDB bio... He is often called the greatest living actor in film, a title he humbly waves off and says he is just "lucky."

straight to the top i tell ya

what, acting with Jessica Tandy isn't the top? is it more the top if he had played some corporate business dude? or a thug, like in his first Oscar-nom'd role? maybe he thought it was the top when he learned to fly, or when he debuted on Broadway with Cab Calloway and Pearl Bailey in '69, or when he was first Tony-nominated in '78.

For all that, Mr. Freeman will always and forever be branded in the public eye as a "black actor", as if that somehow qualified or altered his achievements. So, for Morgan Freeman, the last vestige of how racism affects him probably is "talking about it". Get rid of that and he's home free. No worries, mate! Unlike, oh, maybe about 35 million other black Americans.

this is totally plausible. but isn't it at least equally plausible that Morgan Freeman would like America to acknowledge that a black man is its 'best actor' rather than that Morgan Freeman is its best 'black actor'?

Add to that the generational thing. Look: black people Freeman's age dealt with racism and segregation and all that shit, and they did it with practically zero recourse to anyone else to help them out. These are people who never got much of a chance to cry foul about racism; these are people who put ridiculous amounts of work and integrity into proving themselves as equal; this is a generation that did insane amounts of bootstrapping. Remember that just about every time you see a black person Freeman's age who's doing even halfway middle-class well in life, that's a person who got there despite a whole system of shit specifically designed to keep him or her from getting there. So imagine how different the attitude is going to be! People from that generation seem to really chafe when they see younger blacks calling for correctives or complaining about minor racism. They're predisposed to see the whole thing as maybe a bit of a crutch, because their entire experience is built around having no such crutch. Their entire experience is based around that civil-rights-era mentality, which is that when someone tries to keep you down, you stand up with dignity and work twice as hard to keep them from being able to do it. So among people that age who never did get past those obstacles, I think there's a lot more sympathy to complaints and calls for "correctives" -- but especially among people who, like Freeman, made good despite all that shit, there's obviously not going to be quite as much tolerance. They've already proved that whatever you throw at them, they're better than it.

One corrective might be that instead of simplistic black-history lessons that sometimes imply everything became magically fine by the end of the 60s, people could understand that removing obstacles isn't the same thing as putting people on the other side of them. Possibly we could stand a better sense of this with all cultures, a better understanding of the way that, no matter how much opportunities are theoretically equal for everyone, some people of every race still come from places and families that are at a serious disadvantage, and it takes incredible amounts of work and faith and rigor for them to even catch up to what we consider economically normal.

-- nabiscothingy (--...), December 17th, 2005.

YUP

Which doesn't make them "right," or anything, but it's not hard to imagine where the mentality comes from. (I find the mentality a bit lacking in empathy and pragmatism, really, kind of expecting everyone to live up to whatever ridiculously high standards you've managed to live up to yourself.)

"like you propose" "like you propose" "like you propose". i guess using adademic terms uses all your brain's resources, leaving reading comprehension skills to fend for themselves.

I dunno, oops, Sterl's kinda got you there! Like obviously you're just paraphrasing Freeman, except the point is that your paraphrase still sails past the "men and women" division in order to explain the "no black or white" division. (And in theory/ideals the "man or woman" part should be just as meaningless and we're-all-people-here as the "black or white" part.) (And in reality neither of them really are.)

http://www.gardenguides.com/seedcatalog/packets/edamame.jpg